I've previously praised Neil Postman's landmark book, "Amusing Ourselves To Death", and I'm currently reading his follow-up, "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology."  Note: these were written respectively in 1985 and 1992 so while they continue to pack an insightful punch regarding humans and technology, they obviously couldn't have fully anticipated the iPhone, the internet, and social media. 

There's an interesting passage in the chapter related to "Invisible Technologies". It concerns the Japanese language and science. Given the importance of these subjects in "The Fire Agent", I wanted to share:

Susumu Tonegawa, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Medicine, was quoted in the newspaper Yomiuri as saying that the Japanese language does not foster clarity or effective understanding in scientific research. Addressing his countrymen from his post as a professor at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he said, "We should consider changing our thinking process in the field of science by trying to reason in English." It should be noted that he was not saying that English was better than Japanese; only that English is better than Japanese for the purposes of scientific research, which is a way of saying that English (and other Western languages) have a particular ideological bias that Japanese does not. We call that ideological bias "the scientific outlook." ...To reason in Japanese is apparently not the same thing as to reason in English or Italian or German.  

I wonder, in DB's research did he ever encounter this viewpoint? And if Tonegawa's assessment is correct, was the Japanese war machine hampered technologically, as compared to its German ally and American/British adversaries?

Peter T.