Story
To turn the country from imitation to creative power, there is no alternative but to promote research in pure physics and chemistry, and for this we must establish an Institute of Physical and Chemical Research.
Eiichi Shibusawa
So wrote prominent businessman and industrialist Eiichi Shibusawa in a September 1917 article describing the steps leading to the creation of RIKEN.
Just three months earlier, Shibusawa had gathered 120 leading figures from business and government together at Seiyoken, a Western-style restaurant in Tokyo, for a speech by well-known researcher Dr. Jokichi Takamine.
In his speech, Takamine argued that the world was moving away from mechanical industry toward scientific industry, and urged Japan to establish a national research institute for the study of pure science.
Germany had just established the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the United States had the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Carnegie Institution, France had the Institut Pasteur. To compete in this world in movement, Japan had to create a research institute of its own.
RIKEN, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, was formally founded on March 20, 1917 by Shibusawa and leaders from various fields of research, modeled on the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, with an Imperial prince as President, and the mathematician Dairoku Kikuchi as its first Director.
The first years
First RIKEN building in Komagome
After failing to obtain funding from the government, the founders of RIKEN turned to the private sector, where they raised approximately 2 million yen to get the project off the ground.
The new Institute of Physical and Chemical Research was established as a private foundation in the Komagome district of Tokyo but was soon afflicted by the economic turmoil and severe inflation that followed World War I. Unable to solicit funding from the private sector, Japan's first major pure science research institution looked on to a decidedly bleak future.
A paradise for scientists
Things turned around for RIKEN in 1921 with the appointment of its third director, Masatoshi Okochi. Only 42 years of age at the time, Okochi had a strong sense of vision and determination. He set out to completely transform the underlying structure of RIKEN and erect in its place an institution like none other in Japan.
In 1922, just a year after taking on his new position, Okochi abolished the Physics and Chemistry Divisions that had existed previously in RIKEN, and introduced a radically different system in its place. In the new system, which exists to this day at RIKEN, each independent laboratory was directed by a Chief Scientist who was given considerable autonomy to manage research topics, personnel and budget.
The atmosphere which resulted from this structural change was described by Shinichiro Tomonaga, Nobel prize-winner in physics, as a "paradise for scientists". Tomonaga was a member of the Nishina Laboratory (now Nishina Center), famous for boldly venturing into new areas of unexplored science.
With funding secured through government and an increasing number of subsidiary companies, RIKEN grew steadily through the 1930s and early 1940s, nurturing in the process a new generation of young Japanese scientists.
WWII
Nishina facing US soldiers
On December 8, 1941, Japan hurtled into the Pacific war with the attack on Pearl Harbor. In April of the same year, the Japanese army’s air force had requested Masatoshi Okochi to being a project to build an atomic bomb. Yoshio Nishina’s lab, the Mecca of nuclear physics in Japan, was entrusted with the enrichment of uranium for the project.
But American air raids in April 1945 destroyed two-thirds of RIKEN’s buildings and facilities, including Nishina’s apparatus for enriching uranium, putting an end the project.
In August 15,1945, the war ended. In September 1945, the US army started investigating into Japan’s atomic bomb program and decided to destroy the two cyclotrons Nishina had spent 10 years building and dumped them into Tokyo bay.
Collapse and rebirth
The end of World War II marked a sudden and devastating end to an era of rapid expansion at RIKEN. In 1948, Masatoshi Okochi was arrested as a suspected war criminal. RIKEN was saved from completely closing its doors largely thanks to the support of one American scientist, Harry C. Kelly, and his friendship with new RIKEN director Yoshio Nishina.
RIKEN reopened under the name KAKEN in 1948 and changed back to RIKEN again in 1958, when with its new status as a public corporation, RIKEN was able to return to the forefront of Japanese science and technology.
RIKEN's new location
Opening ceremony at Wako
RIKEN relocated in 1967 to a 2.34 km2 plot of state-owned land in Wako, in the outskirts of Tokyo, marking the start of a new era in Japanese science.
With its new headquarters secured, RIKEN moved to establish satellite institutions at other locations in Japan.
Modeled on the Max Planck Society in Germany, the satellite institutions were to be located across the country, each focusing on specific fields of research. Tsukuba Institute, opened in October 1984 to promote gene research, was the first of these satellites. More followed in quick succession: at Sendai, Nagoya, Harima, Yokohama and Kobe, and overseas at RAL in the United Kingdom, and BNL at MIT in the United States.
The satellite institutional structure that RIKEN has today stands out in comparison to the "small science" of its postwar period, when the majority of government's science budget was funneled toward the big projects of atomic energy and space exploration. From a long and proud tradition of creative small science projects, RIKEN launched itself into big science, with projects including SPring-8 and XFEL at Harima Institute and the Next Generation Supercomputer in Tokyo. Thanks to the satellite system, RIKEN today conducts research across all fields of science, from physics and chemistry to engineering and life sciences, and from basic research to practical applications.
The Noyori Initiatives
In October 2003, nobel laureate Ryoji Noyori assumed the presidency of RIKEN just as the institution was reorganized as an independent administrative institution under the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
President Noyori's first move was to propose a set of initiatives aimed at fulfilling RIKEN's mandate to "conduct research in all fields of science and technology, and to disseminate the results of that research." These initiatives are: (1) to boost the visibility of RIKEN, both domestically and internationally; (2) to maintain RIKEN's outstanding record of achievement in science and technology; and to strive toward a RIKEN that (3) motivates its researchers, (4) is useful to the world, and (5) contributes to culture.
The Noyori Initiatives are part of an overall process of internationalization at RIKEN, as the institute increasingly orients itself toward the global stage. "The biggest issue in the 21st century will be the co-existence of civilizations and cultures," President Noyori has said. "Right-minded science and technology are at the core of civilization and are a source of national strength." With a growing set of collaborative projects spanning the globe, RIKEN finds itself today in the midst of this meeting of civilizations and cultures.