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Silent invasion: Imanishi’s primatology and cultural bias in science

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. In the fall of 1998, I visited China and Japan for several months on a scholarship provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). During this time, I spoke with many different primatologists and other academics both at my home base, Kyoto, and throughout Japan, from the north to the south. This included a discussion with the late Jun’ichiro Itani, who offered me a firsthand glimpse of Imanishi’s early ideas and their reception both in Japan and in the West. It also included a visit to Koshima and discussions with Satsue Mito, who from the start assisted the studies of potato-washing on the island. The reader is referred to de Waal (2001), for a more comprehensive account of my impressions of Japanese science and the connections and differences to the Western approach.

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Acknowledgements

This essay could not have been written without my Japanese colleagues during my pleasant stay in their country. I am immensely grateful to Toshisada Nishida and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, who invited me to Kyoto in 1998 and 2002, respectively, and to the late Jun’ichiro Itani, Pamela Asquith, Toshikazu Hasegawa, Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, Michael Huffman, Suehisa Kuroda, Satsue Mito, Osamu Sakura, Hideko Takeshita, Kunio Watanabe, Soshichi Uchii, and many other colleagues for helpful discussions. I also thank three anonymous referees of this journal for constructive comments and supplemental references to the literature.

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  1. Living Links, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA

    Frans B. M. de Waal

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Correspondence to Frans B. M. de Waal.

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The first Imanishi-Itani Memorial Lecture of Primatology, Kyoto, 18 February 2002

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de Waal, F.B.M. Silent invasion: Imanishi’s primatology and cultural bias in science. Anim Cogn 6, 293–299 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0197-4

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