Science and technology have come to play increasingly important roles in defining the daily lives and bodies of people across the globe and the cultures and societies within which they live. A techno-scientific project called the human genome project, or more generally "genomics," has been described by some as the most socially transforming science since the Manhattan Project produced the atomic bomb.

"Genomics" refers to the new world that molecular genetic sciences, computer sciences, and their institutional affiliates -- the human genome projects (HGP) in the U.S., Japan and Europe -- have created. (See the Appendix for a brief description of the American and Japanese projects.) This new world includes the scientific projects being conducted across the globe, the transformation of genes into commodities with major investments and high profit expectations by biotechnology companies and venture capitalists, present and potential medical applications, and social, legal, and ethical concerns about the consequences of these technologies.

In addition to dramatically changing the production of knowledge in biology, transnational genomics has begun to transform understandings of life, bodies, disease, health, illness, relatedness, identities, "nature," and "humanness;" as well as the practical handling of affairs surrounding them. These revisions, while they occur across global contexts, do not happen in the same way everywhere.

Japanese science provides a location to study the transnational production of knowledge. The genesis and circulation of genomic science is a multi-directional process, and Japanese scientists and publics are major participants in the production of global genomics. At the same time, they are located within a complex web of relationships that have links to a history of Japan as a country occupied militarily by the United States and maintained until today as an ally and military base in old Cold War politics. Japan also occupies a place in race and gender politics, where it has played the little brother to the American big brother, the feminine to the American masculine (Igarashi 1998, Kondo 1997). These postwar relations are also embedded in a set of Japanese discourses about pre-war Japan's relations with the "West" and specifically "western" technology.

Transnational genomics provides a site to explore the place of culture in science and the place of science in culture in terms of both the production and consumption of techno-scientific knowledge.[1] In this paper, I use two examples to make the following points: First, through the transformation of biology, scientists are re-inventing (or attempting to reinvent) "nature" and "culture," on the one hand, and the "East" and the "West," on the other hand. While some authors in science studies continue to debate the science-society, nature-culture divides, biologists have already crossed these "boundaries" to remake nature and culture, science and society. Although some may not necessarily accomplish exactly what they intend and others do not even know what they intend, biologists do have some power to transform "nature" and materiality, and they have created new notions and technologies that have already changed how people live their lives.[2]

Second, my discussion also addresses debates within (and outside) Japan on "Japanese uniqueness." This debate has taken various forms in twentieth century Japanese history. In the modern era, "Japanese culture" was represented as authentic and pure in danger of violation by "Western" technologies. My examples demonstrate that "modernity" and "tradition" are not simple binaries. The two can exist together, each even creating the grounds for the existence of the other, especially in this period that is often called postmodernity.

Third, in the postmodern era, "Japanese culture" has often been represented as "robotic" by Western media and politicians who viewed Japanese technological successes as threats to the supremacy of "Western modernity." Japanese genomics replays this threat to "Western" dominance in the examples I discuss. Nationalist rhetorics, as articulated in both Japan and the U.S., sit side-by-side with transnational collaborations in genomics.

Fourth, I address the problem of the theoretical language we use to talk about cultural and historical practices and processes. How do we talk about science, culture, and history in ways that do not reduce their complexities, heterogeneities, and dynamisms? In discussing the aims and desires of contemporary Japanese scientists, I explore the ways in which culture and imagination become part of technoscientific and cultural production. In particular, I consider rhetoric which claims that Japanese culture makes Japan particularly attuned to the new biology. I use this account to continue the debate over the analytical reification of culture, either as theoretical tool with which to understand the depredations of modernity, or as the hard and fast product of scientists' and others' discourses.

I continue next with a discussion of discourses on "western" technology and "Japanese" culture in order to contextualize my informants' understandings of "Japan" and transnational genomics. I then present a brief chronicle about the early days of Japanese genomics in order to demonstrate both the nationalism and transnationalism that helped to create both the Japanese and American human genome projects. The final section focuses on the rhetorics of the "East" and the "West" in transnational genomics. I argue that cultural discourses are not an entity autonomous from the material practices and products of science and technology.

Technology, Science, and Culture in Japan

Debates about premodernity, modernity, postmodernity, and nonmodernity in Japan are intertwined with discussions of culture and technology and of Japan's relationship to the "West." The premodern is often represented as a time/space when/where "Japanese culture" reigned supreme. Although technology and science were being imported from the "West" in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the technologies and sciences were said to have been carefully translated through "Japanese culture" so as to make the foreign "native" and in order to allow the "Japanese Self" to merge with these importations. "Japanese culture" is represented as the source of a firm, unshakable self-knowledge, and technology was the foreign, "Western" object that required translation through culture. In this discourse, everything brought from outside becomes translated through a unique "Japanese culture" that differed from other cultures around the globe.

The modern period is often represented as a time when serious conflicts between modernization and "Japanese culture" arose. Debates about importation of western science and ambivalence about modernization began in the late 1800s (Harootunian 1970, Pyle 1969), although the discourse of certainty in the "inviolate" "Japanese culture" continues in the language of Japanese exceptionalism until circa 1910. Then Japanese intellectuals began to criticize intensively the modernization of Japan and its attendant introduction of "Western" knowledge and technologies during the Meiji era (1868-1912, when Japan was transformed into a modern industrialized nation-state). The critics argued that technological progress through measurable improvement of efficient production came at a price; that is, it came to take precedence over unique Japanese aesthetic and cultural forms.

According to Tetsuo Najita, this discourse criticizing modernization for its cultural pollution was embedded in an early twentieth century Japanese discourse of "cosmopolitanism."[3] This cosmopolitan discourse placed Japan in a larger global context, but again within a globalism informed by a notion of fixed nation-states with fixed, bounded cultures.[4] Thus, Japan was represented in this discourse as the only Asian nation to industrialize and therefore as the nation with the responsibility to other Asian nations to "clarify its cultural identity as a nation outside the ordering cultural framework shaped by 'Western' nations" (Najita 1989:10). This discourse was framed by Japanese intellectuals like writer Natsume Soseki, who then argued that technology was overwhelming "Japanese culture" and was producing a pervasive "nervous exhaustion" in place of social well being and happiness. Tanizaki Junichiro argued that the knowledge accompanying "Western" technology -- that of administrative law and modernist institutions, applied science and positivist epistemologies -- produced a form of "self-colonization." The result, in their eyes, was that "Western" technology was transforming "Japanese culture" to produce a crippled personality and a crisis of culture in Japan. This crisis had to be dealt with not only for the sake of Japan but also for the sake of other Asian nations.

In the postwar period, modernization theory reversed this earlier discourse by arguing that the Meiji Revolution demonstrated the distinctiveness of "Japanese culture". The argument was that Japan demonstrated its cultural exceptionalism by being the first Asian nation to achieve technological excellence and industrialization. For better or worse, Japan's early modernization was aided by "authentic Japanese values" or a "Tokugawa religious" ethic (group harmony and loyalty, individual and collective achievement) (Bellah 1985 [1957]), a pattern of psychological dependence in relationships (Doi 1973, 1986), and a vertically stratified society (Nakane 1970). These values and patterns purportedly made it possible for "the Japanese" to be effective in the organized processes of high-growth economics. In contrast to these social scientists, writers like Mishima Yukio and Kobayashi Hideo argued that culture was epistemologically and ethically different from the politics and technologies of modernization. They invoke the prewar discourse's notion of Japanese culture as a pure, authentic sphere to criticize the new consumer culture of high growth economics and its accompanying bureaucracies (Ivy 1995, Pincus 1996).

Postmodernity is often discussed as an extension of the modern past, and the differences between them are only matters of degree and quality. Here again, the main question has been whether or not rapid modernization and high growth economics have actually helped Japanese social and cultural life; never mind whether it has helped "Western" social and cultural life, as Miyoshi and Harootunian (1996) point out. Or have they instead created a homogenized and harried consumer culture with few intellectual or social benefits? Are the Japanese people better off, happier? And what are the interests of the State in this postmodern period? Are its interests and actions in line with the social well being of its constituents?

Recent studies of Japan have begun to question and complicate these early representations of "Japanese culture" and the "Japanese self."[5] These studies interrogate how what is called "Japanese culture" has been and is being constituted, reconstituted, deconstructed, and challenged. They critique the earlier literature on the "Japanese self" as yet another example of "Orientalism."[6] In contrast to both premodern and modern discourses, these histories and ethnographies discuss the local, located, and contingent courses of events, actions, and practices rather than static generalizations about "Japanese" social, cultural, and identity categories.[7]

At the same time, the earlier representation of "Western" science imposing its frames of knowledge on "Eastern" "authentic" culture in these debates about Japanese modernity is recapitulated in some recent social and cultural studies of science. Some critics have represented genomics as an English-dominated, European and North American-framed and oriented project which is increasingly becoming globally distributed. Non-Euro-Americans are said to participate in this project through either adopting its methods, practices, and theoretical frames, or through their roles as research objects and testing sites for theories, methods, and products generated in Euro-America. I examine this assumption through an analysis of the Japanese human genome project and argue in contrast that the genesis and circulation of genomic science is a multi-directional process. My study instead argues that "West" and "East," both sciences and cultures, are being (re)constituted by scientists and non-scientists involved in genomic sciences.

This historical set of discourses is the context within which I analyze the following two cases of scientific imagination and entrepreneurship in Japan. In one case, culture never appears in the discussions of science and nation. In the second case, nation and culture are made synonymous by my informant who strategically uses the notion of culture to do particular kinds of work. In so doing, he simultaneously constitutes his representation of "Japanese" and "Western" cultures, but in broad brushstrokes.

Building the Japanese Human Genome Project: Early Days

Although the American Human Genome Initiative is often spoken of as the beginning of genomics, the birth of the American Human Genome Initiative was in part an outcome of a transnational effort by Akiyoshi Wada, a Japanese scientist and then a professor at Tokyo University, to promote interest in and raise funds for building DNA sequencing machines.[8] In 1981, a few years before James Watson's version of the American Human Genome project was conceived, Wada was appointed chairman of a project on the "extraction, analysis, and synthesis of DNA," a project supported by the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (STA).[9] The project was meant to reduce the tedium of biological wet lab research and to engage support from companies involved in the development of robotics, electronics, computers and material science (Wada 1987, Wada and Soeda 1986). Wada's idea was to automate existing protocols used in sequencing DNA in molecular biology rather than invent entirely new approaches. According to his testimony, he was not thinking of a Human Genome Project at that time, even though he did at times talk about sequencing the whole human genome with his machines. He was interested in building machines that automated DNA analysis including, for example, machines for separation, sequencing and frame reading, robotics for chemical reactions, and informatics hardware and software tools. His idea was that these machines should be assembled together to facilitate scientific production in a manner similar to the factory production of automobiles. That is, these machines would work together in a big factory that could sequence millions of nucleotides every day. Wada did manage to convince several companies to join his team. Seiko, Fuji Photo, Toyo Soda, Hitachi, and Mitsui Knowledge Industries joined in the effort.

In 1986, Wada decided to promote an international DNA sequencing effort in an attempt to consolidate international support for his project. In Japan gaiatsu ¹⁰ is an established strategy where foreign support is generated in order to encourage internal support for a project, often a project that requires changes in established ways of doing things. Wada's goal was to goad the Japanese government to support both his project and basic science through pressure from foreign countries. The Japanese government, specifically the Ministry of Finance, had been relatively conservative about funding basic science projects of all kinds, and most of the technological developments in Japan had come from private industrial funding.

In late 1986, Wada traveled to the U.S. to help move his international DNA sequencing project forward. At that time, a national co-ordinated effort to map and sequence the human genome was just beginning to be discussed by members of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the now defunct Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).[11] Wada visited these organizations and several national laboratories in the U.S., including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the American major genome database GenBank was then located. He states that his intention was to promote collaborations between American and Japanese scientists, especially at a time when trade and economic tensions were very high between the two countries.

Instead of using Wada's efforts to promote an international project, U.S. scientists and technocrats (including biologist James Watson, biologist Walter Gilbert, Senator Pete Domenici, and Congressman David Orey) used it to promote a national project. Domenici and Orey used Wada's efforts in the context of international trade competition to argue that the U.S. had to create its own genome project in order to compete with Japan and that Japan already had a five-year lead on the U.S. At a time when the Japanese economy was booming due in part to sales of Japanese products in the U.S. and when Japanese monies were being used to purchase property in the U.S., American rhetoric about this scientific project transformed it into yet another assault on America's self image as the dominant power. As policy analyst Robert Cook-Degan (1994:218) puts it,

American perceptions of the Japanese genome project as a biotechnological Trojan horse -- a premeditated assault on one of the remaining bastions of U.S. preeminence -- were grounded more in loose historical analogies with automobile manufacture and electronics than in direct observation of the policy process. The Japanese genome program as a scientific effort was largely the result of [Japanese] scientists aspiring to join the international ranks. Industrial partners were, at least in the opening phase, more reluctant participants than instigators. The genome program was more a dream of what Japanese science could become than a cornerstone in some grand economic plan.

Genomic science then became another arena of national competition in the rhetorics and practices of American and Japanese technocrats and politicians. And these nation-states became strategic arenas for scientific entrepreneurs to promote their projects. Science is politics by other means (Latour 1987).

But in the Wada story, neither nation raised the concept of culture or cultural differences in their discussion of genome science. For them, genomic science was modern science whether in Japan, the United States, or Europe. Genomics was not culturally inflected or implicated in these early discussions.

In the next example, in contrast, culture and cultural differences are brought in and woven into discussions of national programs of genomic sciences.

Building the Japanese Human Genome Project: The 1990s

Professor "Suhara" (a pseudonym), a leading molecular biologist in Japan, has been instrumental in making the Japanese Human Genome Project a reality. Suhara was very influential in convincing the ministry to fund this research and in constructing the project in its present form. Many of the researchers I spoke with in Japan call him "Mr. Molecular Biology."

Suhara envisioned the genome project as more than the investigation of human genes. For him, it also represented the installation of a new science for twenty-first century Japan. In his view, Japanese biological laboratories were not well integrated into information networks with laboratories and international databases in the United States and Europe. One of Suhara's primary missions was to create an infrastructure of such "thick lines" of communication, which he accomplished in the first phase of the genome project (1991-1996).

Suhara believed that genome informatics, that is, biology by using computer technology, would soon become the "second standing point" of biology. Traditional, or wet lab, biology would decrease in importance in comparison. With this in mind, he created a separate institutional and budgetary structure to fund genome informatics and computational genome analysis as a prominent feature of the Japanese genome project. In contrast, wet lab molecular genetics had taken precedence over bioinformatics early in the American human genome project.

Suhara's rationale was based on both national competition as well as "scientific progress." At the beginning of the 1970s, a time when molecular biology was becoming firmly established as the "new biology" in the U.S. and Europe, Japanese biologists were not interested. In Suhara's estimation, this lack of an early investment in wet lab molecular biology had left Japan behind the U.S. in the field. He worried that the same situation would repeat itself in the new era of genome informatics. So in 1990 Suhara planned and argued for Japanese genomics to focus more resources on genome informatics, a field in which Japanese and American bio-informaticians were beginning at about the same level of investment, expertise, and experience relative to their national budgets and personnel.[12]

Due to Suhara's efforts, the Japanese project was planned with specific reference to, and in direct competition with, the American project. The desire to establish Japan in a competitive position vis a vis the U.S. was part of the plan of their science. And computer bioinformatics was regarded as the place where Japan could make its mark. In contrast, bioinformatics in the U.S. has had to fight for its place as something more than a "handmaiden" to wet lab biology (Fujimura 1998).

This national competition was steeped in some of the terms of the technology and culture debates which I discussed above. Japan has achieved at least equality with the U.S. in the realm of information technology. Indeed, as Morley and Robins (1995, Chapter 8) have argued in their chapter entitled "Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic," Japan has become known as the most machine-loving country in the world. Beyond the automobile industry, Japan has also excelled in the production of robotics, imaging techniques, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and simulation technologies like virtual reality. But technology has been a key symbol in "Western" modernity since the Industrial Revolution. Thus, Japan's technological power, and especially its information technology, is represented by American and European media as a threat to "Western" modernity, to its notion of "Western" superiority, and to the very boundary that has stood between the "premodern/East" and the "Modern/West."

Morley and Robins argue that American and European media have responded to this threat with an ingenious twist of "Western" Orientalism. In "Western" Orientalism, Japan has now become like a "robot" controlled by technology, while Euro-America has maintained its humanism in the face of increasing technology. Here then battles among national identities return us to the early nineteenth century debates about superiority and cultural integrity. In Euro-American media representations, the "West" maintains its cultural integrity in the face of increasing technological development, while Japan has lost its humanity and soul to technology. Were they to be reincarnated and exposed to this rhetoric, Japanese intellectuals of the early twentieth century would have had their worst fears confirmed. But Suhara, as we shall see, turns this argument on its head by reconstituting the "nature"/"culture" and the "East"/"West" binaries.

A Discursive Production of the "East" and the "West" and "Nature" and "Culture"

In explaining the significance of the Human Genome Project, Suhara produced a fascinating narrative about the "East" and the "West" as well as of "nature" and "culture."

"The most interesting [aspect] of the Human Genome Project... is in helping to understand life, helping to understand what man is. We are collecting huge amounts of information on the genome which is the record of our history, and similarly, records of the histories of plants, animals, fish and insects. We'll be able to understand our past history by analyzing genomes...

The important [thing] in the Human Genome Project is that the concept of humans will slowly be changed as we understand more about the histories written in the human genome. I think people will share a sense [of our place in nature] and forget about human dignity. Too much stress has been placed on human dignity [in the West]. It's much easier for us [in Japan] to accept [man's place in nature] because we have not been brought up under the influence of Christianity. Most Japanese are either Buddhist or Shinto, and they have a much wider view of all living things. They don't put man as the representative of God to be placed above all the other living things. This attitude is very firmly imprinted during our childhood.

[The Japanese have a] much cooler concept of man. We look at man as one [among other] living creatures. By slowly changing the concept of life, I think... our attitudes toward technology [and towards] making use of the Human Genome Project will be slowly changed, particularly in Asian countries where the majority of people are not living under the influence of Christianity or [Islam], but under the influence of Buddhism or Confucius or Shinto.

Everybody's bound to the contract [with one God] in the Christian community. You don't have to change this [Christian] social contract. But you do have to get better views on what man is by taking the flow of information from the Human Genome Project and extend the thought on evolution to man, that a man is a result of a process of nature, has very close ties with other living things, and has to live together [with them] on earth. Culture plays the most important role in accepting evolution and the life of man among other lives.

The discipline of anthropology has been caught in a whirlwind of controversy over its central organizing concept, culture. The notion of "culture" has be criticized, articulated, re-articulated, rejected, defended, and embraced. In contrast to these agonistic struggles, Suhara produces a clear definition of culture: it is a set of values imprinted in our early years which then governs how we act in the world. Religious differences between "Eastern" and "Western" cultures explain why the "Christian/West" values humans above other animals. He then uses his notions of "East" and "West" as resources to criticize "Western" actions and attitudes, to promote his view of "Asian" values and attitudes, which he in turn used and uses to promote genomics research in Japan.

Suhara subverts the Orientalist trope where tradition and religion are attributes of the "premodern Orient," while science and modernity are attributed to the "modern Occident." In Suhara's rhetoric, there is no "Western" and "Eastern" science. Instead, there is only science. It is not science that is the problem in the "West," it is "culture." "Western culture" does not allow it to benefit from the fruits of its own technologies. Indeed, culture and science are in direct conflict and contradiction in the "West."

Suhara's rhetoric is that the "West" will eventually have to change its concept of humans and other animals when more is known through genomics. He predicts a (re)turn to nature/immanence in the more animistic sense of a Buddhism that has been heavily influenced by Shinto.[13] Although Suhara is interested in the potential medical payoffs and products proclaimed by many American technocrats as their reason for promoting genomics, his rhetoric engages more with the potential transformation of "Western" cultural values.

Unlike early twentieth century critics of the Meiji adoption of "Western" technologies, Suhara does not see the adoption of molecular biological technologies as an adoption of "Western cultural views." Indeed, in his view, these technologies are resisted in the "West" precisely because they (or at least their rhetorics) threaten to impose evolutionary biological knowledge over what he calls "cultural knowledge."

Suhara appeals to a view of "the Japanese" as sharing a common culture steeped in a Buddhism and a Shinto that are, in his perspective, radically different from Christianity. This notion reminds me of Marilyn Ivy's (1995) work on nostalgic appeals to premodernity that make up discourses in some quarters of Japan on cultural purity and identity. Ivy examines the spaces in Japan where efforts to distinguish the nation-state "Japan," the people "the Japanese," and "Japanese culture" from the "West" and "the rest" take on the form of nostalgia, of appeals to "the Japan" of "premodernity" (Nihonjin-ron literature, cf. Befu 1993). But, in fact, Ivy insists that Japan and the "West" (Euro-America) are co-evally or coincidentally modern. The one is implicated in the other. The nostalgic literature or Nihonjin-ron discourses of cultural purity and uniqueness then contradict the realities of multiple border crossings and transnational interchanges in trade, fashion, and science.

Ivy's argument is that particular discourses in Japan are currently representing modernity, defined as foreign intrusion, as the threat to a (re)constructed "Japanese" cultural purity and identity. But Suhara's rhetoric argues that modern science in fact is congruent with "traditional" Japanese cultural values and that these "traditional Asian" values are critical to the success of science. Indeed, in Suhara's rhetoric, Japan and Asia will become the leaders of a modernity that is based on religious and scientific understandings that show the "Christian West" to be premodern, irrational, and "traditional." (Japan is the current leader in East Asia in genomics, and Suhara uses Japan to stand in for the "East."[14])

Ironically, this transformation will happen because of molecular genetic technologies first developed in the "West." The ability to develop cutting edge technologies that will, in his eyes, be instrumental to this transformation were developed in a culture that will change as a result of the cutting edge knowledge that it produced. Genomics knowledge will make "Western culture" consistent with "Asian culture" and sensibilities. "Christianity will have difficulties in changing the concept [of man] in the near future when we know about the basic structure of the human genome, but still, that time will come" (Suhara).

Although Suhara's notion of "culture" appears at first to be very under-theorized, he uses his notion in a very strategic way to weave a representation that reinvents the "West" as the place of tradition and the "East" as the forefront of a scientific modernity. In contrast to the discourses discussed in Ivy's work, Suhara is promoting "modernity" through "nostalgia." That is, he uses tropes which Ivy would call "traditionally Japanese," i.e. Buddhism, Shinto, and their attendant views of nature, to promote Japanese science and modernity. Tradition and modernity are not binaries for Suhara (or for Ivy). Suhara is making a distinction between "Japan" and "the West" not for purposes of maintaining Japanese "Otherness," a "Japanese" national and cultural identity, but instead to build what he considers to be a new, better, more progressive, more scientific modernity in the "East" and the "West." Suhara's rhetoric is part of a larger discourse where Japan is transgressing the borderline between the "Modern/West" and the "Pre-modern/East." Thus, while Ivy's account helps us to understand the production of authenticity as a reaction to the depredations of modernity in contemporary Japan, Suhara's rhetoric uses this authenticity to promote the emblem of modernity, that is, science.

Conclusions

My purpose here has been to use informants' accounts of "culture," "science," and "technology" to think through issues of modernity, tradition, nationalism, and transnationalism.

Nationalism is alive and well in both American and Japanese genome projects. However, these examples show how genomic science is simultaneously transnational and national. It is transnational in its global flow of ideas, information, materials, protocols and practices, and people.[15] It is transnational because entrepreneurs from each nation used other nations to promote their own projects. It is transnational in the shape that each national project took as each developed in relationship with and contradistinction to the others.

Genomic science is also transnational in terms of the efforts of biologists who, through technology, are redefining culture and nature in quite interventionist fashions. Scientific objects, technologies, and practices are both producers of society and culture and products of culture and society. They are transformative in ways that are not pre-determined or predictable by cultural location. Transnational genomics have already changed medical decisions on the parts of doctors and their "clients" in Japan, the U.S. and elsewhere. None of this would be possible without the transnational production and flows of bioinformation and molecular genetics. Science in Japan is not Japanese science, it is transnational science. Similarly, transnational genomic sciences owe part of their existence to actions that were locally based in Japan.

Debates in Japan occurring over a century have centered on whether or not Japan could import "Western" sciences and technologies and their material objects and practices, without importing their attendant epistemologies and administrative structures that have been regarded as constituting "Western culture." Could "Japanese culture" retain its integrity? These debates assumed that there was and is an essential, bounded "Japanese culture" that would be violated by "Western" ideas. This discourse also assumed a desire to maintain "Japanese culture" as it had been conceived by these intellectuals in conversation with each other.

I argue that "culture" is not an entity autonomous from materialities. Assuming that changing a culture is a negative outcome, those who worried about the dangers to "Japanese culture" in early twentieth century discourses about modernization were correct to be worried. Materialities, among many other things, do change cultures.[16] And cultures change materialities. However, I want to interrogate their concept of an autonomous "Japanese culture" that could be corrupted by materialities adopted from "elsewhere." In contrast, I prefer to use the notion of culture to refer to specific practices located in space and time. For me, culture is both a heuristic device for discussing local and global actions and movements and a concept that is being continuously produced through actions and discourses about these actions.

In the examples discussed in this article, imaginaries, meanings and understandings of "the East" and "the West," of "culture" and "nature," of "Science" and "Society" shape and are being shaped by the people and practices engaged in genomics research. "Culture" in these examples are at once rhetorical devices in international competitions and sets of discourses and practices being shaped by genomics practitioners and visionaries. Suhara's rhetoric, for example, plays into the history of debates on culture and technology in Japan. He uses ideas and arguments that have been made at various points in history and combines them in new ways to produce his vision for genomics in Japan and the world. His rhetoric has been useful to him in attracting support for the Japanese Human Genome Project. Genomic science is clearly in conversation with other cultural discourses, contemporary and historical.

My discussion of "transnational science" then does not assume two distinct, closed systems within their (also assumed closed) cultural contexts that somehow meet and combine or intersect. It does not assume that either science is so different from each other or that each has its own distinctive coherence and rationality. Instead, I see in my investigations Japanese sciences that are the results of the weaving of particular strategies and practices.

Taking seriously Appadurai's admonishment then that fantasy is a social practice, I argue that it is critical that we pay attention to these practices of scientists as social actors and the worlds they are imagining.

Fantasy is now a social practice, it enters,... into the fabrication of social lives for many people in many societies... This is not a cheerful observation, intended to imply that the world is now a happier place with more "choices" (in the utilitarian sense) for more people, and with more mobility and more happy endings (Appadurai 1991:198).

Suhara and other scientists are participating in rebuilding culture and society and not just in the practice of a limited view of science. Genomic scientists are building maps of genomes, national identities, and notions of culture. Although one could argue that genomic maps are first order products and notions of national identities and culture are by-products, it may be that second order effects are greater than the effects of first order products. Or that first and second order effects are inseparable. Social and cultural organization may not be first order objects of the everyday practice of scientists, but they are clearly tools manipulated in their efforts to produce genomes and other such "scientific" knowledge.[17] Both their manipulation of these tools and their specifically "scientific" products have consequences for the constitution of society and culture. Politicians, political philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists may mark their territories and themselves as the makers and keepers of society and culture, but sciences and technologies have already demonstrated their powers in (re)making culture and society.

New technologies and their accompanying rhetorics are dramatically changing our lives. Change happens on location and involves many other actors, events, and contingencies. Given this, what is the best theoretical language for us to use to talk about the complexity on the ground? How do we talk analytically about science and culture in useful ways? How do we conceptualize the relationship between scientific practice and its rhetorical invocation of culture? Additionally, assuming that we do not want to give up on the notion of culture, what are the terms for usefully discussing culture?

This paper attempts to provide several answers to these questions. First, it attempts to analyze culture and science in terms of located practices.

This does not mean that one examines only particularity. Scientific practices rely on flows of knowledge, protocols, people, and materials which demand adaptation to particular local situations. At the same time, scientific protocol itself demands that knowledge be uncodable as "Western" or any other denomination. It demands that it be "universal." It is critical then that we examine the historical and transnational interweaving, cross-cutting conversations that are part of local and transnational genomics.

The issue is complicated further by scientists who, in their first-order practices, invoke cultural explanations in order to intervene at specific times and places in the practice of science. After examining how the different actors, events, and historical contingencies together constitute science and society in different instances, I argue that the assignment, assertion, or denial of cultural categories can be studied as part of the production of social and cultural order and conflict.

APPENDIX

The Human Genome Projects (HGP)

The Human Genome has as one of its stated goals to map and sequence "the" entire human genome. The human genome refers to the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (an estimated three billion base pairs of DNA) that are a part of every human cell. The HGP has become a convenient focal point for discussions about human genetics and its medical applications as they have developed over the last decade, and will continue to develop in the years to come. Prominent figures in American molecular biology have argued for the importance of the HGP as a foundation for progress in biology and medicine. The news media headline the almost weekly reports of "discoveries" of genes for conditions ranging from cystic fibrosis, colon and breast cancers, heart disease, to schizophrenia, alcoholism, homosexuality, television watching and divorce. While recognizing the potential value of knowing which gene or genes are involved in the initiation and development of conditions such as cystic fibrosis, many social scientists and medical and bioethicists have apprehensions about much of the Human Genome Projects. These concerns range across a spectrum: the privacy of information, the efficacy of genetic screening, the social impact of these information (e.g. discrimination in health and life insurance provisions, in employment, in marriage, etc.), the "geneticization" of social and behavioral "disorders," the constitution of new definitions of disease and health, and the geneticization of "normal" behaviors.

The American Human Genome Initiative

The American Human Genome Initiative (HGI) was authorized by Congress in 1990 and institutionalized in and funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy (DOE). It is administered through NIH's National Center for Human Genome Research, currently under the direction of Francis Collins (previously under the direction of James Watson). The HGP, in contrast, has been an ongoing effort since the late 1970s involving many scientists, public institutions, private corporations, and national governments to fund and carry out the research of mapping and sequencing human genes, and to develop the basic tools and materials of molecular biological research.

The American project focused its first five years on constructing maps (genetic and physical) of the genome and on finding genes for diseases. We are now into the second five years of the Initiative where the focus is on genes for behaviors and on sequencing the genome (1995-2000).

Japanese Genome Projects

The Japanese Genome projects are on much smaller scales than the U.S. or European project.

There are at least five genome projects in Japan. Each project was begun by a different ministry. Japanese ministries are on the order of departments in the American federal government. They are organized into a top-down fashion, and each ministry is highly competitive with other ministries. In tune with this competition, when Wada succeeded in convincing the Science and Technology Agency to fund his research on automated DNA sequencers, the other ministries decided that they too needed to build genome projects. The largest project on the human genome is funded and organized by Monbusho (the Ministry of Education, Sport, and Culture). The Ministry of Agriculture also funded a rice genome project. The Ministry of Health and Human Welfare (Koseisho) began a project later at their National Cancer Institute focusing on human genes. MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) has a project is re-organizing its quality control office into a large scale DNA sequencing laboratory.

The Monbusho Human Genome Center is located in Tokyo. However, Monbusho's Human Genome Project is a much larger entity with researchers and facilities distributed in universities throughout Japan. In 1996, it began the second five year stage of their project.

Besides physical and genetic linkage mapping, structural analysis, cDNA cloning and mapping, and sequencing, there has been a separate program set up on computational aspects of biology in both the first and second five-year plans. What is called "Genome Informatics" has received a substantial portion of human genome funds in Japan.

Bioinformatics

One way to represent genomics is to talk about the transformation of biology into an information science. While this process has been going on for a while, bioinformatics is now happening at a speed and scale now that is unprecedented in the life sciences. Through the major efforts that have been put into the HGP, we now have and will continue to collect such a large volume of information about gene and protein sequences that no one can make sense of this information without the use of computers, large databases, particular organizational structures of databases, and different kinds of software for creating and understanding relationships between bits/bytes of information. Genes are represented by strings of G, C, T, A's in computer displays. Proteins are represented as strings of letters as abbreviations to stand in for amino acids. Some more "contextual" information about the cell is also included. So genomic knowledge is now stored as strings of letters in databases accessed through computerized information networks criss-crossing the globe. In addition to this sequence information, one can also access physical and genetic map representations that locate particular gene sequences on particular chromosomes. Also available in databases is similar information for Drosophila, C. elegans (worm), the mouse, yeast, and a few other species. Some databases are private, i.e. one pays for access, but the major databases are public and can be accessed by any biologist any place on the globe as long as she has a computer and ethernet hookups.

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[1]This paper takes from a larger project that uses social and cultural studies of science to address issues of transnationalism, culture, modernity, and multi-sited ethnography. I am using science as both my ethnographic and historical object and as a site to study how meaning, culture, and nature are produced. My specific scientific object is transnational genomics and especially genome informatics/genome information knowledge and technologies.

[2]For example, some women who have been diagnosed as "carrying" BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes that are thought to cause breast cancer have chosen to undergo bi-lateral mastectomies.

[3]This discourse has been repeated in recent decades using the language of internationalization.

[4]In contrast, recent work in anthropology, history, and cultural studies have argued that culture is not synonymous with nation-state (e.g. Gupta and Ferguson 1992).

[5]These include Field 1993, Fujii 1989, Fujitani 1996, 1998, Ivy 1995, Kondo 1990, 1997, Morris-Suzuki 1995, Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, Sakai 1997, Tanaka 1993, Traweek 1992, Vlastos 1998, Yoneyama 1995.

[6]See especially Kondo 1990, Ivy 1995, and Sakai 1997; see also Said 1979.

[7]These anthropologies and histories of Japan are being used by some anthropologists to reformulate the organization of area studies.

[8]Wada's family has been steeped in the scientific establishment in Japan for generations (Cook-Degan 1994: 213-214).

[9]James Watson, together with Francis Crick, won the Nobel Prize for their work proposing a double helix structure of DNA.

¹⁰"Gai" is "foreign" or "outside," "atsu" is taken from "atsuryoku" or pressure.

[11]1986 was the pivotal year in the U.S. for discussions of a proposal to organize a coordinated effort. A meeting was held at the Santa Fe Institute in March, 1986 a debate at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in May, and only thereafter did the effort speed up (Cook-Degan 1994, Fortun 1993).

[12]See Fujimura (1998) on bioinformatics in the human genome projects.

[13]See Ketelaar (1990) on the conflicts between Buddhism and Shinto in Japan. Through this process, Buddhism transformed into a more immanent view of spirituality.

[14]At the time Suhara said this, the Japanese newspapers were debating whether Japanese government should apologize and pay some retribution to the Korean women who were used to "service" Japanese soldiers during their occupation of Korea. When we step outside of Suhara's laboratory, his image of Japanese culture as non-invasive and harmonious becomes a beautiful but problematic neo-japoneseque dream. The possibilities for the Human Genome Project to change the concept of life in Asian countries may still be viable, but will it happen if Japanese genomics is initiator? Suhara's vision of a transnational Asian modernity may run into trouble when faced with the history of Japanese nationalist incursions into East and South Asia.

[15]Wada, for instance, studied protein structure in the U.S. in Paul Doty's laboratory at Harvard University from 1954 to 1956.

[16]A vivid example of this two-way (many-way?) transformations is Donna Haraway's (1997) chapter on the historical transformations of kinship categories in twentieth century United States. See especially her charts on pages 219-229.

[17]For example, see Duster 1999 on the forensics' use of race categories as defined in FBI crime statistics in the design of experiments and production of molecular genetic and neurological "data" on "violence" in the African American community. By using socially defined race categories to produce genetic identifiers, hematology studies of antigen reactions "by race," and neurological accounts of propensities towards "violence," biologists are both producing the molecular genetics of "racialized identification" and reproducing or confirming the construction of "African Americans" as a biologically defined racial category. Yet, they simultaneously deny that that race has any legitimacy as a category in biological science.