Matters for Japanese Geoscience Community to develop more open, cooperative, and competitive presence.

Abstract:

The Japanese Geoscience Community formally merged to the Japan Geoscience Union in 2005 although individual traditional societies such as meteorology, geology and seismology keep their own activity in parallel.

Modern history of Japanese geosciences started in mid 19th when western countries demanded the Japanese “Shogun” Government to open the country and to trade coal, water, foods, and others. After the local sea battles with western navies, the central government decided to open the country and import the modern sciences. The Japanese civil war took place in 1868. The “Shogun” surrendered to the opposite power. The new “Meiji” government established in 1868 and soon started to import natural sciences more thoroughly to modernize the society. The Japanese independence was rare in the world at that time and took a free hand to import which science is from which country. Physics and Chemistry were mainly from UK and France, and Medical and Military sciences were imported mainly from the new Imperial Germany.

Seismology was a branch of physics, therefore imported from UK. Geology was firstly from Massachusetts US, together with agriculture. US was after the civil war and the Japanese new government asked that the new US would come to Japan and support the development of frontier Hokkaido, where was uncultivated island. However, the Meiji government switched the import of geology from Germany when the government established the geological survey of Japan and the university of Tokyo.

The principle of the Meiji government for the import of western sciences was a complete translation with coining Japanese terminology. The first western professors for sciences were employed for a decade and Japanese students translated, investigated and learned to each other. In 20th century through 1st and 2nd world war, Japan kept such a research and education system even since the complete change of society system after the 2nd world war. The language barrier between the Japanese and English is quite high yet even for the highly educated scientists and engineers.

How to evaluate the scientific achievement is not so simple in Japan due to differences from western societies in history, culture and education system. We have to develop our way harmonized with the concept of open science.