I work in the university sector where there is much talk about which students from which groups are privileged and which are disadvantaged, and whether such information should compel us to treat students differently. 

However, it is not straightforward for me as an educator to determine someone’s group affiliations, degree of privilege, or their socioeconomic background. And is it not clear to me that I should have access to this information for all students that I teach. 

I work in a part of the education sector where all students pay substantial fees for their education, and staff:student ratios, class sizes and workloads are such that personalised education is rarely practical until one undertakes advanced research work for a thesis. Finally, I am responsible for educating adults who have chosen their programme of study. 

With these things in mind, I have written a pledge to clarify my role and guide my thinking on how I engage with students in my classes, in all their diversity. I intend to share this with my classes. If any of what I have written is useful to you as an educator, please use it, share it, or adapt it and make it your own. I expect my thoughts on this will evolve over time, and I welcome feedback on it. 

An educator’s pledge.

My role as an educator is to help you and every student I teach to reach their highest potential.

As a student you need to put in the hard work to get there too.

I will not ask for personal information about your gender, age, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. 

These things are your business, not mine, and I will try my best not to treat you differently, even if I become aware of any of these things. 

I am aware that it is not always possible to tell any of these things from appearance alone.

If you have a disability or are neurodiverse and you need specific support, I will work with you to the best of my ability.

I won’t make assumptions about what you need, but, with consent, I will seek advice and help on how best to support you in your learning.

I won’t privilege or disadvantage particular students because of any perception I have that they come from a disadvantaged background, or from a background similar to mine.

All students that I teach, regardless of whether they are a citizen, resident, or an exchange student, have equal right to be taught by me to the best of my ability.

I recognise that there are a range of political, societal and religious views among students and their families, and that these may differ from my own.

It is not my job to indoctrinate you with my own political, societal or religious views, or tell you which to accept or reject. It is my job to teach you the skills you need to evaluate different views and decide for yourself. 

I will not shy away from challenging or difficult topics.

Some topics are controversial or can provoke emotional reactions. It is not my job to shelter you from these. It is my job to provide you with the knowledge and tools needed to navigate these.

I will aim to teach and inspire you using the best knowledge and tools the world has to offer.

I recognise that your future is not yet set – you may move town or country, or you may not. I will not limit what I teach to things only relevant to a specific time or place.

I aspire to teach you how to learn for yourself.

This is the most important skill I can teach, and the most important skill you can learn.

I will continue my own learning so that I can continue to improve as an educator.

I will aspire to learn from my mistakes, and I will contribute to creating an environment that fosters growth, not compliance, where you can also learn from your mistakes.

I will be courteous.

I expect you to be courteous to me and to your fellow students, even when we disagree with one another.

The header image for this article was taken from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/2JIvboGLeho)

The post As an educator, what is my responsibility? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

This approach is taking us in a dangerous direction. There is an urgent need to move away from the emerging culture of fear, cancellation and caricature, and towards patient and in-depth discussion and debate using reason, evidence, logic. We need to move beyond the knee-jerk social media-style outbursts and emotional tirades. But how do we remove the fear of being attacked for having differing views? Well, we need to relearn how to have challenging conversations. But first, we need to defuse the pejorative bomb. Let’s talk about how to do this.

Defusing the pejorative bomb

There are two ways to defuse this bomb. One is that a slur is reclaimed as a compliment or a badge of identity as people begin to stand up to bullying behaviour. For something as serious as racism, such an outcome would be disastrous. I fear this outcome and you should too. The other is that we choose to stop deploying the pejorative bomb. That requires us to do three things.

Step one: provide specifics

First, we need to stop claiming that racism is systemic or rampant in NZ. As a minority member of society, I can say, hand on heart, that New Zealand is not a country riddled with nasty racist people. Racism is far from absent, but it’s not rampant either. Most New Zealanders are decent people and we’re all getting better at living in a multicultural world. The vast majority of people aspire to see our country continue to improve. How does one respond to claims of structural or systemic or rampant racism when no details are given? Such sweeping generalisations don’t provide a means of finding solutions because they only serve to get peoples’ backs up, particularly if you deny those you accuse any right of reply. So, by all means, point to a specific problem and propose a solution. And be prepared to discuss both the problem and a range of solutions.

Step two: we need to understand what is and what is not racism

These days, many people seem to have a very black and white idea of what constitutes racism. But reality is never as simple as we might wish it to be. Here are a few examples that draw from my own experience.

As a student, I often heard the trope that Asians are good at passing exams because we just memorise facts—Asians cannot think for themselves. That stereotype was common in my student days—so much so that Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani provocatively titled a series of essays, ‘Can Asians Think?’ This trope has often been rolled out in discussions of high Asian scores for competitive entrance exams, in NZ and abroad. The starting point for an Asian is that we know that some hold an underlying assumption about our ability; despite good grades, we are assumed to lack other (more important) qualities. Perhaps, on the basis of race, we don’t fully deserve to be there. This is to confuse an individual with a stereotype. Each of us painted with that stereotype has to demonstrate, one person at a time, why the stereotype doesn’t hold. 

In the weird world of the 2020s this narrative has been replaced: Asians are now being recast by some as ‘white-adjacent’. This means that, because of our perceived success, we not only do not need any help, we are also now part of the power base, so discrimination against us is justified in order to ‘make room’ for those who are genuinely unprivileged.

What’s the issue with this? Well, ‘Asian’ is a very broad term – it covers enormous cultural and ethnic diversity, and in different parts of the world, the term refers to very different ethnic groups. Asians are not all alike. Some have come here as refugees from among the poorest countries in the world, with little education, and limited opportunities. Some are descendents of people who first arrived here in the 1800s. Some are comparatively recent arrivals. Some, like me, are part something else. 

Asians are aware of our many differences, and we are sometimes known to have fun with them; I was at the hospital recently and had to work hard to keep a straight face when talking to an excellent and very professional Filipino nurse. Why? Because the playful portrayal by Filipino-American comedian Jo Koy of the Filipino ambition to become a nurse popped into my head! This is surely a stereotype? Yes, it is. So isn’t it racist to laugh and share it? No, not if we take Jo Koy’s lead. By inviting us to laugh with him, he lifts up his community; we learn something and share in a love letter to a community, a humanising in-joke.

By contrast, to uniformly label or treat all Asians as ‘white-adjacent’ is an astonishing use of racial stereotyping. While the term originated in the US, I have heard this viewpoint from people here in NZ who specifically claim to be champions of minority groups. These individuals are frequently from the majority group, cast themselves in their role as champions of the less fortunate, and, in their self-proclaimed benevolence, have taken it upon themselves to decide who needs help, who can be ignored because they have it good enough, and who has too much privilege, all using a flimsy proxy: race.

For someone who has grown up with the, ‘Asians are good at exams but are not able to think’ trope, this strikes me as a very poorly thought out position. 

Step 3: check your privilege-checking. Can you really determine privilege by skin colour?

Let me end with a very personal example that touches on the complexities of privilege and why we can’t assume it follows race. After moving to NZ, I had a difficult time at school. In my final year of primary school, I had only one friend. He had just arrived from another school and we were thrown together by circumstance. His family were rough around the edges working class folk and, when I first met them, they were living out of a caravan. By contrast, members of both sides of my family—Japanese and British—are university educated. My friend’s family were always friendly, and made me feel welcome. There was however one thing they did which really annoyed me. They gave me a nickname based on my Japanese ancestry. I detested it because I didn’t want anyone to draw attention to my difference, but it stuck. These are the type of people one might often hear being pejoratively labelled ‘white trash’. This is accurate: they were white, my friend’s stepfather literally worked in ‘trash’, and they were from that slice of society that is short on privilege—certainly lower than my university-educated family. But they were far from being trash. My friend went on to get a university education and is successful in his chosen calling. 

This reframing of who is privileged and who is not by the New Racists is allowing privileged members of the activist class to inadvertently punch down on people who look like me but don’t have my ‘white adjacent’ status. Is an Asian refugee who fled an oppressive regime more privileged than a successful, well-educated Māori academic? I would argue that it is hard to quantify and compare privilege. Perhaps we should spend less time trying to work this out from proxies and talk to people instead.

Then there is the deliberate punching down (yes, you read that correctly) on people who in the eyes of the New Racists look white and privileged but who, like my friend and his family, are actually starting from close to the bottom and doing it tough. But they are still white, you might say, they still have privilege. Yes, they do. That ‘white’ family are the only people who get to call me by the nickname they gave me—Fuji. 

An alternative to punching up and dropping pejorative bombs

So what’s the alternative? Calm, evidence-based discussion and debate, and making an attempt to understand the reasons behind someone disagreeing with you. It helps to remember that the world is a complex place and ‘good and bad’ or ‘right and wrong’ are not always easy to establish. It also helps to be wary of overly-simplistic solutions, and to accept that sometimes we will be in disagreement on contentious matters.

Here are some personal measures I intend to take in conversations going forward; I hope you will consider doing the same.

I will tell people that it’s OK to

• Talk about race and to discuss the difficult stuff without fear of recrimination.
• Say something that you subsequently regret or realise is inappropriate.

If I don’t think something you say is appropriate

• I’ll tell you why. 
• If you apologise, I’ll accept your apology. And vice versa.

I won’t

• Shut down your right to state your opinion, even when I disagree with you.
• Get distracted by the way you deliver your message – you don’t need to sugar coat it or tread carefully.
• Presume to know what will or won’t hurt others or act to censor you on their behalf.
• Try and shut down or win an argument by calling you names.

I will

• Try to listen carefully to what you have to say, even if it is challenging for me to do so.
• Endeavour to discuss difficult topics and debate with you firmly, but fairly.
• Endeavour to sort out the content from the emotional reaction either you or I have to your delivery. I expect you to do the same.
• Tell you if I disagree with you, but I’ll use evidence to back up my position.
• Have the courage to concede when you are right. 
• Treat you as my equal. That means I will sometimes disagree with you.
• Avoid using pejorative insults or outbursts. 

As an educator I will

• Endeavour to teach others how to discuss and debate constructively.
• Not demean students by presuming I need to protect them from hurtful statements. 
• Teach students how to defend themselves calmly, and with evidence.
• Empower students to think rationally and clearly, and to debate based on evidence. 
• Teach students the value of changing one’s views in light of evidence.

As a colleague I won’t

• Act to get you removed from some position of responsibility, kicked out of your job, or bullied by others, simply because I don’t agree with you.
• Scapegoat someone so as to protect myself.
• Bow to the demands of bullies, no matter what form they take.

Photo by Romain Gal on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/4G_C_qKwi6s

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Should the use of racist, ageist or sexist slurs against members of a perceived privileged group be employed on behalf of another group? Should  ‘punching up’ be considered a necessary means to reach a noble goal? 

I argue that this tactic, even if employed with the best intentions, is wrong and dangerous. And it can provoke a response that leaves society worse off. I will do this by talking a little about my own experiences of growing up as a member of a minority group in New Zealand. In a follow-up article, I suggest some better alternatives to ‘punching up’.

The changing face of racism

As a part Asian growing up in New Zealand in the 1980s I experienced plenty of racism. It was overt, and involved physical and verbal abuse. I am proud of my heritage but there were certainly times where, had I been able, I would have gladly erased the Japaneseness from my physical appearance. I couldn’t control that, but I did insist that my mother stop putting (delicious) Japanese food in my lunchbox! By the the time the 1990s rolled around, I no longer felt the desire or the need to hide my ethnicity. New Zealand was becoming much more multicultural, and intolerance was receding. Don’t get me wrong, I still encountered overt racism, ignorant statements, faux pas, and an abundance of things that I could have rolled my eyes at, but my experience of everyday life in NZ was becoming much more positive. I no longer viewed my Japanese heritage as a badge of shame. One might say that this is all part of growing up. The taunts and physical attacks of the playground give way to maturity and decency, in the main.

In the 2020s, things have changed again. Discussions of race are everywhere, but this change has not entirely been for the better. Strangely, I have caught myself feeling tempted to exaggerate my minority status, not out of pride, but for protection.

The reason is simple: some of the people who are championing support for minorities are actually making things less safe, less open, and potentially more dangerous for the minorities they claim to be lifting up. The primary reason is an intimidatory tactic designed to shut down discussion and debate. 

This tactic? Deploying what I call the pejorative bomb. 

What is a pejorative bomb? In part, it is old-fashioned name-calling, of the type I and many minorities have experienced, but it is aimed at the majority, accusing them for instance of being racist.

Let me first explain something about name-calling. Many people fear being called names. Bullies who use this tactic are clever: they know exactly how to hit you where it hurts and it is challenging to fight back against this type of behaviour. Growing up, I had to regularly endure pejorative references to my ethnicity. I couldn’t do much about that as my ethnicity was something I had no control over.

But what I am calling pejorative bombs are different. A pejorative bomb uses the tactics of the bully, but it is being used as a way of shutting down debate by attacking someone’s physical attributes: age, sex or ethnicity. An example is the term ‘pale, stale, male’, to pejoratively dismiss the views of an older white man.

Indeed, I am struck by the increase in the casual use of terms like racist, white supremacist, old white male, and colonist, to name a few, by educated adults who see themselves as supporting minorities. They use these terms as a way to shut down or even preemptively kill off discussion. Often these pejorative bombs are being mouthed by people who are themselves white. 

Having spent a chunk of my formative years dealing with bullies, and having had to think about race my entire life, I can tell you that the latter requires careful, considered thinking and reading. The former? Well I can spot a bully from a mile away. Believing one has the moral high ground and that this justifies acting like a bully still makes you a bully.

What our aversion to being labelled racist reveals about society

Why is this type of insult so effective at silencing people? 

Ironically, it works because so few people are genuinely racist.  Hence people genuinely fear being labelled racist. This is a big change: once upon a time, stating this fact when one was on the receiving end of racist slurs had zero effect. It was simply laughed off because it meant nothing to the perpetrator. The insult works today precisely because so few people harbour genuinely racist views any longer. Instead, most people are mortified to be associated with such views. Granted, people do put their foot in it from time to time, but their intent is most often not to insult. There are of course still people out there who are genuinely racist, but our society has improved enormously on matters of race in my lifetime.

Calling people racist works so well because, for someone who is white, it’s the ultimate insult: denying it is as futile as not responding – the fact has been stated, leaving it pinned on you as a badge of shame. The strategy being employed here is so effective at shutting down debate that it in turn clears the way for change to be pushed through by fiat. When wielded by people with influence, change can be pushed through even if we don’t agree, because the majority feels intimidated. That’s crafty, and in the worst instances where it is used, it is a tool for antidemocratic change.

The pernicious effects of name calling

This brings us to the unintended consequences. My concern is that open, reasoned, and frank discussion and debate are becoming more difficult because of this nefarious strain of bullying. This has two impacts. First, it actually makes it harder for minorities to hold diverse views. Instead, we are all being coerced into conforming to a specific set of views that a particular group demands we hold. 

Even worse, agitating on behalf of minorities risks making minorities the focus of a future backlash.

Working out how to get along in a multicultural milieu despite our differences is a difficult problem that requires careful thought. Working out how to improve society is also difficult. It requires challenging conversations and listening to a diverse range of views; some enticing solutions may actually be bigger problems in disguise. The discussion we need is not happening, in part because of the use of the bully’s approach to shutting down diverse opinions. 

It is one of the strangest ironies that shutting down diverse opinions is being championed in the name of promoting diversity. Witness the rise of the slur, ‘race traitor’, a peculiar concept that refers to a person of a particular race who is deemed to hold an opinion that is contrary to what someone else expects someone of that race to hold. This is a terrible stereotype of racial groups as necessarily uniform in thought, a caricature that a group of people should think the same on the basis of something as biologically meaningless as their skin colour.

That the term race traitor has been used by alt-right white supremacists and by left-wing ‘antiracists’ alike illustrates that such groups are intolerant of diversity of opinion, and underscores the tribal nature of such movements: if you are not with us you are against us. 

Both usages appear disturbingly alike, but let’s think about this for a moment.

Society largely views white supremacists with ridicule, but I fear that the New Racists will give them a new lease of life: the frequent, and frequently unwarranted, pejorative attacks on white people who are not racists, but not ardent antiracists, can engender a counter position: people can get fed up, their hearts can harden towards the minorities that the vocal antiracists purport to be in support of. These people don’t necessarily become racists, but if an antiracist can decide it is justified to call someone a race traitor, well, anything is possible. 

The direction we are heading seems astonishing to me and other minority ethnic academics like Dr. Melissa Derby. In an excellent article on the late Martin Luther King, she reminds us of one of his most seminal insights. King said, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools”. It’s high time we heeded that advice.

The header image for this article was taken from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/KflQqYcFknk).

The post It’s time to speak up against the New Racists appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, there are a range of well-intentioned efforts to incorporate Mātauranga Māori into science. These include a pilot programme in NCEA science subjects, such as biology and chemistry, where the aspiration is to incorporate concepts from mātauranga Māori on an equal footing with science. Likewise, there are efforts to incorporate mātauranga Māori into the science curricula at some universities, and perhaps even to incorporate it into science-policy discussions.

For some, these efforts are a welcome move, while others view them as cause for concern. I wish to contribute an Asian scientific perspective on this discussion. In this article, I wish to contribute an Asian scientific perspective on this discussion.

Why do we need an Asian perspective? At the 2018 census, the diverse Asian diaspora of New Zealand made up 15.1% of the population, with about a quarter of Asians under 19, and thus of school age. Education matters to Asians as much as to other ethnicities, so conversations on national curriculum changes should include us. To that end, I believe we have a helpful perspective to offer on the current conversation. As a part-Japanese New Zealander, I offer mine in good faith: the science and education systems are relevant to us all.

First, some statistics. Universities in Asia are emerging as among the world’s best places to do science. One can get an idea of this by looking at the 2021 QS World University Rankings. In Engineering and Technology, eight of 25 of the top ranked universities are in Asia. For subjects central to our NCEA science curriculum, Asian universities are in the mix: 2/25 in Biological Sciences, 5/25 in Physics and Astronomy, with an impressive nine Asian universities in the top 25 for Chemistry. The countries represented include Singapore, China, Japan and Korea. The remainder of the lists are made up of US and European institutions. Australia and New Zealand universities are all outside the top 25 for these subjects. While one can quibble about the value of such rankings, it is clear that Asian countries are now among the very best in the world when it comes to science. While science practiced in the West has made major advances, as these statistics show, it is now global in nature and in reach. Clearly, we have come a long way.

How long a way? One side of my heritage stems from one of the most insular countries of the past 500 years, and I want to share part of the story of how we went from isolationism to scientific powerhouse. My culture has concepts that are very similar to many of those in mātauranga Māori that are being considered as part of the pilot NCEA science curriculum: concepts like whakapapa, mauri, and kaitiakitanga are familiar to us. Our traditional culture and religion are polytheistic and animistic, and we have prized traditional knowledge that has now found currency globally. Yet, in recent years our scientists have won Nobel prizes for the invention of blue-light LEDs (think smart phone screens) and lithium-ion batteries (think electric vehicles).

That formerly insular country is Japan, and the origins of modern science was not so much ‘Western’ as Dutch. I first want to relay a famous episode that encapsulates the development of modern science in Japan, and then I will return to the question of how our traditional thinking sits alongside modern science.

We start our journey in 1771 in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) at Kotsugahara (the ‘Plain of Bones’), and the execution of a convicted murderer. Several physicians, including Genpaku Sugita, went to witness the executioner dissecting the body, as was the custom in those days. Their interest in such a gruesome event was to compare knowledge from two cultures. They took with them a traditional Japanese text on anatomy derived from Chinese teachings, and a Dutch book called Ontleedkundige Tafelen, itself a translation from a book originally published in German.

The significance of this is that, at this time, and until the Americans forced Japan to open her borders in 1853, Japan was a closed country. The only westerners allowed into Japan were the Dutch, but even they were barely allowed to enter: The Dutch East India Company was allowed to trade, but was restricted to the island of Dejima, outside of Nagasaki. It was only from 1720 that foreign books were allowed into the country.

At the execution, what Sugita and his colleagues found was that the illustrations in the Dutch text were the more accurate by far, and they resolved there and then to translate it into Japanese. The resulting book, Kaitai Shinsho (A New Book on Anatomy), was published in 1774. It became the standard text on anatomy, displacing the earlier texts derived from Chinese knowledge. In doing so, Sugita and colleagues actively overturned the orthodoxy of the time, where physicians would keep their knowledge secret, teaching it only to their disciples. This endeavour is remembered in a memorial in Tokyo, with an inscription that reads,

“the source of rangaku [Dutch studies] sprang from here and served to revitalise the progress of modern Japanese science”.

Japan recognises the importance of the painstaking work that Sugita and his collaborators undertook in bringing ‘western’ scientific knowledge into its own sphere.

This episode indicates several of the most wonderful things about science. First, it can and should be shared, for the betterment of humanity. Second, it shows that any concept can be translated into any language. This is of course not trivial: Sugita documented the arduous challenge that he and his coauthors faced in his book, Rangaku Koto Hajime (The Beginning of Dutch Learning). This included needing to understand Dutch words that did not have a Japanese equivalent, and create those equivalents. Sugita’s own words best sum up the scientific mindset, when confronted with new knowledge:

“On our way home, [we] talked about the strong impression this made on us. We were ashamed of having lived so far in such a complete ignorance and served our lords day after day as physicians without the slightest idea of the true configuration of the body, whereas this should have been considered the foundation of our art”.

Sugita is known for another episode where he found he was wrong about a contemporary’s work in obstetrics. Gen’etsu Kagawa’s work Sanron, published in 1765, described his observation that a developing foetus is positioned head-down in the mother’s womb. In Kaitai Shinsho Sugita expressed skepticism about this theory, which was not documented in the Dutch texts, and was not known from traditional theory. He later discovered that Kagawa’s observations were in fact correct, and openly admitted his error. This is another wonderful thing about science. Unfortunately not all scientists are as honourable as Sugita, but over time this process means science tends to correct errors and zero in on the truth.

So how has Japan reconciled traditional thinking and modern thinking? Did it develop a different form of science? This question was raised by one of our greatest writers, Junichiro Tanizaki, in a wonderful essay, In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows, 1933), in which he criticises modern gaudiness and praises Japanese aesthetics, which favour darkness and shadow, inviting mysticism and imagination.

He muses,

“Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art – would they not have suited our national temper better than they do? In fact our conception of physics itself, and even the principles of chemistry, would probably differ from that of Westerners; and the facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms might well have presented themselves in different form.”

The answer from each and every instance of adoption of science across Asia, including in Japan itself, is a resounding no. Physics and chemistry are not social or aesthetic constructs; they are concerned with phenomena that exist even if our species does not. To his credit, Tanizaki, who was known to have a penchant for irony, goes on to say,

“Of course I am only indulging in idle speculation; of scientific matters I know nothing.”

But his question is worth exploring a little further, not least because of the similarities in our traditional thinking and Māori traditional knowledge. Let me tell you about a few examples that I hope shed some light on how our cultural and scientific worlds interact, but where it is also clear that they give each other space.

The first example is a wonderful little monument to microbiology at Manshu-in Monzeki, a temple in Kyoto. On the grounds is kinzuka (‘microbe mound’), which carries an inscription by Kinichiro Sakaguchi, who invented the Sakaguchi flask used for microbial culturing. The inscription reads,

To the innumerable souls of microbes
Who have dedicated and sacrificed
For the existence of humans,
We pay our deepest respect.
Here we hold a memorial service
For their soul’s rest and condolence,
Building a microbe mound.

My collaborators in Kyoto took me to Manshu-in, and I was told that all the members of the lab are expected to visit it. This offers a moment of calm and an opportunity for reflection, and is something quite unique to Japan. As an aside, when we first set up our collaboration, we also went to pray for the success of the collaboration. This resulted in a somewhat comical exchange between the lab head and one of the postdocs: the postdoc on the project refused to pray at a Buddhist temple as he is Christian! However, what is important about this story is that, by contrast, stepping inside the laboratory, one could be anywhere in the world: the methods are clearly described and standard, the equipment recognisable. And when we swap protocols, they can be—and indeed are—readily applied in either lab, albeit with a little translation required at times!

Japanese culture is unique, important, and has protocol and etiquette, but it is separate from the details of how to grow microbes or how to extract DNA from them; these things are independent of human culture.

That said, Japanese research environments often hold history as important. The microbiology lab that I am currently collaborating with has a very long history, being established in the 15th year of the Taisho era (1926). Thus, the current head, Professor Ogawa Jun, is the latest in a line of lab heads. He has on his office wall photographs of his predecessors. I can well imagine these pictures invoke a mix of emotions: one must feel pride, a weight of expectation, not to mention humility.

Some areas of their research are informed by local interest and traditional arts. One particularly interesting case for me was learning about the mechanistic basis of Aizome (traditional indigo dyeing). The process of Aizome involves extracting indigo dye by a long ~100 day oxidative fermentation of the leaves of the Japanese indigo plant, then microbial reduction under alkaline conditions, yielding leuco-indigo, which is then able to be used for dyeing cloth. The traditional process is fascinating in itself, and no artisan needs a scientist’s insights to improve their craft. However, the scientific part is understanding precisely how it is that the extraction process works. And what science can offer from that knowledge is astonishing. My colleagues have taken this well beyond just the study of how a traditional process works: they have built on this knowledge and constructed a microbial fuel cell from it. That is mind-blowing, and something only science can do.

I have touched on religion, but I want to end by diving straight in the deep end. There are times where science has come into conflict with other parts of human knowledge. For instance, Japanese are familar with the stories in the Kojiki (A Record of Ancient Matters), our oldest written text, dating to 711CE. It describes the genealogy of the Imperial family, and provides written accounts of oral tradition, stories, mythology and our kami (gods). It includes the claim that the Emperor’s genealogy is divine – tracing back to Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, and it details the creation stories of the Japanese archipelago. As a scientist, I understand that, if held up to the light of modern genetics, linguistics, or geology, these stories, if taken literally, are absolute nonsense. The science-informed views of the origins of the Japanese people and the lands they inhabit have superceded these as they are are based in fact. But that does not detract from the central place of these stories in Japanese culture, history and heritage. They are treasures, and they should not be conflated with science.

I can think of no better embodiment of how our national religion, Shinto, sits alongside science than to tell you a little about Emperor Akihito, who abdicated in 2019, ending the Heisei era, with his son’s ascent to the throne marking the beginning of the Reiwa era. Ancient texts are consulted in choosing an appropriate name for the new era. Although the head of our indigenous religion that states he descends from the Sun Goddess, Emperor Akihito, remarkably, is a keen ichthyologist (fish biologist), who has published numerous papers, in both Japanese and English-language scientific journals. In an article from the journal Science, where he discusses the early development of science in Japan, he writes,

“Since science pursues truth and scientific methodology puts truth to the use of mankind, it is desirable that such studies be pursued through cooperation that transcends national and other boundaries.”

It is worth reminding oneself that Emperor Akihito was a child when Tokyo was firebombed, when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, and when his father, Emperor Hirohito, was forced to recant his status as akitsumigami (a god in manifestation). It is also worth noting that Hirohito himself was also a marine biologist, having published on hydrozoans (small marine animals), and even had a marine biology laboratory at the Imperial Palace! Both have boycotted the Yasukuni shrine where war criminals have been buried, and both espouse science, despite each having been head of a religion that places them as gods among men.

This to me is the embodiment of what Stephen Jay Gould called non-overlapping magisteria, which he coined in response to Pope John Paul II stating, in a document called, ‘Truth Cannot Contradict Truth’ on the Catholic Church agreeing that the theory of evolution and Catholic doctrine on the soul entering the body were both correct. Gould argued that religion and science are non-overlapping, one dealing with facts and theories, the other with moral meaning and value, but they do nevertheless “bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border”.

I think that this is worth considering in national discussions of the interface between mātauranga Māori and science, and which parts of mātauranga belong in science teaching versus other subjects. Some parts are problematic to include in science, such as arguing for mauri in the vitalistic sense (that there is an identifiable life force), but we can of course understand the values inherent in such a term. This is true in Japanese, where the equivalent to mauri is, ki, a word that is peppered through everyday language. For instance, when we say ‘ki o tsukete’ (take care) the literal translation would be, ‘switch on your mauri’! In as much as the Japanese Imperial family descend from kami and Māori whakapapa to atua, these ideas fall outside of science. Kami don’t figure in the marine biological studies of our two past Emperors, despite their own supposed genealogical descent from kami. Japanese traditional aesthetics, as Tanizaki praises, finds beauty in shadows and what ghosts might be hidden there, but there is also beauty in what Richard Dawkins called ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’, and the illumination that science sheds on the world. They occupy different magisteria.

This point is well understood by some of the most eminent Māori thinkers. Here for example is Sir Mason Durie’s take on the relationship:

“You can’t understand science through the tools of Mātauranga Māori, and you can’t understand Mātauranga Māori through the tools of science. They’re different bodies of knowledge, and if you try to see one through the eyes of the other you mess up.”

We need to explore the interdigitating border between Mātauranga Māori and science. Some parts of the former may be compatible with the latter (as with the Aizome-inspired microbial fuel cell!), while others might be better dealt with through the lens of non-overlapping magisteria. We must also recognise the value of scientific progress, which is the legacy of Sugita Genpaku. His embrace of Dutch studies sealed the fate of much of traditional Japanese medicine – in the service of improving it.

Further reading

Akihito (1992) Early cultivators of science in Japan. Science 258:578-580.

Gould (1997) Non overlapping magisteria. Natural History 106: 16-22.

Kikuchi et al. (2021) Indigo-Mediated Semi-Microbial Biofuel Cell Using an Indigo-Dye Fermenting Suspension. Catalysts 11(9):1080.

Rauika Māngai. (2020). A Guide to Vision Mātauranga: Lessons from Māori Voices in the New Zealand Science Sector.

Sakula (1985) Kaitai Shinsho: the historic Japanese translation of a Dutch anatomical text. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78:582-587.

Tanizaki (1933) In praise of shadows.

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