Japan’s most dangerous delicacy is getting harder to prepare safely as warming seas push different pufferfish species into the same waters, where they are inbreeding to produce hybrids whose lethal toxins are not yet fully understood.
Fugu – the collective Japanese name for several species of edible pufferfish – is prized as much for the danger surrounding its preparation as for its subtle flavour.
Many species contain tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin with no known antidote that can cause paralysis, respiratory failure and death.
Since 1958, anyone wishing to prepare pufferfish for public consumption has had to obtain a licence first, a process that takes at least two years and defeats roughly two-thirds of those who attempt it.
Chefs learn to strip out the fish’s liver, ovaries, eyes and skin – tissues where the poison concentrates – with the precision of a brain surgeon and the nerve of a bomb-disposal technician.
But that hard-won expertise is now being undermined by climate-induced interbreeding, as experts say Japan’s coastal waters are heating up at roughly twice the global average rate.
Spotted pufferfish, once largely confined to the Sea of Japan, have spent the past decade steadily pushing northward in search of cooler currents. Some slipped through the Tsugaru Strait – the channel separating Honshu from far northern Hokkaido – where they have met and mated with the region’s native pufferfish species.
The resulting hybrids now make up as much as 40 per cent of local catches, according to a recent study of fish caught off Fukushima and Ibaraki prefectures.
“We started seeing these spotted fugu on the Pacific coast in 2012 as temperatures in the Sea of Japan became too high for them,” said Professor Hiroshi Takahashi of the National Fisheries University in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi prefecture.
Temperatures in the waters there were “among the fastest rising anywhere in the world”, he told This Week in Asia, adding that the changes in pufferfish had been happening just as fast.
Some spotted pufferfish had ventured down the east coast as far south as Tokyo Bay, Takahashi said, only to be driven north again as those waters also warmed.
The trouble is not that hybrids are more toxic than their ancestors, it is that nobody yet knows how interbreeding has affected the distribution of toxins.
Each species of pufferfish stores tetrodotoxin in a different combination of organs and Japan’s health ministry has not yet been able to establish which parts of the new hybrids are safe to eat and which are not.
Until it does, the government has banned the sale or consumption of hybrid fugu– but this ban is almost impossible to enforce.
“They are very hard to identify,” said Takahashi, whose team has developed a DNA test capable of distinguishing hybrid fish and hopes to make the technology commercially available to fishermen who currently have no reliable way of screening their catch.
None of this is likely to diminish fugu’s deadly mystique. The dish has been eaten in Japan for centuries, enjoyed despite – or because of – the risks involved.
Every year, new tales emerge of amateur anglers preparing the fish to eat against the advice of anxious relatives and not surviving the attempt.
Diners speak of a faint numbness in the lips as evidence of a narrow escape and the emperor of Japan is barred from eating fugu altogether, lest even a licensed chef makes a mistake.
Urban legend holds that chefs who do poison a customer are honour-bound to end their own life, with their own knife, in atonement – though this is a myth.
For their part, Japaneserestaurateurs are, perhaps unsurprisingly, keen to play down the risks.
A spokeswoman for Miyawaki Fugu Club, an upscale restaurant in Tokyo’s Ginza district, said its chef works exclusively with farmed tiger pufferfish from a long-established supplier, which she insisted were “completely safe”.
“What happens to marine ecosystems is one of the hot-button issues of the day, particularly in Japan, because the waters here are warming at twice the global average rate,” he said.
During fieldwork off the Izu peninsula, south of Tokyo, three years ago, local fishermen told him that they had lost virtually their entire kelp crop and that the abalone once abundant in those waters had vanished.
In their place, they said they were seeing far more sea turtles, as well as large schools of brightly coloured fusiliers – the prefecturalfish of Okinawa, some 1,400km (870 miles) to the south.
“Last year, our summer in Okinawa was 30 days longer than average, and we had 120 days when the water temperature was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit),” Reimer said.
He warns that the picture is not simply one of fish and other marine life swimming steadily north in search of more comfortable temperatures, however.
Global warming is also destabilising weather patterns, making them less predictable. Waters off Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, that might otherwise suit certain species are increasingly prone to temperature swings that could make them unsuitable after all.
Even so, the broader direction is unmistakable. Kyushu’s waters have seen a marked rise in shark sightings in recent years, including large tiger sharks – one more sign of the changes occurring beneath the surface of Japan’s seas.
Although significant work remains to harness fusion energy, pursuing the development and deployment of IFE is crucial for the nation’s energy security, enabling the United States to shape implementation worldwide, avoid technological surprises from adversaries, and influence technical leadership in other energy-intensive technologies such as AI, machine learning (ML), and supercomputing.
IFE research stretches back to the early days of Lawrence Livermore, and today the Laboratory is fostering the overall fusion ecosystem. Livermore’s unique capabilities, expertise, and connections will be critical to laying the technical, logistical, and legal groundwork to make IFE possible. “IFE is a grand scientific and engineering challenge, something that is so incredibly difficult and high-risk and takes enormous expertise,” says Tammy Ma, Livermore’s IFE Institutional Initiative lead. “This challenge makes it the right kind of problem for national laboratories to pursue.”
This artist’s rendering shows the concept for an inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plant design, with a cutaway to show the plant’s target chamber in the center. Livermore researchers are laying the groundwork for private fusion companies to build similar designs. (Illustration by Eric Smith.)
Designing for Viability
NIF is the only facility to date to demonstrate the ignition and burning plasma conditions that are prerequisites for IFE, but it is an experimental facility for stockpile stewardship research, not a power plant. To be commercially viable and produce the energy to offset costs and meet demands (baseload power), IFE plants will need to generate more than 30 times the energy they deliver to the fusion target on every shot while firing 10 or more shots per second, compared to NIF’s rate of one or two shots per day.
The Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) study, conducted between 2008 and 2013, aimed to build directly on technology developed for NIF to achieve IFE and took a systematic approach to this requirement by developing the Integrated Process Model (IPM). (See S&TR, April/May 2009 [archived PDF], pp. 6-15.)
IPM is a technoeconomic model of an IFE power plant with detailed technical and cost breakdowns and interdependencies of key systems and subsystems. “The work done under LIFE was fantastic,” says Ma. “IPM lays out engineering and physics requirements for the entire system to test out different scenarios and see the impact. Now, we not only get to expand on all that but also leverage 15 years of new data from NIF, better codes, and high-performance computing (HPC), as well as new work in AI, ML, advanced manufacturing, diagnostics, and nonproliferation across the Laboratory.”
IPM describes an IFE power plant that requires a solid-state laser driver system to “pump” lasers with optical energy using laser diodes instead of flashlamps as at NIF. The plant will also need to fabricate and fill target capsules onsite and send them into its target chamber at a high enough frequency to produce baseload power. “We will have to repeatedly inject targets into the chamber, so the targets must be able to withstand and survive that process,” explains Ma. “Then, the lasers will track the moving targets, and when one gets to the center of the chamber, they would fire on the centered target, repeating 10 to 20 times per second.”
The facility would convert fusion energy into heat and then electricity via steam turbines, sending most of the electricity to the power grid and recycling the rest to power operations on subsequent shots. Neutrons from the reaction would produce tritium needed for the DT fuel by bombarding lithium isotopes in a “breeding blanket” material lining its target chamber. By closing both the power and fuel cycles, IFE plants are expected to be self-sustaining.
Thanks in part to IFE STARFIRE (IFE Science and Technology Accelerated Research for Fusion Innovation and Reactor Engineering), a Department of Energy (DOE)-funded multi-institutional IFE research and development hub, researchers across the Laboratory are working to meet the new system’s demands. IPM can help identify key challenges, test the viability of new designs, and direct future research. “Many technical models and cost models exist for IFE, but very few, if any, pair systems and cost models together at the same depth as IPM,” says Mackenzie Nelson, a technoeconomic systems analyst in the Computational Engineering Division. “This type of tool offers such an advantage because we can assess design choices from both a technical and economic standpoint and create blueprints for what an IFE plant could look like.”
(left to right) Livermore researchers Bassem El Dasher, Claudio Santiago, and Mackenzie Nelson discuss a 3D model of a proposed IFE power plant design alongside the Integrated Process Model (IPM). IPM has more than 270 potential user inputs that researchers and collaborators can use to assess different IFE design choices to see the technical and cost impact on the entire design.
Operational Demands
NIF’s target capsules are extremely precise, fragile, and can take weeks to fabricate, fill, and position. Researchers are trying to reconcile that factor with the estimated demand of more than 800,000 capsules per day produced at less than $0.50 each to achieve IFE plant viability. To do this, they are examining optimal target designs for IFE and exploring advanced manufacturing methods such as microfluidics, volumetric additive manufacturing, and two-photon polymerization. (See S&TR, April/May 2025 [archived PDF], pp. 16-19.) Additional projects involve developing diagnostic instruments that can collect, analyze, and combine data with other diagnostics at the 10 to 20 shot per second frequency and use it to improve lasers in real time.
Nuclear fissionreactors are regulated through international agreements and export control rules, and the independent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verifies that nuclear material and facilities are only being used for peaceful purposes. Neither treaties nor the IAEA address fusion energy, and no consensus has been reached on whether fusion energy systems need an international verification program. Verification methods for safeguarding tritium are also far less developed than for plutonium and uranium and focus more on contamination and transfers than analytical accounting for discrepancies. The precise scale of allowable tritium unaccounted for without posing proliferation risk is also unclear.
Fusion systems can be designed for proliferation resistance, but not having an existing design remains a challenge.
International security analyst Anne-Marie Riitsaar and her colleagues are exploring these complexities and starting conversations with international fusion experts and private industry to raise awareness. Riitsaar also plans to collaborate with the IPM team to map tritium diversion vulnerabilities and identify high-risk points where researchers could incorporate surveillance methods into plant designs to detect and prevent potential misuse. “People sometimes ask me why I’m thinking about fusion energyregulations and proliferation risks at this point, but it’s not too early,” says Riitsaar. “Reaching a multinational consensus on regulating sensitive technologies takes considerable time and effort.”
The National Ignition Facility is an experimental facility and not a power plant, so a commercial IFE plant design has vastly different requirements—many of which are being studied by Livermore researchers and their collaborators.
The Laser Driven Fusion Integration Research and Science Test Facility (LD-FIRST) is a proposed blueprint for a proof-of-concept IFE facility that will test all the key IFE subsystems in an integrated fashion. A public-private partnership will likely be necessary to build the facility and will help the IFE community address the main subset of risks and the technological challenges of building a commercial plant.
Converging on a Solution
The team seeks to make IPM as accurate and comprehensive as possible by meeting with subject matter experts across the Laboratory to incorporate the latest research. “We’re trying to evolve the model so it has the same level of high detail across every single functional area to tell us where we can focus research and help us find optimized solutions that we could propose to industry,” says Nelson.
Computer scientist Claudio Santiago and his colleagues also modernized IPM by porting its framework from Microsoft Excel to Python in December 2024, making it compatible with AI, ML, design optimization, and HPC to further inform designs. “Once we think about all the forcing functions such as minimum shot yield and materials requirements pinning us in from every direction, we end up with an optimized solution space. As we sharpen the pencil more with these tools, that optimized solution box gets smaller until eventually we’ve converged on a point design,” says IFE lead systems engineer Justin Galbraith. Galbraith and his team’s point design is called the Laser Driven Fusion Integration Research and Science Test Facility, or LD-FIRST, a proof-of-concept physics demonstration facility for IFE. “That point design, we anticipate, will serve as the foundation for a future public-private partnership that would facilitate building and realizing a physical facility to focus the IFE community in pursuit of fusion power on the grid,” says Galbraith.
Ma chaired DOE’s “Basic Research Needs for IFE” workshop and report in 2022 and co-chairs the subcommittee providing recommendations on the nation’s fusion activities through DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. She and her team travel often to Washington, D.C., working with DOE and legislators to expand fusion energyresearch and advocacy in the nation. Livermore also leads a “Collaboratory” with other DOEnational laboratories to connect research project leads and facilitate public-private partnerships. The Collaboratory has hosted multiple events with industry, and the Laboratory has partnered with three private companies who aim to design pilot IFE plants.
Meanwhile, Galbraith and other IFE leaders have served as technical advisors for engineering design teams at Texas A&M University and given them IFE-relevant problems to solve, including advanced chamber and blanket design. Galbraith is working with Nelson to develop the IFE plant design portion of a high-energy-density science summer school program, which Nelson is leading in 2025 at the University of California at San Diego, and they have developed IFE curriculum that has been deployed at six universities starting in spring 2025. “We’re hoping we can get a group of students really excited about fusion and start to build up the next generation of engineers and scientists that will make fusion a reality,” says Galbraith. The team has led IFE strategic planning exercises at the Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore will stand up a new fusion institute—named “LIFT,” for Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology—a research and development center that will coordinate and centralize institutional fusion energyresearch.
Harnessing IFE will be a massive undertaking, but Livermore’s broad and deep expertise, facilities, and capabilities put the Laboratory in a unique position to lead and play an impactful role. “If we can set it up correctly, IFE will be a big piece of the Laboratory’s long-term vision,” says Ma. “IFE plays off of our history and all of our strengths, and it is critical for long-term national security.”
When objects interact with light in particular ways — by absorbing or reflecting it — we see in color. A sunset’s orange hues and the ocean’s deep blues inspire artists and dazzle observant admirers. But colors are more than pretty decor; they also play a critical role in life. They attract mates, pollinators and seed-spreaders, and signal danger. And the same color can mean different things to different organisms: A red bird might attract a mate, while a red berry might warn off a hungry human.
For color to communicate meaning, systems to produce it had to evolve, by developing pigments to absorb certain wavelengths of light or structures to reflect them. Organisms also had to produce the machinery to perceive color. When you look out into a forest, you might see lush greenery dappled with yellowish sunlight and pink blooms. But this forest scene would look different if you were a bird or a fly. Color-perception machinery — which include photoreceptors in our eyes that recognize and distinguish light — can differ between species. While humans can’t see ultraviolet light, some birds can. While dogs can’t see red or green, many humans can. Even within species there’s some variation: People who are colorblind have trouble distinguishing some combinations, such as green and red. And many organisms can’t see color at all.
Within one planet, many colorful worlds exist. But how did colors evolve in the first place?
What’s New and Noteworthy
To pinpoint when different kinds of color signals may have evolved, researchers recently reviewed many papers, covering hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history, to bring together information from the fossil record and phylogenetic trees (diagrams that depict evolutionary relationships between species). Their analysis across the tree of life suggested that color signals likely evolved much later than color vision. It’s likely that color vision evolved twice, developing independently in arthropods and fish, between 400 million and 500 million years ago. Then plants started using bright colors to attract pollinators and animals to disperse their seeds, and then animals started using colors to warn off predators and eventually to attract mates.
One of the most common colors that we see in nature is green. However, this isn’t a color signal: It’s a result of photosynthesis. Most plants absorb almost all the photons in the red and blue light spectra but only 90% of the green photons. The remaining 10% are reflected, making the plants appear green to our eyes. But why did they evolve to do this? According to a model, this makes photosynthetic machinery more stable, suggesting that sometimes evolution favors stability over efficiency.
The majority of colors in nature are produced by pigments that absorb or reflect different wavelengths of light. While many plants can produce these pigments on their own, most animals can’t; instead, they acquire pigments from their diet. Some pigments, though, are hard to acquire, so some animals instead rely on nanoscale structures that scatter light in particular ways to create “structural colors.” For example, the shell of the blue-rayed limpet has layers of transparent crystals, each of which diffracts and reflects a sliver of the light spectrum. When the layers grow to a precise thickness, around 100 nanometers, the wavelengths in each layer interact with one another, canceling each other out — except for blue. The result is the appearance of a bright blue limpet shell.
Although previous studies suggest anthropogenic forcing may influence extreme precipitationprobability, few have specifically investigated the human influence on moisture transport. Here, we leverage the 2023 record-breaking summer precipitation in Northern China (NC) to address this gap. Combining station observation with Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) model outputs, we demonstrate that the 2023-like heavy precipitation event was exacerbated by anthropogenic enhanced moisture transport. External forcing increased the probability of extreme southeasterly moisture transport by approximately 1.3 (90% confidence interval: 1.0–1.8) times. Moreover, the total anthropogenic forcing likely increased the probability of similar precipitation events at least 1.7 times (1.0–3.1), with both greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols contributing positively. As greenhouse gases concentrations rise and anthropogenic warming intensifies, the frequency of similar extreme precipitation events in NC is projected to increase further.
The extent of human influence on moisture transport and consequent heavy precipitation remains a critical research question. While anthropogenic contributions to precipitation extremes are increasingly recognized, studies specifically addressing human-induced changes in moisture transport remain limited. The record-breaking summer precipitation in Northern China (NC) during 2023 provides a salient case study. This extreme event was fueled by substantial moisture transport from the southeast into NC, driven by TyphoonsDoksuri and Khanun. Attribution analyses indicate that both greenhouse gas and anthropogenic aerosol emissions likely increased the probability of similar heavy precipitation events and associated moisture transport patterns. Such events are projected to become more frequent with continued anthropogenic warming. These findings demonstrate that human activities significantly influence moisture transport pathways and consequently modulate extreme precipitation occurrence in NC, deepening our understanding of the physical mechanisms underlying these events.
In May, the USadministration proposed budget cuts to NASA, including a more than 50% decrease in funding for the agency’s Earth Science Division (ESD), the mission of which is to gather knowledge about Earth through space-based observation and other tools. The budget cuts proposed for ESD would cancel crucial satellites that observe Earth and its atmosphere, gut USscience and engineering expertise, and potentially lead to the closure of NASA research centers. As former members of the recently dissolved NASA Earth Science Advisory Committee, an all-volunteer, independent body chartered to advise ESD, we warn that these actions would come at a profound cost to US society and scientific leadership.
Following the sequence and structure revolutions, predicting functionally relevant protein structure changes at scale remains an outstanding challenge. We introduce BioEmu, a deep learning system that emulates protein equilibrium ensembles by generating thousands of statistically independent structures per hour on a single GPU. BioEmu integrates over 200 milliseconds of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, static structures and experimental protein stabilities using novel training algorithms. It captures diverse functional motions—including cryptic pocket formation, local unfolding, and domain rearrangements—and predicts relative free energies with 1 kcal/mol accuracy compared to millisecond-scale MD and experimental data. BioEmu provides mechanistic insights by jointly modeling structural ensembles and thermodynamic properties. This approach amortizes the cost of MD and experimental data generation, demonstrating a scalable path toward understanding and designing protein function.
Results from a study combining experiments and simulations could overturn the assumption that amorphous forms of the same compound have the same molecular arrangement. The team behind the work claims to have prepared three amorphous forms of the diureticdrughydrochlorothiazide and determined that they have distinct properties and distinct types of disorder. ‘If polyamorphism is proved in the future to be a universal—or at least not a very rare—phenomenon, then the pharmaceutical industry will need to make screens for polyamorphism and this will also be an opportunity for patenting,’ comments Inês Martins, from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who led the work with Thomas Rades.
Crystallineactive pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) often suffer from poor solubility. A common strategy to circumvent this problem is converting APIs into their amorphous form. This has been demonstrated for various APIs, including hydrochlorothiazide. However, the physical properties of polyamorphs are dependent on how they were prepared. Given there are no straightforward techniques to study how molecules interact and organise themselves in amorphous materials, the area is poorly understood.
‘The problem out of the gate with polyamorphism as a concept is how to tell the difference between a well-defined metastableamorphous structure and an unrelaxed one that simply results from kinetically trapped defects introduced during processing. This is hard to define since the amorphousstructure is statistical in any case,’ comments Simon Billinge, who studies the structure of disordered materials at Columbia University in the US. ‘They process the samples very differently. We know—from our own work—that this results in amorphous phases with very different stabilities against recrystallisation, for example, but is this polyamorphism? On the other hand, they find that the pair distribution functions of each of their “forms” are identical. There is no experimental evidence for a distinct structure. Taken together, the results do little to advance my understanding of polyamorphism.’
The team also says the simulations corroborated its experimental results that polyamorph I can transform into polyamorph II, while the opposite conversion did not take place.
Scientists have gained new insight into why thermal runaway, while rare, could cause a resting battery to overheat and catch fire.
In order to better understand how a resting battery might undergo thermal runaway after fast charging, scientists are using a technique called “operando X-ray microtomography” to measure changes in the state of charge at the particle level inside a lithium-ion battery after it’s been charged.
Their work shows for the first time that it is possible to directly measure current inside a resting battery even when the external current measurement is zero.
Much more work is needed before the findings can be used to develop improved safety protocols.
How likely would an electric vehiclebattery self-combust and explode? The chances of that happening are actually pretty slim: Some analysts say that gasolinevehicles are nearly 30 times more likely to catch fire than electric vehicles. But recent news of EVs catching fire while parked have left many consumers – and researchers – scratching their heads over how these rare events could possibly happen.
“What’s exciting about this work is that Nitash Balsara’s group isn’t just looking at images – They’re using the images to determine how batteries work and change in a time-dependent way. This study is a culmination of many years of work,” said co-author Dilworth Y. Parkinson, staff scientist and deputy for photonscience operations at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS).
The team is also the first to measure ionic currents at the particle level inside the batteryelectrode.
“What happens after fast charging when the battery is at rest is a little mysterious,” Balsara said. But the method used for the new study revealed important clues.
Experiments led by first author Alec S. Ho at the ALS show that when graphite is “fully lithiated” or fully charged, it expands a tiny bit, about a 10% change in volume – and that current in the battery at the particle level could be determined by tracking the local lithiation in the electrode. (Ho recently completed his Ph.D. in the Balsara group at UC Berkeley.)
The researchers also learned that the measured internal currents decreased substantially in about 20 minutes. Much more work is needed before their approach can be used to develop improved safety protocols.
It means that many more qubits, the basic calculating unit, can be joined together than is possible on a single microchip. This will make a more powerful quantum computer possible.
The scaling of qubit numbers from the current level of around 100 qubits to nearer 1 million is central to creating a quantum processor that can make useful calculations.
The significant achievement is based on a technical blueprint for creating a large-scale quantum computer, which was first published in 2017 with funding from EPSRC.
Their development may help solve pressing challenges from drug discovery to energy-efficient fertilizer production. But their impact is expected to sweep across the economy, transforming most sectors and all our lives.
Potential to scale up
Winfried Hensinger, Professor of Quantum Technologies at the University of Sussex and Chief Scientist and co-founder at Universal Quantum said:
The researchers were successful in transporting the qubits using electrical fields with a 99.999993% success rate and a connection rate of 2424 transfers per second. Both numbers are world records.
Dr. Kedar Pandya, Director of Cross-Council Programmes at EPSRC, said:
This significant milestone is evidence of how EPSRC funded science is seeding the commercial future for quantum computing in the UK.
The potential for complex technologies, like quantum, to transform our lives and create economic value widely relies on visionary early-stage investment in academic research.
We deliver that crucial building block and are delighted that the University of Sussex and its spin-out company, Universal Quantum, are demonstrating the strength it supports.
In Karatani’s sharpest departure from conventional wisdom, he locates the origins of philosophy not in Athens, but in the earlier Ionian culture that greatly influenced the so-called “pre-Socratic thinkers” such as Heraclitus and Parmenides. Their ideas centered on the flux of constant change, in which “matter moves itself” without the gods, and the oneness of all being—a philosophical outlook closer to Daoist and Buddhist thought than to Plato’s later metaphysics, which posited that, as Karatani puts it, “the soul rules matter.”
In the political realm, Karatani contrasts the form of self-rule from Ionian times based on free and equal reciprocity among all inhabitants — “isonomia” — with what he calls the “degraded democracy” of Athens that rested on slavery and conquest. He considers the former the better foundation for a just polity.
In a novel twist on classical categorizations, Karatani regards Socrates himself as fitting into the pre-Socratic mold. “If one wants to properly consider the pre-Socratics, one must include Socrates in their number,” he writes. “Socrates was the last person to try to re-institute Ionian thought in politics.”
A Degraded Form of Democracy in Athens
For Karatani, Athenian democracy was debased because it was “constrained by the distinctions between public and private, and spiritual and manual labor,” a duality of existence that Socrates and the pre-Socratics sought to dismantle. As a result, by Karatani’s reading, Socrates was both held in contempt by the “aristocratic faction,” which sought to preserve its privileges built on the labor of others, and condemned to death by a narrow-minded mobocracy for his idiosyncratic insistence on autonomy and liberty in pursuit of truth.
Appalled at Socrates’ fate, Plato blamed democracy for giving birth to demagoguery and tyranny, radically rejecting the idea of rule by the masses and proposing instead a political order governed by philosophers. In Karatani’s reckoning, Plato then “took as his life’s work driving out the Ionian spirit that touched off Athenian democracy”—in short, throwing out the baby with the bathwater but maintaining the disassociations, such as citizen and slave, that follow from the distinction between public and private grounded in an apprehension of reality that separates the spiritual from the material.
In his seminal work, The Structure of World History, Karatani flips Marx’s core tenet that the economic “mode of production” is the substructure of society that determines all else. He postulates instead that it is the ever-shifting “modes of exchange” among capital, the state and nation which together shape the social order.
For Karatani, historically cultivated norms and beliefs about fairness and justice, including universal religions, compel the state to regulate inequality within the mythic commonality of the nation, which sees itself as whole people, tempering the logic of the unfettered market. As he sees it, the siren call of reciprocity and equality has remained deeply resonant throughout the ages, drawing history toward a return to the original ideal of isonomia.
Expanding the Space of Civil Society
Not an armchair philosopher, Karatani has actively promoted a modern form of the kind of reciprocity he saw in ancient Ionian culture, which he calls “associationism.” In practical terms in Japan, this entails the activation of civil society, such as through citizens’ assemblies, that would exercise self-rule from the bottom up.
In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, Karatani famously called for “a society where people demonstrate” that would expand the space of civil society and constrict the collusive power of Japan’s political, bureaucratic and corporate establishment. Like other activists, he blamed this closed system of governance that shuts out the voices of ordinary citizens for fatally mismanaging the nuclear power industry in a country where earthquakes and tsunamis are an ever-present danger.
