Japanese STS and Science Criticism

From Post-war Theories of Science to the Era of Post 3・11

Abstract

　 Japanese STS is assumed to be the successors of 1970’s environment movement motivated by Minamata disease and criticized by Jun Ui, and also those of anti-nuclear activists like Jinzaburo Takagi. But from my personal experience, such a supposition is not taken for granted, because main stream of Japanese STS is now aiming at mediation between science and society, not at criticism, but at arbitrate conflicts. So they are now more compromising to politics and economy. In order to analyze this discrepancy of different assumptions, I would like to look into a history of Japanese STS: Firstly about two origins of Japanese STS by Shigeru Nakayama and Yoichiro Murakami, and their different nature, in order to explicate complicated structure of low-church activist movement and high-church academic style in Japanese STS; then its transformation in the process of institutionalisation in the 1990s to 2000s, with reference to the critical comments made by the contemporaries, late Osamu Kanamori and Hitoshi Yoshioka. To our regret, both of them have passed away recently, so that this paper is intended as an obituary tribute to their critical discourse on Japanese STS, as well.