Nationality and the Nobel Prize
Those of you paying attention to the news reports about this years Nobel Prize winners may have noticed some irregularities in the headlines.
One sees headlines like this:
- Two Japanese, American win 2008 physics Nobel (Reuters)
- Japanese duo, US scientist win Nobel Physics Prize (AFP)
- Americans Share In Nobel Prize For Chemistry (Ozark First)
But also some headlines like this:
- Japanese trio wins Nobel Prize for physics (Mainichi)
- Japanese scientists win Nobel physics prize (Financial Times)
- Japanese, American Scientists Win Nobel Chemistry Prize (Voice of America)
The difference between the two sets of headlines is that the first set identifies scientists by their country of birth, while the second set recognizes their countries of citizenship/residence. Two of the four Japanese-born Nobel winners were scientists who immigrated to America decades ago and one has since become a U.S. Citizen. Some have singled-out and bashed the Japanese media for their reporting style, but as you can see, it isn’t just the Japanese media that is headlining all the scientists as “Japanese.”
I really can’t blame the Japanese media for celebrating the achievements of a naturalized U.S. citizen and a Japanese citizen that have lived for decades in America. They born in Japan, partially educated in Japan, and I haven’t seen anything about them demanding that the Japanese media not call them “Japanese.” One may have needed to renounce his Japanese passport after becoming an American citizen, but that doesn’t mean the media can’t consider him both Japanese and American (the Japanese media is not hiding the reality that he is a U.S. citizen).
However, I have to say that I was more than a bit annoyed at the comments of one FTV news anchor on this evening’s SUPER NEWS broadcast:
The clip starts with one anchor talking about the two scientists and how they immigrated to America, speculating that it had something to do with the lack of research opportunities in postwar Japan. She wonders if it really is okay to consider their success a Japanese achievement.
The other anchor (Taro Kimura) replies with something about how scientists will go where they can conduct their research, and the science is for the sake of all mankind, not just individual countries. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with the recognition of the scientists as both Japanese and American, but he does have a problem with Roger Tsien, a scientist who shared the Chemistry prize with Osamu Shimomura. Apparently some reporters asked Tsien if he was Chinese, and he responded by telling them that he was American, not Chinese. Kimura implies that Tsien’s denial was a bad thing, perhaps on the assumption that Tsien was born in China and immigrated to America. However, Tsien was born in the United States. It is unreasonable to expect that Tsien, an American citizen born in the United States, should primarily identify himself as Chinese.
Another case of Kimura getting his facts wrong, or an indication of his overall views on ethnicity and nationality?
