Overcoming war-time difficulties: a special episode
11 January 2008 (Volume 3 Issue 1)
Figure 1: Harry Kelly (left) and Yoshio Nishina (right), Japan’s top nuclear physicist, developed two cyclotrons but those were dumped into the Tokyo Bay after the war.
Research into particle physics using a cyclotron has been one of RIKEN’s core strengths since its very early days that date back to the 1930s. Yoshio Nishina of RIKEN, Japan’s top nuclear physicist at that time, avidly applied knowledge learned from the US and Europe and developed Japan’s first, albeit small, cyclotron in 1937. He later witnessed preliminary experiments using the first beam of a bigger cyclotron in 1944 (Fig. 1).
By that time, Japan had forged its way into the morass of war, and its relationship with the US was rapidly deteriorating. A few days after the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, Japan declared its surrender. Then, Japan’s science suffered a tragedy.
The US-led General Headquarters of Allied Forces (GHQ), which controlled postwar Japan, feared Japan had the capability to build nuclear bombs, and suspected that RIKEN’s two cyclotrons were used to develop them. The GHQ undertook a thorough inspection of Nishina’s laboratory, and destroyed the cyclotrons by plunging them into the depths of Tokyo Bay.
US scientists reading newspaper articles about their government’s action became furious, and filed a complaint to then-president Harry Truman. The protest was successful as the GHQ asked the Department of Army to recruit two scientific advisors so as not to repeat the same mistake.
Young US scientists, including Harry Kelly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were chosen to work for the GHQ’s Scientific and Technical Division. Soon after he arrived in Japan in January 1946, Kelly came to believe that Japan would not prosper without its scientists and engineers. He then played a vital role in reconstructing war-torn Japan from a scientist’s perspective.
Under the GHQ’s governance for seven years until 1952, Japan faced many restrictions on its activities, including a ban on nuclear physics and other areas of scientific research. In addition, the GHQ ordered the liquidation of the powerful business conglomerates that dominated Japan’s economy. That heavily affected RIKEN, as it had formed a group of flourishing venture companies in the 1930s and 1940s. Not only had the GHQ dissolved RIKEN’s business group, but it began considering abolishing RIKEN itself.
In his early days in Japan, Kelly met many top-class scientists at RIKEN, and understood its importance to Japan’s future. Kelly and Nishina, who was also influential to the government’s scientific policies, soon started to work together and built a firm relationship of trust. They even became close family friends. Backed by strong passions to save the moribund RIKEN, the two men scrambled to negotiate with tough government officials of the Allies and Japan, and spent two years persuading them to keep the research institute alive.
In 1947, RIKEN made a fresh start as Japan’s first research institute to be incorporated, and Nishina was appointed as its first president. In his inauguration speech, Nishina praised Kelly by saying “today’s RIKEN is indebted to efforts by the GHQ’s Dr. Kelly, and this fact should be long remembered in our institute’s history.” Bowen C Dees, a colleague of Kelly at the GHQ, recalls in his book1 that RIKEN would have followed the same fate as its cyclotrons without efforts by Kelly and his comrades.
In 1950, Kelly completed his mission and left Japan to work for the US National Science Foundation (and began to promote the US-Japan Scientific Cooperation as the co-chairperson of its Steering Committee). A year later, Nishina suffered from an illness and died at the age of 61. But their close bond was never severed. When Kelly died in 1976 at the age of 67, Kelly’s family divided his remains and brought them from his hometown in North Carolina to Tokyo. Marked on his tombstone built at Nishina’s tomb are the words, “Harry C. Kelly rests here.”
