In this commentary, I examine early responses to Thomas Kuhn's ideas in Japan and show how Kuhn's ideas stimulated discussion in social studies of science in the 1970s and 1980s and their subsequent significance. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962: second edition, 1970) was introduced into Japanese-language scholarship in the early 1970s. Two things set the stage for Japan's reception of Kuhn's ideas. One was political and cultural upheaval after the revolutionary year of 1968. For a decade or so thereafter, there were intellectual and cultural trends strongly opposed to science. The other factor was the Japanese tradition of Marxist or Marxism-inspired social studies of science. In 1932 and 1934, two Japanese versions of Nikolai I. Bukharin's edited volume Science at the Crossroads, which included Boris Hessen's work, had appeared. After World War II. the works of John D. Bernal and Edgar Zilsel were translated into Japanese (Beral 1951; Zilsel 1967). The principal theoretical tenet of the school that arose out of these writings in Japan was, very roughly, a kind of social determinism of science, the idea that science as a superstructure could be determined by its social base, or at least understood as a part of social phenomena.
