Hideki Yukawa's Words about Nuclear Power Development -2-

Hideki Yukawa's Auto-Collected Writings Vol. 3 [Ref. 1] includes the following three essays about nuclear power:

(1) Atomic energy and humanity's turning point -1954 -, p. 261.
(2) The nuclear issue and the true nature of science -1954 -, p. 265.
(3) Nuclear power in Japan: Haste makes waste -1957 -, p. 269.

In essay (1), Yukawa writes that we have entered such a period in which each of us has to think about the tight relationship among the fates of people in different countries and has to pay far greater efforts than ever in order to save mankind from the threat of nuclear weapons. He also describes his own belief that he has to think about it more seriously as a scientist and that he stands at closer to this problem as one of the Japanese, than other persons. In spite of the presence of the words "atomic energy" in the title, this essay does not yet refer to the problems of nuclear reactors.

In essay (2), Yukawa writes first, "Since the beginning of March this year, nuclear issues have become more familiar than before to grow up to the subject of intense interest of the general public." Then, he explains the differences between the basic studies of atomic physics (nuclear and particle physics in the present terminology) and studies of nuclear science application.

As for March 1954, we have to remember the following things: On the sixteenth, it was revealed by Yomiuri Shimbun that the Japanese tuna fishing boat, Daigo Fukuryū Maru, had been exposed to fallout from the United States' thermonuclear device (H-bomb) test on Bikini Atoll (it happened on March 1); and on the twenty-second, the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), established under the US National Security Council (NSC), proposed to provide experimental nuclear reactor to Japan, which became the beginning of the US plans to suppress anti-nuclear movements in Japan caused by the anger against A- and H-bomb sufferings [Ref. 2]. Earlier than this, three conservative parties of Japan submitted a proposal to the Diet on March 2. It was a 250 million yen budget for nuclear reactors and was passed without discussion on April 3.

On the other hand, on March 18, 1954, the Special Committee of Nuclear Science under the Science Council of Japan decided to keep the three principles of independence, democracy and openness in nuclear science research. On April 23, the Science Council of Japan condemned the Government's approach to nuclear reactors and issued a statement about the refusal of nuclear weapons research and complying with the three principles aforementioned [Ref. 3].

The words of "nuclear reactors" does not yet appear in Yukawa's essay (2), but the following passage is included at its end:

[…] as the research develops to extend its applications, a significant and unintended impact on human life happens to appear at the outside of the original purpose. As a scientist and as one of human beings, I repeat many times to reflect this: Which would the application of science produce, the result to which humans are grateful or the opposite result that threatens humanity? Which would the branching point of the main road of science lead to, the road to hell or the road to heaven?

The two kinds of results and the two roads described in the above passage might have come to Yukawa's attention from the thought about A- and H-bombs. However, he pointed out the truth that a dreadful result always has a possibility to occur ahead of "the branching point." Looking back on those words of his, we find that Yukawa even predicted the disasters at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (To be continued.)

References

1. H. Yukawa, Auto-Collected Writings, Vol. 3 (Asahi Shimbun, 1971).
2. US–Japan relations and the headwaters of nuclear power plants (4), Shimbun Akahata (June 10, 2011) in Japanese.
3. Nuclear Chronology: 1954, Web site of Research Organization for Information Science & Technology.

Hideki Yukawa's Words about Nuclear Power Development -1-

The decisions of any kind regarding agreements about or implementation of power reactors will surely have an important impact on the future of long-term nuclear power development in Japan. Accordingly, we should be much cautious about it. — Hideki Yukawa, Atomic Energy Commission Monthly Report, January issue (1957) in Japanese.

In January 1956, Matsutaro Shoriki, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, released The plan for the construction of nuclear power plants in five years and conclusion of the atomic-power agreement with United States. At the end of that year, the Japan–United States Atomic Agreement, which had guaranteed the independent nuclear research in Japan, began to be reviewed for revision. Hideki Yukawa resigned the Atomic Energy Commission in protest against this. Thereafter, the Atomic Energy Commission was dominated by the Government of Liberal Democratic Party, and was transformed to the agency of promoting nuclear-reactor construction. Yukawa's words quoted above represent the accusation against such a situation just before his resignation. [The above description is based on: US–Japan relations and the headwaters of nuclear power plants (4), Shimbun Akahata (June 10, 2011) in Japanese].

It is deeply regrettable that the absence, in the Atomic Energy Commission, of scientists who took over Yukawa's spirit of protest was one of the factors leading to the nuclear accidents in Fukushima.

The Great Writer's Essay in His Childhood

The Nobel-Prize winning writer Kenzaburo Oe writes a series of a single-page essay in the magazine Tosho under the column name of "Intimate Letters." His essay of this month is entitled "Nambo-nandemo."

When he was in elementary school, Oe wrote an essay of the following story about his grandmother: Being hurt by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a friend of hers was in hospital, so that the grandmother visited the friend. On returning home, she uttered the word "nambo-nandemo" (a dialect word to mean "too dreadful to say anything") to refer to her feeling of having seen the landscape of Hiroshima without any building at all.

His teacher told him that it might be possible to make his essay appear in a local newspaper by sending it to her acquaintance at the newspaper company but that he should rewrite dialect words into common ones. However, Oe did not want to change the grandmother's word of lament "nambo-nandemo" and told so to his teacher. Then, the teacher rejected to send it to the newspaper. A long time after that, the word "nambo-nandemo!" came to his mind on looking at the disasters of the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear power plant. He adds to say that he cannot but shout this word especially against the government and the nuclear power plant.

Recently, German and Swiss governments decided to abolish all nuclear power plants of their countries by the year 2022 and 2034, respectively. It is in Japan, whose nuclear accident at Fukushima affected those decisions, that such a policy is deadly needed be made as soon as possible.

The Japanese Mathematician Shigekiyo Muramatsu

Yesterday, Arjen Dijksman, a Twitter friend of mine, told me on twitter that the Twitter user by the name of OnThisDayInMath was looking for pictures of Matsumura's tomb, Sengakuji, and the inscription on the path, in relation to a blog article (Ref. 1). This article quotes the following description from a March 1908 article in the American Mathematical Monthly:

[O]ne of [the 47 ronin], Shigekiyo Matsumura, was the greatest Asiatic mathematician of his age, who in his work Sanso, published in 1663, calculated the length of one side of a regular inscribed polygon of 32768 or 215 sides, obtaining 0.000095873798655313483 and thence for the value of pi 3.141592648, which is accurate to seven places of decimalsone of them, Shigekiyo Matsumura, was the greatest Asiatic mathematician of his age, who in his work Sanso, published in 1663, calculated the length of one side of a regular inscribed polygon of 32768 or 215 sides, obtaining 0.000095873798655313483 and thence for the value of pi 3.141592648, which is accurate to seven places of decimals ...

I made the search of "Shigekiyo Matsumura" and "Sanso" on the Internet to find that the correct name of the author of Sanso was "Shigekiyo Muramatsu" and that he himself was not the member of the forty-seven ronin (赤穂四十七士). The most useful source of my finding was Ref. 2, my translation from which is given below (the original Japanese text is given in Appendix):

Shigekiyo Muramatsu (村松 茂清, 1608–1695) published Sanso (算俎) in 1663. Muramatsu served Asano (浅野) family and possibly had a math institute in Edo [present Tokyo]. Muramatsu had only a daughter, and took Hidenao (秀直) into his family as a son-in-law [the daughter's husband]. Hidenao and his son Takanao (高直) joined the forty-seven ronin to cause the Akō incident. In Sanso, Muramatsu arranged idai [problems published in earlier Japanese mathematics books written without answers] by classifying them into different levels with consideration for ease of learning. In this book, he also showed the calculation of pi from the regular inscribed polygon of 32768 sides to correctly obtain the value 3.1415926. Thus, this book was the first in the mathematical calculation of pi in Japan. Sanso was republished in 1684 by the title of Sanposanso (算法算俎). This item [possessed by Kyoto University Library and presented in the exhibition] is the copy of this republication, but it is not clear if this is the one published in 1684. Inside the back cover, it is written that this was bought in September 8, 1857, in Asakusa-kuramae.

We can see the names of all the forty-seven ronin in a list of a Wikipedia page (Ref. 3). The list shows Hidenao and Takanao with their middle names included as 村松 喜兵衛 秀直 and 村松 三太夫 高直, but not Shigekiyo. It is natural because the Akō incident was in 1703 (Refs. 3, 4), and Shigekiyo had died in 1695 as written in Ref. 2. Thus, I am not sure if Shigekiyo's tomb is in Sengakuji Temple together with those of the forty-seven ronin.

References

1. "Pi and the 47 Ronin." Pat's Blog (September 5, 2009).
2. The Catalog of the Exhibition "Wasan no Jidai (和算の時代, The Age of Japanese Mathematics),"edited by Kenji Ueno, Chapter 3, p 28, item 66 (Kyoto University Library, 2003) (In Japanese).
3. "赤穂浪士 (Akō-rōshi)," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Japanese edition (March 19, 2011, 10:23).
4. "Forty-seven Ronin," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (23 April 2011, 05:32).

Appendix. The Original of Ref. 2

　村松茂清（むらまつ　しげきよ、1608－1695）は寛文３年（1663）に算俎を出版しました。村松は浅野家に仕えていましたが、江戸に数学塾を持っていたようです。村松には娘しかなく、婿養子秀直を迎えましたが、秀直と秀直の子高直は赤穂四十七士の討ち入りに参加しました。村松は「算俎」のなかで、遺題の問題を内容別にレベル分けして配列し、学習しやすいように配慮しました。「算俎」では円に内接する正32768角形の周の長さを計算して円周率を3.1415926まで正しく計算しました。円周率を数学的に計算した我が国初の書物です。「算俎」は天和４年（1684、同年貞享に改元）に「算法算俎」と題して再版されました。本書はこの再版本ですが、天和４年に出版されたものかどうかは不明です。裏表紙の裏に「安政四丁巳九月八日浅草蔵前求之」と記されています。

Notes added later

• The revised version of Ref. 1 with an addendum appeared: "More on Pi and the 47 Ronin," Pat's Blog (May 3, 2011).
• According to the Japanese Wikipedia page on Hidenao Muramatsu, Shigekiyo Matsumura had the middle name Kyūtaifu (九太夫) (the "middle name" was used as the daily nickname in those days of Japan), and he had a son. However, the son disappeared from home and was lost, so that Shigekiyo took Hidenao as a son-in-law.

The Disaster Report from Tohoku University

Coming back from a bus trip to Okayama Prefecture late last evening, I found an email massage from a former colleague of mine, Naoki Toyota, who is now Professor at Department of Physics, Tohoku University. He writes as follows:

Find the file attached, "The March-11 disaster report from Sendai." I have sent this nonofficial, rather personal document to my overseas friends and asked them for distributing it to their colleagues. I would appreciate it if you could upload this email on your home page or provide a link to the URL of the report (a link to the home page of our Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics Group is also okay).
By the way, all my family including my mother-in-law and her family, living in the devastated coastal region, are safe.

Naoki's report consists of four pages of a PDF file and describes the damage caused by Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, as well as the status of recovery from it, at Tohoku University. Especially, detailed descriptions are given of those at Department of Physics and related facilities.

Just after the March-11 disaster, I thought of sending Naoki an email message of sympathy. However, I supposed that he might be busy responding to many similar messages (even I, living quite far from Tohoku, received some such messages from abroad). Thus, I refrained from sending a message. On the return path of yesterday's trip, I was thinking about sending him a note during this week. What an interesting phenomenon of synchronicity it is to find his message after returning home!