Published on August 15, 2019.
This article introduces an essay by Kunihiko Takeda published in the monthly magazine Sound Argument, discussing the spread of liberal thought in postwar Japan and the involvement of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hideki Yukawa in anti-nuclear movements, peace activism, and nuclear-energy policy.
It criticizes the way scientists gained influence in political activities outside their fields of expertise, thereby allowing political intervention in the world of science, and questions the problem of a society that treats Nobel laureates as omnipotent.

August 15, 2019.
Liberalism has spread throughout Japan and has brought great calamities to thought, scholarship, the economy, and society.
However, among the present-day liberals, there is no person worthy of commentary.
This is a chapter I published on August 14, 2018, under the title, “The Three Villains I Choose from the Fortress of Postwar Liberalism: Hideki Yukawa, Sawako Ariyoshi, and Shigeru Nanbara — Under the Name of Science,” which was published under that title.
The following is from an essay by Kunihiko Takeda published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument for 840 yen, under the title, “The Three Villains I Choose from the Fortress of Postwar Liberalism: Hideki Yukawa, Sawako Ariyoshi, and Shigeru Nanbara — Under the Name of Science.”
Emphasis in the text, other than headings, is mine.
Liberalism has spread throughout Japan and has brought great calamities to thought, scholarship, the economy, and society.
However, among the present-day liberals, there is no person worthy of commentary.
What we should look back upon is “the people around them who gave power to the liberals — the true masterminds.”
A Nobel Prize-winning scholar with whom I had a friendship once asked me, “Professor Takeda, what do you think changed the most after receiving the Nobel Prize?”
When I replied, “Since it is such a major prize, perhaps it meant that after receiving it, you could no longer conduct your research?” he said, “No, it is that everyone came to be impressed by anything I said.”
According to that laureate, although he was merely a scholar in the field of natural science, immediately after receiving the prize he came to be regarded as an “expert” whether the subject was early-childhood education or politics and economics, and everyone began listening to him with admiration.
What I remember when I hear this story is Dr. Hideki Yukawa.
In 1949, Yukawa received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his achievement in theoretically predicting the existence of mesons.
It was the third such achievement by an Asian and the first by a Japanese.
Because it was before the conclusion of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, together with Hironoshin Furuhashi’s world record in swimming, it gave courage to Japanese people who had been crushed by defeat in the war.
However, after receiving the Nobel Prize, Yukawa came to become deeply involved in the world’s anti-nuclear movement and Japan’s nuclear-energy policy, and he changed from a natural scientist into a cultural figure.
He not only signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the peaceful use of science and technology, but also participated in the Pugwash Conferences, which began in 1957.
Such actions by Yukawa were treated as sacred among people connected with natural science in Japan, and they made unshakable the “liberal attitude that Japanese scientists should uphold.”
Scholars and engineers in fields such as physics, biology, and engineering spend their days in an atmosphere resembling the “apprenticeship system” of athletes, and therefore they tend to have strong respect for “great seniors and prize winners.”
In that respect, they are quite different from people in the “humanities,” who grow up with a critical perspective and in a nihilistic atmosphere, and precisely for that reason, Yukawa’s actions can be said to have been sanctified.
Many of the international peace movements after the end of the war were influenced by the Cold War and had the same meaning as political activities.
The aforementioned Pugwash Conferences were also a place where Soviet operatives and American intelligence agents secretly maneuvered.
From this standpoint, what the author wishes to emphasize is as follows.
① Yukawa was a physicist worthy of respect.
② It would truly have been good if he had kept his distance from activities outside his field and devoted his life to research in physics.
③ However, in reality, he engaged in political activities not as an ordinary citizen but as a Nobel Prize laureate.
④ In the field of politics, he was an amateur.
⑤ The great majority of Japanese scientists influenced by him proceeded in the wrong direction.
⑥ As a result, political intervention was allowed into the world of science.
That is the point.
It is acceptable for scientists to engage in political activities or social activities, but they must satisfy one of two conditions: either acquire ability surpassing that of specialists in the field, or use the methods of natural science.
As a result of devoting himself to basic physics, Yukawa reached the Nobel Prize, but he did not immerse himself in history or literature.
He was merely enveloped by the atmosphere of Kyoto University and became ideologically liberalized.
In other words, he did not have the ability to stand at the forefront of political activities.
Furthermore, in Yukawa’s peace thought, the standard path of natural science — accumulating facts and approaching the final truth — was also omitted.
It is possible that Yukawa himself was deluded because society raised him up by saying, “Because he won the Nobel Prize, he must be omnipotent,” or that Yukawa made use of a society that bowed before the Nobel Prize.
The author once gave an academic lecture at the Yukawa Memorial Hall of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University.
When I entered the slightly old-fashioned and small memorial hall, I felt myself bracing as a researcher in the same field.
However, I simply cannot evaluate favorably his activities outside his field of expertise.
And when one considers the harmful influence that a “society treating the Nobel Prize as omnipotent” had on natural scientists, it can only be called unfortunate that, as a result, he became one of its masterminds.