Japanese Universities and Regenerating STS Knowledge for Public Use: Fukushima Disaster and Eugenics-Based Forced Sterilization

• In Event: STS and Universities - III

Abstract

One way to investigate knowledge production and circulation is to attend to unexpected networks among actors with diverse intellectual, political, bureaucratic, and policy objectives and standpoints. I discuss two cases of university-based researchers in Japan working on topics that concern public welfare in major ways. Focusing on the interactions among those based in universities, quasi-governmental organizations, non-governmental activist groups, and the media, I explore innovative ways that universities are important nodes within such webs of knowledge circulation.
    First is a major issue in current Japanese media: the rise of redress movements among the victims of earlier eugenics-based forced sterilization of both people with disabilities and Hansen disease patients. The movements include scholars affiliated with universities, such as Ochanomizu and Ritsumeikan, that promote innovative interdisciplinary studies. Ochanomizu’s Ph. D. programs, including the Human Developmental Sciences and Comparative Studies of Societies and Cultures divisions along with Ritsumeikan’s Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, offer rare and invaluable space for scholars who combine their backgrounds in biology, bio-ethics, history, sociology, and gender studies to produce new findings on eugenics practices in Japan. The second case concerns activism following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power disaster by Kyoto University nuclear scientists who had long opposed Japan’s nuclear power policy. Focused on these cases, I examine how universities regenerate knowledge for public use, interrupting and subverting the circulation of the types of knowledge that the government and corporations invoke.

Author

• Yuki Terazawa, Hofstra University