On the Day I Shouted His Name ... (2)

Inoue wrote more than 60 dramas as well as many novels and essays. I have read none of them but have the book of collected photos, "Hisashi Inoue's Dalian*" [1], edited by Inoue and his theatrical troupe Komatsuza. Opening the book, I found Inoue's essay entitled "Dalian, the Dream Town." Reading this essay for the first time, I learned the relationship between Inoue and Dalian from it. I guessed that the photos in the book should have been part of collected data for a drama. However, the relationship had started much earlier. It was when one of his best friends moved to a primary school in Dalian and sent Inoue a picture card of Dalian in the winter of 1943. (I also moved to a primary school in Dalian in September 1944; namely, the friend of Inoue's and I had a similar experience. I bought this book to look at images of old Dalian dear to me.)

On the basis of his thought about Dalian, Inoue made a drama entitled "Enshō and Shinshō." Komatsuza made the first performance of this drama in 2005. It is about this story: Raconteurs Kokontei Shinshō and San'yutei Enshō went for performances in Manchuria** during the war time and were induced to stay in Dalian because of Japan's defeat. They had to do different and difficult jobs to live there for 600 days before coming back to Japan.

The last passage of Inoue's essay is as follows: 'The word "Dalian, the Dream Town" that entered deep in me as a child would not disappear until my death while its meaning is changing." One of the changes was due to his concern about Chinese people who had to live on the outskirts of Dalian when the city was part of Japan's borrowed land. Here we find Inoue's pacifism that made him one of initial members of the Article 9 Association.

Praying for his peaceful sleep in heaven, I wish to follow his footsteps in the efforts to keep Article 9*** of the Constitution of Japan and extend the renunciation of war all over the world.

Notes

* Dalian is a beautiful port city in the Northeast China. It was in the region of the land borrowed by Japan until August 1945, the time of Japan's defeated in the second World War.

** The historical name of the present Northeast China.

*** 1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Reference

1. H. Inoue and Komatsuza, ed., Hisashi Inoue's Dalian (Shōgakukan, 2002).

On the Day I Shouted His Name ... (1)

The ninth (sometimes the eighth or tenth) day of the month is the day for the petition campaign of our "Fukuizumi-Ōtori Article 9 Association (FOA9)." The FOA9 is one of about 7500 local and office groups that support the Article 9 Association. In the morning of April 9, 2010, I went for the campaign together with colleagues of FOA9 and shouted through a microphone, "Hisashi Inoue, Kenzaburō Ōe, the late Shuichi Kato and others established the Article 9 Association. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution declares the renunciation of war as a means of settling international disputes. The purpose of the Association is to keep Article 9, shine its light upon this turbulent world and join hands with the peace-seeking citizens of the world," and so on.

That evening Hisashi Inoue, a leading Japanese playwright and writer of comic fiction, died of lung cancer. He was active not only in art and literature but also in anti-nuclear and peace movements. The number of inaugural members of the Article 9 Association was nine. Members other than Inoue were as follows; Takeshi Umehara (philosopher), Kenzaburo Ōe (Nobel-Prize winning novelist), Yasuhiro Okudaira (Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo and researcher of constitutions), Makoto Oda (novelist and peace activist), Shuichi Kato (critic and author), Hisae Sawachi (non-fiction writer), Shunsuke Tsurumi (philosopher) and Mutusko Miki (wife of the late Takeo Miki, former Prime Minister). We had already lost two of them, Oda and Kato, and Inoue was the third. However, I believe that the movement to shine the light of Article 9 upon the world would become stronger and stronger than ever. (To be continued.)

Rivals

At the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Yu-na Kim of South Korea took the gold medal of women's figure skating competition with a world record score; and Mao Asada of Japan, the silver. Both of them played beautifully and are only 19 years old. Further, they have been rivals each other since quite young days. Thus, their rivalry will perhaps continue through coming years. This reminds me of the relationship between Hideki Yukawa and Shi'nichiro Tomonaga.

Before his publishing of the paper on the meson theory, Yukawa had the days of slowdown in his research at the Department of Physics, Osaka University. Then Hidetsugu Yagi, the then Head of the Department and known by Yagi antenna, said to him, "We had the plan of recruiting Tomonaga but your brother's request compelled us to adopt you. Therefore, we should be in trouble if you do not work harder than Tomonaga." These words stimulated Yukawa soon to complete the research on the prediction of the existence of the meson (this story has been translated and adapted from [1]). He got Nobel Prize in Physics for that work in 1949. Tomonaga shared the same award in 1965 with Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman for their work in quantum electrodynamics.

I also had some rivals in studying during my schoolboy days. They were mostly girls. Among them, one has been the enduring rival, though our specialties have been quite different. She studied Japanese literature in Edo period and is now Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, while I am a little proud of publications in many different academic journals ranging from physics to psychology. I rarely meet her or exchange messages with her but am grateful to her for continued rivalry.

(Noticing of [1] owes to the discussion we have had at Osaka Science Museum among the members of "Citizens' Study Group on Hideki Yukawa.")

Note added later: Mao Asada beat Kim Yu-na to win her second title at the World Figure Skating Championships held in Turin, Italy, on March 27, 2010.

1. R. Utiyama's writing, quoted in: "Light" into after-war darkness, Asahi Shimbun, special pages for its 120th anniversary (February 13, 1999) in Japanese.

The Poetic Answer in the Science Test

On February 20, the column of the Asahi Shimbun, "Tensei jingo," treated the nearing of spring. The column began by the question, "What does ice become when it melts?" This was a question in a science test at a primary school in Japan. The teacher expected the answer, "water." However, the question written in Japanese was rather vague, because it was close to this: What does it become when ice melts? Thus, there was a story that a child wrote the answer, "spring." The author of the column wrote this story once before, without being sure of its veracity.

However, the author received a letter from a lady reader, who had been in Supporo, a snowy large city in Hokkaido, as a child. The letter included a multicolor photocopy of a science test. In fact, it was of sepia color, showing the oldness of the test paper. One of the test question was "What does it become when snow melts?" The answer written in pencil was "The ground appears and it becomes spring." The teacher did not consider the answer as correct, and her overall test score was 85 out of 100. The reader wrote that her late mother had held on the paper and that she found it among the belongings left by the latter.

The author concluded the article by the words, 'Yesterday (February 19) it was "rain water" of 24 solar terms in East Asian lunisolar calendars. It signals the beginning of the spring thaw. After just a little of patient waiting, spring is coming again in order to make the child's "wrong answer" right.'

If I were a science teacher who asked the aforementioned question, I would have regarded the poetic answer of "spring" correct. Following the conventional wisdom only, we cannot make scientific discoveries. For fostering scientific mind, teachers should put much importance on children's original answers.

Note: Usually the English version "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" of the "Tensei jingo" column appears online soon after the publication of the Japanese version. However, the English version of the article here mentioned appeared nine days later (March 1) with the title "Hidden buds stir, eager for spring thawing." Thus, I prepared the story included in it by my own translation from the Japanese version, borrowing some expressions from the official English translation after finding it but retaining the others as prepared. The explanation of the vagueness of the relevant question, when expressed in Japanese, is mine.

The Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight"

Please read the revised version instead of this article:
The Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight" (Revised).

Read in Japanese.
(The Japanese version has not yet been revised.)

The crucial point in the development of Hideki Yukawa's meson theory came to him one night in October 1934. He writes in his autobiography Tabibito [1] as follows:

My new insight was the realization that this distance [the effective range of the nuclear force] and the mass of the new particle that I was seeking are inversely related to each other. Why had I not noticed that before?

This passage contradicts the fact that Yukawa used the above relation already in 1933. Namely, in April that year he made his first oral presentation at a meeting of an academic society. It was entitled "A consideration about the problem of electrons within nuclei," and the meeting was the one held in Sendai by Physico-Mathematical Society of Japan. The abstract of the presentation includes the following sentence [2]:

From the fact that the electron has the rest mass, we consider that the strength of the interaction decreases rapidly as the distance between the neutron and the proton becomes large compared with h/(2πmc).

In the work of the above presentation, Yukawa treated the possibility that the electron might be the mediator of the nuclear force between the neutron and the proton. This hypothesis included difficulties related to the spin and statistics of the electron. Therefore, Yukawa totally abandoned the hypothesis later together with the relation of the distance and the mass of the particle that would mediate the nuclear force [3]. Did this abandonment make it necessary for Yukawa to rediscover the relation? If so, this explains the contradictory remark of his "new insight."

We find another possible explanation of the contradictory description in the process of the making of Yukawa's autobiography. Hisao Sawano of the Asahi Shimbun Company helped the publication by editing Yukawa's manuscript [4]. If Sawano's editing had been to such an extent as to change Yukawa's original version into more dramatic one here and there, the passage that began with "My new insight" might have been Sawano's creation. To eliminate the expression different from the fact, Yukawa, perhaps, regularly checked the changes made by Sawano. However, Yukawa finished writing the last section related to the discovery of the meson theory just a few hours before his trip to Europe [5]. Thus, it is quite possible that Yukawa did not check Sawano's modification of that section.

Both Yukawa and Sawano are now in heaven, and the mystery of the "new insight," i.e., which of the above two explanations was the case, cannot be solved easily.

(This article owes much to the discussion we have had at Osaka Science Museum among the members of "Citizens' Study Group on Hideki Yukawa.")

Read the continuation of this article: The Solution to the Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight"

1. H. Yukawa, Tabibito (The Traveler), translated by L. Brown and R. Yoshida (World Scientific, 1982) p. 202.
2. H. Yukawa, Sūbutu-gakkaisi, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1933) quoted in Nihon-no Buturigaku-shi (History of Physics in Japan) (Tokai University Press, 1978) p. 319 (in Japanese; English translation of the quoted passage by the present author).
3. M. Kawabe and M. Konuma, Butsuri Vol. 37, p. 265 (1982) (in Japanese).
4. H. Yukawa, Atogaki (Afterwords) in Tabibito, (Kadokawa, 1960) (in Japanese).
5. H. Yukawa, Hon-no Naka-no Sekai (The World in Books) (Iwanami, 1963) p. 182 (in Japanese).