ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Shatter the Mandala!”―the 1985 Tsukuba Science Expo and the Spectacle of Pluralist Dystopia

• In Event: Beyond Universalisms and Flat Pluralisms: East Asia as Method for the Global History of Science

English Abstract

This talk examines how scientific pluralism can be weaponized to advance a singular universalism through a close analysis of the 1985 Tsukuba Science Expo. The Expo was presented as a pluralist celebration of technoscientific diversity across the globe. Its vision drew on theoretical frameworks developed by conscientious scientists and historians who critically reexamined “modern Western science” and its universalist tyranny. In Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, the Enlightenment faith that “scientific reason” would secure freedom and democracy gradually eroded as scientists and historians recognized environmental crises induced by modern technoscience and scientists’ complicity with both the former Japanese Empire and the Cold War military–industrial complex. These critiques—often aligned with leftist politics—sat uneasily alongside Californian-style Orientalism and Japan’s ethnocentric pride, fueled by its postwar economic success. Orientalist discourse sought in non-Western traditions alternative paradigms capable of transcending the impasse of Western modern science. If the West once negated “the East” and erased indigenous ways of knowing, Japan—figured as a site of self-negation that had absorbed epistemic systems first from China and then from the West—could emerge as a synthesis that negates the negation, harmonizing non-Western and Western modes of knowing. The Tsukuba Expo thus became a point of convergence: leftist critiques of Big Science, melancholic reflections on the erasure of indigenous epistemologies, and Orientalist aesthetics seeking the West’s salvation in “the East” coalesced into a spectacle of pluralist dystopia, reenacting Japan’s wartime “Overcoming Modernity” movement in pacifist disguise, envisioning harmonious interdependence captured in a Buddhist mandala. Revisiting critiques of the Expo, this talk reveals critical science studies’ affinity with Orientalism and ethnocentrism and reimagines technoscientific pluralism for our present.

Author

• Yasuhiro Okazawa, Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University