This essay by Masayuki Takayama traces a line from Japan’s prewar and wartime scientific ingenuity—anti-rust coatings, Shimose shells at Tsushima, early atomic models, radar, television, and ferrite—to the postwar suppression and exploitation of that genius by Western powers, especially the United States.
He argues that while Japan could theoretically have developed nuclear weapons before Hiroshima, Japanese scientists did not share the ruthless mentality of “white” powers, and thus became victims rather than wielders of nuclear force.
According to Takayama, the postwar creation and role of the Science Council of Japan served U.S. interests by restraining Japan’s scientific potential under the banner of “peace.”
The “peace” promoted by the Science Council, he concludes, is not universal peace, but a “white man’s peace” designed to preserve Western dominance.

The following is from page 49 of Masayuki Takayama’s book Henken Jizai: Biden wa Akai (“Biden Is Red: A Lying President, Ignorant Scholars, and Unprincipled Media—49 Essays for Seeing Through Fake News”).
This essay, too, proves that he is a unique, one-of-a-kind journalist in the postwar world.
It also proves the correctness of my evaluation that he is the writer most deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Science Council the United States Created

The sculptor Horita Zuishō, who served the Kyoto Imperial Palace, is introduced in an elementary school reader as having “done such fine work that even the Emperor marveled.”
Zuishō continued to do fine work after the Meiji Restoration as well.
In that era, warships were changing from wooden hulls to iron ships, and with that came the new problem of rust eating away at the hull from below.
Zuishō knew that lacquer was very effective in preventing rust.
He experimented with lacquer as an anti-rust agent and in 1885 released the Horita-style anti-rust paint, which became Patent No. 1 in Japan.

The first to prove its effectiveness was the Russian cruiser Dmitrii Donskoi.
Though a new ship, she suffered badly from rust, and when she happened to call at a Japanese port, she learned of Zuishō’s paint.
They were desperate, grasping at straws, and had him apply the coating; the result was spectacular.
Her service life was extended, and seventeen years later she was able to sortie as one of the main ships of the Baltic Fleet in the Battle of Tsushima.

Before the battle, talk circulated that Russia would win a crushing victory.
The reason was that at the time, battleships were manufactured exclusively in Western Europe: Russia bought the battleship Tsesarevich from France and used her as a model for building the Borodino, Suvorov, and others.
Japan also purchased European-built battleships, so in terms of performance, the capital ships of Japan and Russia were almost evenly matched.
In other words, with three times as many battleships, Russia enjoyed an overwhelming advantage.
How could Japan overturn that?

Shimose Masachika conceived shells filled with picric acid explosive that had three times the destructive power of enemy shells.
However, picric acid has the property of exploding the instant it comes into contact with iron.
How could it be sealed inside an iron shell body?
At that point Shimose remembered Zuishō’s lacquer and tried coating the inside of the shell head with lacquer.
That was the moment of the invention of Shimose powder.

The Russian fleet, including the flagship Suvorov, saw Japanese shells for the first time off Tsushima.
“The shells burst into deep crimson flames the instant they touched any part of the ship’s hull, burning everything to ashes” (Rallybault, Tsushima).
The Oslyabya, clad in steel armor, burned and sank, and the Suvorov was reduced to scrap iron.
The Dmitrii Donskoi too was engulfed in crimson fire and scuttled off Ulleungdo.

The Japanese used their own wisdom and ingenuity to repel the invasion of overwhelmingly powerful and merciless white nations.
After that, Japan continued to unveil ideas that astonished the world.
In the West, regarding atomic structure, people thought electrons and protons were “mixed together as if in a bowl of red-bean rice.”
Around the time of the Russo-Japanese War, Nagaoka Hantarō announced that protons sit at the center and electrons orbit around them “like Saturn and its rings.”

During the Taishō era, Yagi Hidetsugu devised a directional short-wave antenna.
In other words, he created radar.
In the early Shōwa years, Takayanagi Kenjirō succeeded in receiving images using a cathode-ray tube.
The first image he received was the Japanese character “イ (i).”

Around the same time, Takei Takeshi invented a non-metallic magnetic material, ferrite, and obtained a patent.
A magnet that is not made of iron made possible, for example, magnetic recording tape.

The white nations immediately stole the Japanese people’s ideas.
Rutherford confirmed Nagaoka’s model and received a Nobel Prize for it.
Yagi’s idea was quickly turned into military radar by Britain and the United States.
Takayanagi’s television was turned into the “eyes” of guided missiles by the U.S. military after the war.
Ferrite was snatched up amid the postwar confusion by the victorious nation, the Dutch company Philips.
This technology is what made today’s stealth capability possible.

The conversion of civilian technology to military use is called “spin-on.”
This series of “steal and convert to military use” cases could be called “steal-on.”

That same sneak-thief United States suddenly stopped publishing papers on nuclear fission in the period leading up to the last war.
It was highly suspicious.
In Japan, it was already known that one gram of uranium-235 reaching critical mass had the explosive power of 13,500 tons of TNT.
Nishina Yoshio and Yukawa Hideki were conducting research, and they had already produced uranium fluoride for enrichment.

With the completion of the 700,000-kilowatt Sup’ung Dam on the Yalu River, Japan could have built nuclear weapons had it wished.
However, no one believed that even a country like the United States would actually use such a demonic weapon in combat.
Because development lagged, Hiroshima was bombed first.

If Japanese scientists had possessed the same pitiless mindset as the white nations, Japan could have had nuclear weapons long before.
In that case, the United States would have feared retaliation and would not have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

After the war, the United States used the Science Council of Japan to seal off the Japanese people’s outstanding spirit of scientific inquiry.
The “peace” spoken of by the Science Council is “white people’s peace.”
(From the December 3, 2020 issue)