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Subodhana Wijeyeratne, "The Islands and the Stars: A History of Japan's Space Programs" (Stanford UP, 2026)
00:48:32
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today with the book and author we have with us because as the title of this book suggests, we get to go well to a particular country, but also well beyond even just this planet, which is quite an exciting premise, really, for a discussion. So the book is titled the Islands and the Stars, A History of Japan's Space Programs, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Obviously, that title tells you what country we're going to and why. I said we're going beyond the planet. And this book really brings together a whole bunch of things, right? We're going to be talking obviously about particular space programs, plural, that is important. That will come up. And so we're talking about institutions, we're talking about science, technology, politics, economics, and of course, all the other things that come into Japan's history in recent decade, decades too. So a whole bunch of things packed together in this one book. And who better to tell us all about it than the person who wrote it? So I have the pleasure to welcome onto the podcast the author, Dr. Subodhana Vijay Ratna, to tell us all about his research. Subo, thank you so much for joining me to tell us about what you've done.
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Thank you very much for having me on.
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B
Miranda, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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A
Yeah, with pleasure. So my name is Suborzana Vijay Ratner. I'm a assistant professor of history at Purdue University in the United States. So my, my family is Sri Lankan. And obviously during Sri Lanka's past, you know, when it was ruled by the British, the Japanese funded a great deal of Sri Lankan independence activity. And so I'd always been sort of tangentially aware of Japan as sort of a, an interesting place, but I actually sort of studied Medieval British history at university because that's what I was really interested in. So it took me a while to drift through the various histories and places to Japan, but in the end, when it came to doing my PhD, I decided to sort of do research on this topic for two reasons. One, I'm a huge space nerd. And it occurs to me that for the longest time we've understood the space race and our journey to becoming a space faring species really through the stories of two big enterprises there, the United States and the Soviet Union, Russia. And that was, that approach is fine, but I don't really think that it meaningfully covers the bulk of sort of space activities happening around the world after sort of the 1980s. I think there's a lot more happening around the world that actually has a direct impact on how we behave in space and what we do in space. And to find out more about that extra stuff, you have to look outside those countries because there are other countries doing things that the big boys aren't. So that was sort of my general approach to it. More specifically, I also thought that a lot of Japanese space technology is very cool. They focus on niches within space technology and then they get good at those. And it tends to be slightly obscure but very interesting things like solar sails and for using military technology to bring stuff back from space and that sort of stuff. So it's this combination of a large scale historical significance and the fact that I just think a lot of what they do is cool.
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B
I mean, that's a pretty good combination for a book project, right? A clear sort of academic niche and just something you're intrigued by. So thank you for that background to the project. And I wonder if we can talk a little bit more about kind of what is interesting about the history of Japanese space programs in that sort of more global context. Right. In terms of how it helps us better understand what has and is happening with space, for one thing, I mean, I think most people would probably be as surprised as I was in terms of the like amount of funding and size of Japan's space program. Do we want to maybe cover that briefly?
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A
Yeah, absolutely. So I think we have to essentially in our minds, separate out Japan space programs into a before and after. And that's the foundation of JAXA in 2003. So since the foundation of JAXA in 2003, and JAXA is sort of the overarching, centralized Japanese space program as it exists today, there have been a few trends that have made it distinctive from the past. And one of these is sort of the militarization of their responsibilities. They have more military responsibility now than they did before 2003. And by they, I mean Japan's space technologists and space specialists. But going back to the period before jaxa, I think you see a very idiosyncratic set of developments. We can go into them late in the conversation, but I think the lesson we can draw from them is it's important not to be blinded by the way some countries get to space and to assume that all countries get to space for the same reasons or the same way. And for the same reasons. I think what Japan Space program shows is that we need to. So let me give you a quick example. This notion that space programs primarily exist for. For prestige. So the Soviets and the Americans are doing these crazy and amazing missions just to show the world that their systems are better. The Japanese never had that motivation. And in fact, the Japanese have been in space to make money from the very beginning. So a lot of the stuff that we see in terms of working out the technical details of interact. Interaction between the state and private business, for example, we've already sort of unfolded in Japan. And I think we can learn about what's happening in other places around the world from Japan's experience before 2020.
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B
Yeah, no, that's definitely a very good example to kind of put on the table early on in our conversation. As you said, we are going to get into these developments in a lot more detail. For one thing, as much as you mentioned, obviously, Jackson, we will get there. We're not starting the book in 2003. We're starting the book in 1920. Why then?
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A
If there's one thing I want folks to take away from this book, it's that a space program is made up not just of technology, but also of people. So I think you have to start the story of a country going to space with the moment its people became aware that that was something that could be done. So in the case of Japan, my first question was, who are these folks who end up pushing through the space project right after the war, the ones who actually end up creating it? Well, it turns out they were all aeronautical engineers who had been trained and had worked during the Second World War and right before. And these include major figures like Itokawa Hideo, who, again, we'll talk about him later, but is regarded as the founding father of the Japanese space program. So I went back to the 1920s because I had a suspicion that I actually went back a lot further, but I couldn't find anything. And that's just history. But what I did notice was in the 1920s, you begin to see a lot of engineers, aeronautical engineers, beginning to take the idea of going to space seriously. And this is partly because that's actually when a lot of the basic work people like Goddard are working at this time and they're learning about it. Beyond that, they were also space nerds. They also acquired their aesthetic sense of what space is and what space represents in the 1920s. So if we go back to that time, you'll see that, you know, there are. One of the things I cover in the book, right. Is that there's this comic book where this collection of anthropomorphized cats who basically represent the Japanese, go travel around the world and travel to the moon on a rocket and conquer places. And it's a really interesting moment because it's clear that space has become a thing, and it's becoming gripping the imagination of young boys, particularly around Japan. But at the same time, the technology isn't quite the technology we recognize. So their rocket has a little propeller at the back, for example. So it's this really interesting moment when older forms of technology and this new form of technology are melting together in the imaginations of people. And I think that it's that moment that later goes on to inspire people after the Second World War. So that's why I start in the 1920s.
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Yeah, that's a really key aspect. Right. Nothing can be done technically before the idea exists for it. But of course, then we do have the technical stuff that we want to add in, too. So can we move forward and talk more about World War II and its aftermath and what that meant for Japan's space research and development?
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Yeah, absolutely. So it was an absolutely critical moment in the development of Japan's rocketry technology particularly. And the main thing is this war, I think, as your viewers will well know, tends to be an incredible pump for innovation. And in the case of Japan, they were committed to the creation of what they regarded as superweapons almost from the very beginning of the war, a lot of these projects. So there was, for example, this project that created a death ray that apparently could kill a dog at sort of 20 paces or something. And it was supposed to be able to sort of destroy car engines. They worked on various kinds of aircraft, experimental aircraft. And amongst the things they worked on was rocketry. And often what happened was you had individuals or particular groups within Japan's research establishment, as existed in the Second World War, who would get ideas into their head and would just sort of try and push through the creation of that project. What this meant was that beginning in sort of 1943, the Japanese made a real effort to acquire German rocket technology and develop their own. So there are basic things that they mastered in this process. For example, learning how to make particular alloys that can sustain really high temperatures. They learned how to make particular. How to control the incredible pressures that exist inside rocket engines. But in other ways, they. They were still quite backwards. So really, the story of the Second World War was the story of the Japanese learning the basics of rocketry, learning the basics of practical rocketry. And then tries to funnel as much information as they could back from Germany. Now the Germany bit is actually really interesting. I begin my book there because it turns out first of all that the Germans are a little reluctant to be giving their technology away to the Japanese free. But also there's a major problem which is it's really hard to get anything from Germany to Japan without going across Allied territory. So the Japanese up going to extraordinary lengths to secure this information, including having materials and engine samples brought back from Germany by submarine. And it's sort of a 15,000 mile journey. The submarine leaves from occupied France and arrives in Singapore, having sailed all the way around the Cape of Good Hope carrying rocket technology. So the Second World War has all this incredible effort directed towards development of rockets. And then of course, it all comes to an end in 1945. And so between 1945 and 1952, the United States completely bans any sort of aeronautical engineering in Japan. So it's this very dramatic moment. You have all this work that's happened and all these people getting good at what they do and then suddenly they can't do any of it anymore. And that's where Japan's at in 1952. I also want to very quickly add that that description I just gave you, if any of your viewers notice that there's no sort of centralized rocketry effort. That is correct. Japan's research establishment, such as it existed during the Second World War, was actually quite messy. There were all these tensions within it, like the army didn't want people in the Navy knowing what they were up to. Professors didn't really like working with army folk on occasion. So there was a lot of tension. And this is one reason why actually Japanese technology didn't progress as quickly as the Allies technology during the Second World War. And that legacy of institutional decentralization persists after the Second World War.
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B
This is such an interesting period in the history for I think two key. I'd pick out particularly two key things you mentioned there. Obviously One, the sort of infighting and coordination. Right. Goes back to the point you made earlier that like we have to understand the people for any of this to make sense. Right. And that's such a key element. But I'm glad you also mentioned the ridiculous submarine story too, because that was pretty wild to read about, to be honest. I mean, that clearly needs to be some sort of film at some point. But of course that's not where Japan's research in this area stopped, even with the ban placed on it by the US after the war. How did it get to a point where kind of this was something that could be touched again?
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A
So I think the blunt answer to that is dudes doing stuff. I think the first thing is obviously the politics changed. Japan regains independence in 1952, and the United States, from that point on essentially has to accept that they are now an independent country. And to the extent that Japan can, they will pursue industries that they believe are important. The Japanese were very keen after the Second World War, and by this, by the Japanese, I mean the Japanese government to re industrialize Japan. And the thing about re industrializing after an experience like the one Japan has had is that you don't need to start again from scratch. You still have a lot of the infrastructure, and more importantly, you have the human capital. You have people who know how to rebuild the infrastructure there. So they were able to begin rebuilding their industry. But what I meant by dudes doing things was despite the government's interest, I don't think that rocketry would have emerged organically in Japan if it weren't for the fact that there was this guy, Itokawa Hideo, and a collection of other people around him who became interested in rocketry after the Second World War. So Itokawa had worked in Japanese aircraft design during the Second World War. He'd been responsible for the design of a fighter jet called the Hayabusa. And remember that name, because I'm sure we'll come back to that name later. And after the Second World War, he found himself out of a job. He kind of flailed around, he did a bunch of different things, including developing some medical scanning technology. And at some point he came to the United States partly to sell that technology and partly to see what was up in America generally and what he read. One of the things he read while he was here and was some research into sending animals into space. And Itokawa, who was obviously a very clever man, put two and two together and realized, oh, America's working towards putting a person in space. Now, Itokawa had always had a sense of competition with the West. Even when he was young, he was a bit, just a bit of a nationalist. And when he was young, he remembers seeing European and American aviators accomplishing all these incredible feats, like flying across the Pacific. And he remembers thinking, why is it that we in Japan aren't doing the same thing? And I think that same logic extended to the space program or America's space effort. So it's almost as soon as he picks up on the fact that they're planning to send people to space he thinks, why can't we do it too? And so he comes back to Japan and he starts this research lab called the avsa, which is really the institutional beginning of Japan's post war space program.
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B
That's really interesting to think about, kind of the motivations there. How is this, though, received more broadly?
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Right.
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You mentioned earlier that when you said the Japanese in that context, you meant the government. But of course the country is made up of loads of people who are not the government, who also just went through a really nasty war. Right. And it didn't go so well for them. So were they excited about these goals? Like how did space research and development fit into kind of pacifist Japan?
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A
I think it's important to understand precisely what the experience of a Japanese, average Japanese person during the Second World War was. Japan was no doubt an aggressor state, but for most people living in the country, the wall was distant until it arrived at their doorsteps. And it was. It arrived on their doorsteps in the form of things like carpet bombing. So in May 1944, for example, beggar part of 45, the United States launched an air raid on Tokyo called Operation Meeting House, where they essentially used napalm bombs on a wooden city. And there was a strong wind coming across Tokyo Bay. So the result was a firestorm that may have killed as many people as the Hiroshima bombing. So that's the average Japanese person's experience of the Second World War. And there's two things about that I think that we have to keep in mind. The first thing is that this is destruction on a scale that they just simply hadn't conceived up till that point. Conceived a lot till that point. But the other thing is it's death that came from the sky. This is bombs falling from above onto their cities. So the sky became a frightening place for most Japanese people. And indeed, this was something that the United States particularly used to their advantage when it came to pacifying Japan. So they would regularly have low flying sort of observation missions over Tokyo. During surrender, an entire fleet of bombers flew over Tokyo almost to sort of remind people that what had happened to them a few months earlier could happen to them again tomorrow. So you can imagine that in this context, it's really hard for someone to come along and start developing technology which at that point was used almost entirely in a military context. People were deeply suspicious of it. And people were also deeply suspicious because it had become really evident in the sort of five or six years after the Second World War that nuclear weapons and rockets actually went together Quite well. If you could make a nuke small enough, you could then inflict incredible levels of damage at very long distances. And the thing that enabled that was the rocket. So both Itokawa Hideo and the powers that be that funded his work had to be really careful in their presentation of rocketry to the public. The solution for this was two things. Number one, they emphasized its Japaneseness. So the idea that successes in the space program were indicative of Japan rising from the ashes and taking its place as a major international player was part of Japan's presentation of their space effort from the very beginning. Now it's important, I think, to distinguish this between, with the narratives in America and the Soviet Union where it was, what we're doing is impressive and it shows you that we, you should be living like us too. You should adopt our political systems too. In Japan, the narrative was inward, turned inward to its own population. So it didn't have that international dimension. The narrative was, we messed up, but look, we've still got it, we're still able to do this stuff. So that's the first thing. But the second thing actually came down to technology, which is that the early Japanese space program avowedly adopted only particular kinds of technology. So at the time, for example, solid fuel rockets were known to be quite effective for making missiles and Japan could, had an, could use them in warfare. But in order to make the really powerful flagship weapons at the time, which were intercontinental ballistic missiles, you needed liquid fuel technology, because liquid fuel technology allows you to turn an engine on and turn it off and therefore increases its accuracy. So one thing that the first Japanese space program, which as I mentioned was grew from a laboratory called the AVSA and then later became an institution known as isas, isis. They worked almost entirely on short range solid fueled rockets. And in fact, Japan in 1970 becomes, I think, the only country in the world to put its first satellite in orbit on a solid fuel rocket. So that's the second way they get around it. So the two points are they create a very specific narrative that gets around discussions of military activity. And secondly, they focus on technologies that they can present as having limited military use. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time,
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50% off regular price for new customers, upfront payment required $45 for three months, $90 for six month or 1, $180 for a 12 month plan. Taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms. That's really interesting to understand the positioning of the space programs in Japan and especially kind of the comparison with the US and the ussr. That definitely helps kind of clarify what's unique about what is happening in Japan. But of course another thing that's unique about it is we're not talking about one organization that everything's coordinated through, right? That comes a lot later. We have two organizations at this point, right? Why two?
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A
Well, because not everybody's on board with ISS's mission. It turns out that solid rockets are great for the kind of thing that ISS wants to do, but they're sort of limited in their ability to put e.g. satellites in very specific orbits. It was also the case that ISAS was so committed to, to an entirely Japanese based program that they were absolutely unwilling to work with anyone outside Japan. And so their tech, that their technology progressed relatively slowly. And there actually happened to be another very large constituency in Japan who wanted access to space and wanted access to space yesterday, and that was telecommunications companies. So what happens is over the 60s, these telecommunication companies become increasingly unhappy with what they see as the excessively academic focus of Japan Space booker. They are also more than willing to establish links with overseas suppliers, partly because that means they have access to better technology, but partly also because they can then buy patents, they can figure out how the technology works and they can start making it themselves. So they band together. There is a very powerful trade union organization in Japan called K Dan Lin and they band together with Kaidan and they start lobbying to access foreign liquid fuel technology. It takes them a while, but it's not till sort of, it's not till, until the late 60s that they finally managed to persuade the government and they get enough people on their side and they establish a new space organization called nasdaq. Nasdaq. NASDAQ very quickly becomes the bigger of the two space programs. So NASDAQ is really interesting. Whereas ISAS is sort of this small, almost iconoclastic group of academics who are quite protective of their research and want to do interesting and peculiar stuff. NASDAQ is a much more technocratic institution and its goal from the very beginning is to create practical, usable rockets. And the guy who's put in charge of it is called Shima Hideo and he's the guy who oversaw The Shinkansen project. He's the one who oversaw the development of the Japanese bullet train. So we can see from his appointment what the vision for this institution is. Right. It's a practical institution. It's going to produce a vehicle that can be used. And over the course of the next 20, 30 years, that's what they tried to do. They have this concerted effort in the 1970s to produce a liquid fuel rocket from American technology and then they launch in the 1980s into the creation of the H2 rocket, which becomes one of the most important rockets in the history of Japan's space program.
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B
That's really intriguing to see the differences here because it's exactly as you said at the beginning, right. It's differences in people that therefore leads to differences in technology. And we have to kind of keep centering the sorts of people involved. Are there any others we need to add to the conversation? We've got the Japanese government, we've got the two agencies. Any other people that had roles or influence on what was going on with space?
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A
Yeah, absolutely. So there's two groups, I think, who deserve a particular, a particular moment in the spotlight, I guess. The first, of course, is the Americans. So the United States is non negotiable for the Japanese as a participant in their space program, partly because if they are going to get advanced technology, they're going to get it from the United States. The Soviets are unlikely to give the Japanese any advanced technology at this point, at least partly because, you know, of China. But then the other reason that they're so important is that they have their own anxieties, the United States, about giving Japan any rocket technology. So what you essentially have is a relationship where you have a smaller industrialized power that is trying to elaborate and complexify their own ability to create space vehicles. And the United States that is willing to have Japan develop those abilities to a certain point, but very keen for them, A, not to develop the ability to have intercontinental ballistic missiles and B, really keen not to let the Japanese into a position where they can meaningfully compete technologically with the United states. So the US helps in the early 70s, but then in the late 70s they actually begin to limit their technology transfer to the Japanese. They begin to try and pressure the Japanese into either investing into R and D jointly or to accept black boxed technology, which is technology that the Japanese are not permitted to figure out the functioning of. The other group of people, I think who are really important here are people who live in the areas where the space program is building its infrastructure. I Think we forget that there are people out there for whom space is something they interact with on a daily basis, but not through rocket launchers and stuff. They live next to the factories that make rocket fuel. They live next to research sites, so they get to see. So, for example, ISAS is still responsible for Japan's ballooning program. And there are people who live near that facility in Hokkaido and in northern Japan. And so for them, they will regularly see these giant balloons rising into the sky. And that's part of their experience. These facilities are built near their houses. So if rocket launchers go wrong, sometimes they. They know about it. And I think you see their influence in particularly the late 1960s, where Japan has to build its space facilities in the south on these sort of little islands, and there are people who live nearby, and a lot of them make their living from fishing. And it turns out that launching rockets on a beach requires you to have empty seas for quite a distance around, just in case a rocket blows up and falls in, which means that people can't fish. So these fishermen, these fisher people, got particularly annoyed, and they banded together and they protested. And as a result of their organized protesting, Japan's first successful satellite launch was actually delayed by a couple of years. I think that's huge. Any group of people that are able to delay a space program's agenda by two years have to be considered major players within it, I think. And so I think you see there the ability of the public, even though they seem powerless, to band together and assert their influence over this huge program.
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B
Yeah, that's a really big deal. So definitely worth flagging. And also really interesting to kind of have as flagged. The two external actors here are in one case a group of fisher people, in the other case the United States.
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A
Right.
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B
That definitely gives a sense of the fuller context. And let's check back in, I suppose, on the kind of broader Japanese public as well. Right. Not just the people living near all of this, but as we've got more, we've got the two programs developing, we're getting things like, as you said, satellite launches. Like, this is no longer just sort of two little clusters of academics kind of hidden away. This is a much bigger deal. How then did the public react? You know, we're moving a few decades from the war. What is public opinion like at this point?
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A
Japan in the 1970s, and particularly in the 1980s, was a much more confident place than it is today. So I think in the beginning, I think in the 1960s and 70s, the early 70s, I think people were Becoming aware of Japan's space program, I think in the 1970s and 80s people were genuinely engaging with it. You have accounts of school children traveling down the length of Japan with their teachers just to watch rocket launches. You have so many people turning up to watch rocket launches that local ins are booked out completely. So interestingly enough, this economic bounty for the localities where they built these facilities was one of the ways central authorities sold the building of these facilities to locals. Essentially, if we build this, you're going to get rich. You'll have people coming to look and people coming to research and they'll pay money for accommodation and food and that kind of stuff. And this was a period when that promise seemed like it was there to stay. People were going, people were engaged. You also see space becoming much bigger in popular culture. So I don't necessarily go into anime, manga and science fiction in my book because I think people have done that much better than I can and have covered a great deal of it. I focus more on the direct transmission of information about Japanese missions to the public. And one of the reasons the public responds so positively at this time is because outreach has been something that people do from the very beginning. And I want to draw attention here to a couple of characters who I think are really important. One, of course, is Itokawa Hideo. It turns out that he's not only quite a driven sort of technocrat, but he's also very charismatic and a fantastic communicator. So Itokawa Hideo leaves the Japanese Space program in 1967 for various reasons, but he continues to be one of its most accomplished public spokesmen. And he does all sorts of things. He writes articles, he does public lecturing, he appears on television all the time. So he becomes this sort of one man band promoting space technology. And what I love about his work and I think is really important is that he's not just. Just telling people it's cool. He's telling people how it works. He's explaining to people the intricacies of the technology, which I personally think is. Is something that draws in one particular constituency of space fs. It's the technology itself. The other person is Matawa Yasunori, who was to a certain extent Itakawa's protege and goes on to become the leader of Japan's space program. And he also does the same thing. He's a tremendous writer and he reaches out not only to the public, but also to institutions abroad and spreads word of Japan's activities. So I think that combination of general kind of confidence on the part of the Japanese, a sense of Japanese accomplishment and the efforts on the part of the space program meant that in the 70s and 80s, Japan's space program was really riding a high in terms of public support.
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B
And what was the program actually? What were the programmes actually doing at this point? Like when they're on tv, when they're giving these lectures, like, are they. I mean, right, if we look at the US and the ussr, it's get someone on the moon and plant a flag there. Like, what is the program actually trying to achieve?
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A
There are a couple of things that were happening that I think people were keen on. On one hand, we have a lot of satellites being launched. So what the Japanese did was, was twofold in the sense that they emphasized the scientific accomplishment of particular satellites like Tanze, right, which is launched in 1971 and is their first scientific satellite. That's presented as a step in the progress of Japanese technology, a step in the progress of Japanese space technology particularly. But they're also presenting it in terms of what works for the public, improving people's lives. So they're very keen, for example, to emphasize the link between television and satellites. The idea of direct broadcasting is huge and it happens during the Olympics. The Japanese, the Tokyo Olympics, where they use a satellite relay to broadcast live. So these sorts of things, this sort of infrastructural stuff is presented to the public as a good thing. And I think this is one of the big differences, I think, between Japan's space program, America's space program, or the Soviets, where the Americans are doing these particular missions, like, we're going to the moon for the first time, we're going. We're going to put, you know, a probe on the surface of Venus, Japan. That's not what they're selling. What they're selling is, look how much easier it is to find your way somewhere. Look how much easier it is to do business with people. Look how much more convenient your life has become because of what we're doing in space. So it's quite a distinct narrative and the role that satellites and particular missions play within it is, as a result, a little less, little bit less distinct than it is in the West. On the flip side, the other project that the Japanese space program really emphasizes to the public is their rocketry program. So the big thing that the Japanese set out to do in the 1980s was, was to make a 100% Japanese liquid fuel rocket from scratch. ASDA launched on this mission in 1983 officially, and it would dominate the next sort of two decades of its life, and it was constantly relaying to the public updates about advancement on this Japanese super rocket, the H2. So that was really one of the things that they were presenting as their main accomplishment.
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B
Okay, that's really helpful to get a sense of what they were doing and what they hoped to do. As you said, you know, this was really quite a successful period. The foreshadowing, though earlier, that listeners might have picked up on was not accidental.
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A
Right.
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B
These dreams do not really seem to go as planned. When we move into the 1990s, what happened? Why didn't this go?
- [35:58]
A
Well, a few things. I'm going to start with a personal opinion, and I think that they got a bit excited and they got. Got a bit ahead of themselves. By the 1990s, you have Japanese. So I think, again, a little bit of background context here. Those of your readers who are alive in the 80s will remember this. I don't, because I was alive in the 80s, but I was very young. But I learned about it in the 90s, which is that there was a period of history where, certainly from the perspective position of the west, it looked like Japan was going to be a superpower. In the 80s and the early 80s and the mid-80s, the Japanese economy was booming. There was a huge trade deficit between the United States and Japan. So there was this sense of threat coming from Japan. Conversely, there was confidence in Japan that the story was true, that they were going to be a superpower, that they were going to achieve what they'd set out to achieve before the Second World War, but without having to shed any blood. And so the plans that were laid out were, first, we're going to build this enormous rocket. Then we're going to put a space plane on top of it. Then we're going to go to the moon. And at some point, maybe in the 2020s, we will actually be on a par with both the Soviet Union and the United States. A couple of things happened. First of all, the United States moved to limit Japan's economic advantages in terms of trade. What this meant was that the yen became much more expensive. This hiked prices all across Japan's rocketry industry. So projects not only became more expensive, but the rocket they were building suddenly became unprofitable. Its ability to launch payloads cheaply had been predicated on the strength of the yen, and now the strength of the yen was working against it. The other thing that happened was the bubble popped. So Japan in the late 80s and early 90s, essentially tried a couple of new techniques to keep its economy ticking along and keep capital being generated. It didn't work out. There was a huge. SO housing bubble and it burst. And really what we've seen since then is Japan's economy has kind of stagnated since then. So a combination of these two things meant that the 1990s were extremely difficult for Japan space program. It was really expensive. It had to cut a whole bunch of programs. And so these cuts are then seen publicly. And people can get the vibe that Japan's space program is doing badly. But on top of that, what it meant was that every single mistake they made or every single failure they had that was associated with the H2 rocket program was exaggerated. Failures became more expensive. They became emblematic of what was seen as broader malaise in Japan, and they became opportunities for people to criticize government expenditure and the way the economy was being run. So in many ways, the H2 rocket assumes this outsized role in the Japanese public's eye as a symbol of general Japanese failure. So the 90s are actually a particularly bad decade for the Japanese space program because it becomes emblematic of all those other failures.
- [39:23]
B
Yeah, the poster child for failure is not what they were hoping for in the 80s. Is this why then we get in 2003 the creation of JAXA? Is it a consolidation because of budget cuts from the other two, or what factors go into this creation?
- [39:38]
A
Yeah, so to answer that, I need to get into some technicalities a little bit, so I hope you'll indulge me. So, basically, what it has to do is with, first of all, a general political sense that things have been run inefficiently. So to put it really bluntly, the main reason that Japan had multiple space programs was because different groups of people wanted to be doing different things, things in space. And they didn't want to listen to anybody else. They wanted to do things their own way. So nasdaq, with its industrial relationships and its economic outlook, or its commercial outlook, and then ISAs, with its sort of science outlook, politicians always hated this. They always hated the idea that there were these multiple space programs. They didn't like the administrative messiness. They didn't like the fact that they couldn't keep track of development across the space program because they got reports from each space program separately. And this was even more confusing because sometimes they would get reports on the same topic from multiple space agencies, and they would have to sort of correlate these and collate them and try and figure out what the broader trends across the industry was. So this structure that had existed had been great at giving these different groups of people space to pursue their own agendas, but was really bad when it came to rationalizing budgetary concerns or administrative and organizational concerns. The other thing they noticed in the 1990s was that when failures occurred in one area, it was impossible to generalize them into the work of other space agencies. So by the 1990s, for example, ISAs and NASDAQ had divided up their responsibilities in the space program by the kind of rocketry they were using. ISAs had a monopoly on solid fuel rockets. NASDAQ basically dealt with all other kinds of rockets. What this meant was two separate supply lines, two separate sets of organization and administration, and two different sets of procedures. So if something went wrong with a NASDAQ rocket, and I beg your pardon, an ISAS rocket, and NASDAQ was happened to be using a similar booster, you couldn't use the solutions ICES came up with in Nasdaq because that required a mapping over of all the procedures and administrative functions, which were different. So every time something went wrong, it seemed like the solutions didn't really go anywhere. The same problems were recurring, the same mistakes were happening. On top of that, because of budgetary cuts, there was greater pressure placed on fewer employees. I mean, this is what happens everywhere all the time. And people were starting to make mistakes. So there were a couple of incidents where people actually died because of errors in procedure. And after the H2 rocket failed for the second time, and this is late in the 1990s, the cost of this system just became too much in the eyes of politicians. The pressure to reform just became too much. It was essentially concluded that if Japan wanted to have a competitive and efficient space program, it needed to centralize. There was one other factor as well, which is that it became increasingly evident that Japan had to militarize space. They were going to have to establish their own information networks in space. They were going to have to have infrastructure that could coordinate their military assets without fear of intervention by any foreign power, even the United States. So all of these factors kind of contributed to this sense that there needed to be a centralized space program. And so in 2003, they create JAXA.
- [43:27]
B
Yeah, as soon as you're laying out the, like, different processes, when it's not just about kind of different science projects, when you're also talking like duplicate HR departments, right. And like, completely separate checklists of if something is ready, like, the problems become evident very, very quickly and especially in the kind of wider challenges that Japan was facing in the 90s. So, yeah, all of that together definitely makes a lot of sense. And now, as you said at the beginning, JAXA is what Japan has.
- [43:54]
A
Right.
- [43:54]
B
And it's got a pretty big budget, I believe bigger than either France or Germany's space budgets, which is pretty big. And so that kind of helps us understand sort of where Japan's space space efforts are at now. Speaking then of now and perhaps the future, what are you up to now that you have gone back in time and figured this out and taken us up to the present?
- [44:17]
A
Yeah, so I'm working on a. I'm obviously keeping track of what JAXA is doing. I think JAXA have a few really exciting missions lined up. I'm really excited right now about the Toyota Moon Grover, which they're producing for Artemis, which is the American effort of getting back in the moon. I, I actually did an interview recently where I explained, I think that what's happening here is Japan is positioning itself for the upcoming space economy. I think in our lifetimes we're going to see the beginnings of meaningful economic activity in space. And by that I don't mean data centers, I mean actual sort of mining. I think energy is going to be one of the main things. There's a lot of energy in space. So I think what you're seeing in Japan is these institutions beginning to find these niches in the future space economy and positioning themselves there. I also think that Japan has. I'm a huge fan of Venus. I think Venus is the most interesting planet in the solar system. And I do. My understanding is that Japan does have plans to go back to Venus. So I'm very excited about that. But I also, I think I mentioned to you before we started this interview that I'm also a writer. Fiction, I write speculative fiction. My first novel, Triangulum, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. So I do that. I have a couple of stories coming up in Analog as well, so you can follow my work on subobijeratna.com, which is my website.
- [45:43]
B
Well, lots going on with JAXA and in your world as well. So thank you for that. And of course, in addition to finding your fiction, listeners can also read the book we've been discussing titled the Islands and the A History of Japan Space Programs, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Subo, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [46:04]
A
Thank you so much for having me on.