THE JAPANESE DISADVANTAGE
Author:
Date: Friday, October 16, 1987
Page: 18
Section: EDITORIAL PAGE
Those who worry that Japan is about to dominate the world economy might
take heart from the case of Dr. Susumu Tonegawa, the first Japanese to win the
Nobel Prize for medicine. Tonegawa immigrated to the United States -- he's
now at MIT -- to gain the freedom to do his pathfinding work in immunology.
"If I had stayed in Japan I couldn't possibly have made such an
achievement," he said this week. Tonegawa believes the Japanese educational
and research establishments discourage the creative individualism needed for
research breakthroughs. "Young researchers, forget about the security chase,"
he said at a meeting of the Japan Medical Association last April. ''Get out of
Japan and meet your challenge."
Tonegawa seems to be confirming a stereotype of Japan that preceded the
image of an all-powerful Japan Inc. Under this earlier view, Japan was
supposed to be skillful at copying the inventions of others, but inept at
creating new products.
Like most stereotypes, both of these ignore the variations among 120
million Japanese. But nations do have identifiable social traits. The
Japanese, crammed into a small habitable space, must put a high value on
cooperation to survive and prosper.
An aggressive scientist such as Tonegawa, described as a loner who has
''stepped on a lot of people's toes," would have to expend enormous amounts of
energy in dealing with his fellow scientists if he remained in his homeland.
In the United States he is given the physical and emotional space needed to
excel.
Tonegawa has his counterparts in the business world -- brilliant loners
obsessed with a single idea. Many of them fail because their ideas are
worthless. Those who succeed often leave the companies they founded because
they are ill-suited to presiding over a mature business. American capitalism
would be impoverished without them.
The Japanese, aware that their society discourages creativity, are
thinking of overhauling their education system. Change in such a fundamental
aspect of national life will be difficult. The United States will remain the
more wide-open, individualistic society -- the leader in scientific and
entrepreneurial innovation.
GAGEN ;10/14 NKELLY;10/16,10:13 ENOBEL
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