The Making of the Japanese Physicist

The image of a hi-tech samurai has often been invoked to describe Japan’s post-World War II economic success. But such references to the role of Japan’s warrior class go back to the beginning of the twentieth century. “Scratch a Japanese of the most advanced ideas, and he will show a samurai”1—so wrote Inazō Nitobe in his classic text, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, first published in 1900 and then in a revised form in 1905, the year of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Nitobe, who studied politics and international relations at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore during the years 1884–1887, develops an argument, along the lines that “What Japan was she owed to the samurai.”2 He suggests that the samurai became an ideal for the Japanese and that the spirit of bushidō permeated all social classes