An Empirical Study on the realities of the War-Time Researches in Japan during the World War II

1998 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 08680075
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: 科学技術史(含科学社会学・科学技術基礎論)
• Research Institution: HIROSHIMA UNIVERSITY
• Principal Investigator: ICHIKAWA Hiroshi Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences HIROSHIMA UNIVERSITY Associate Proffessor, 総合科学部, 助教授 (00212994)
• Project Period (FY): 1996 – 1998
• Keywords: World War II / Science & Technology / Japan / GHQ / SCAP / INOUE Tadashiro / the Technical Board (Gijutsu-in) / the Research Mobilization / the Atomic Bomb

Research Abstract

Our investigations on the War-Time Research Mobilization Projects in Japan during the World War H have been carried on, depending mainly upon the witnesses of the Japanese scientists involved in those projects. Recently we have , however, come to be able to avail ourselves of other sources : one is the GHQ/SCAP Records, and the other is the documents and the records included in the tiles of the late Count INQUE Tadashiro who was in the post of President of the Technical Board.
In this research I tried comparing these sources and extracted the following conclusions.
(1) The research projects under the control of the Technical Board were of small scale with the widely scattered subjects, of which the members of the organizations were sometimes overlapped and the concernings of the government authorities were complicated.
(2) The main interest of the Technical Board was once focussed in the field of aeronautical engineering at the opening stage of the War. At the final stage, however, it shifed to the developments of the substitutional fuels, materials and foods in order to maintain the potentials to continue the war. Whereas the interests of the Army engineerees were concentrated into the traditional fields of the artillery and the troops.
(3) The intersts of the Department of the Army of the USA were somewhat different They are more interested in the fields such .as communications, raders, the rocket-or jet-propellants, the guided missiles, the infrared ray, submarine acoustics, Death Ray, the atomic bomb, the bombing balloons, the chemical warfare and the biological warfare.
(4) In the case study of Japanese A-Bomb project I pointed out a difference in the attitudes towards the evaluation of its feasibility between the two reports of the investigations or the field inspetations carried by the American specialists. But this difference was caused by the factors such as a distrust upon the Japanese and so on.