Ethnic Pride Rewarded

The front page of newspapers was largely occupied by news about Nobel Prizes awarded to Japanese scholars for two consecutive days. As if escaping from controversial and complicated issues like new security bills, news media competed each other in reporting this uncontroversially happy story. The Japanese got delighted with international endorsement on academic findings several decades ago, preserving ethnic pride that the Japanese were smart and diligent.

Professor Emeritus in Kitasato University, Satoshi Omura, won Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his development of Avermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that helped hundreds of millions of life in Africa, with his colleague in America. The Japanese realized that a former high school teacher found antibiotic in soil around golf course in Japan in 1970s that prevented river blindness of the people in Africa suffering from epidemic.

News media introduced Omura as a man working for others. Stories about his family in a local city in central Japan, his determination in chemistry after he taught in evening high school, or sincere interest in microbes were commonly disclosed. Grabbing an opportunity for raising his declining supporting rate, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a telephone call to Omura, congratulating him with nationalistic words of “I’m really proud of you as a Japanese.”

The enthusiasm did not end in a day. On Tuesday, the second day of Nobel Prize Week, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Nobel Prize in Physics went to Takaaki Kajita, President of Institute of Cosmic Rays Research in Tokyo University, who found mass of neutrinos. “Neutrino study in Japan that challenged mystery in the space won the supreme honor,” praised Asahi Shimbun.

Following the study of Masatoshi Koshiba, a recipient of the same prize in 2002, Kajita discovered transformation of neutrino in a laboratory named Super Kamiokande in late 1990s. The finding was interpreted as a great step to understand why materials existed in the space. “It is not useful immediately, but extending horizon of humankind,” told Kajita in his press conference.

The Japanese like to congratulate people who are respected in international society. In sports, Ichiro Suzuki and Kei Nishikori are heroes who appealed great skill of the Japanese. Nobel Prize is one of the greatest events in which Japanese sentiment on its ethnic supremacy, flourished in wartime Japan, could be fulfilled. But as long as seeing recent tendency of political consideration appeared in Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama, authority of the prize cannot be said as absolute.