RIKEN (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research)

RIKEN was established in 1917 as Japan's first comprehensive research institution in the natural sciences, founded as a private foundation at Komagome, Tokyo. The First World War had exposed Japan's dependence on Western chemical and physical industries; the chemist Takamine Jōkichi called for a national research institute, and the industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi and others brought it into being with an imperial grant, state subsidies and private donations. Ōkōchi Masatoshi became its third director in 1921 and from 1922 introduced the chief-scientist system, giving laboratory heads wide autonomy over topics, staff and budgets; Suzuki Umetarō, Nagaoka Hantarō and Honda Kōtarō all had laboratories there, and it was called a "paradise for scientists".

Ōkōchi also commercialised research, building the Riken industrial group (Riken Konzern) on products such as vitamin preparations, piston rings and photosensitive paper; at its peak it comprised 63 companies and 121 factories, whose profits were ploughed back into basic research. The laboratory of physicist Yoshio Nishina, opened in 1931, was the centre of Japanese nuclear physics and cosmic-ray research; it completed Japan's first cyclotron in 1937 and a large cyclotron around 1943, and Tomonaga Shin'ichirō was among those who worked there.

During World War II, it conducted research in nuclear physics (the Ni-Go project), radar, explosives, and other military-relevant fields, many laboratories working under Army and Navy contracts, while the industrial group turned to munitions. In 1941 the Army's Aviation Technology Research Institute asked Nishina to study the feasibility of a uranium bomb, and from 1943 the Ni-Go project sought to separate uranium-235 by thermal diffusion. Its scale, uranium supply and electric power were all very limited, and the building housing the separator burned in the Tokyo air raids of April 1945; the project produced nothing usable as a weapon. After Hiroshima was bombed Nishina reached the city on August 8 and confirmed that the weapon had been an atomic bomb. RIKEN was thus a cornerstone of Japan's wartime scientific effort.

After the surrender GHQ banned nuclear research and in November 1945 dismantled RIKEN's cyclotrons and dumped them in Tokyo Bay, an act criticised by American scientists as well. In 1946 RIKEN and its industrial group were dissolved under the zaibatsu dissolution programme; it restarted in 1948 as a company, Kagaku Kenkyūjo (KAKEN), with Nishina as president. It was re-established under a special law as RIKEN in 1958, moved to Wakō, Saitama, in 1967 and is today a National Research and Development Agency.