Japanese Science and Technology
Japanese Science and Technology, 1982 –1999, and after
Independent Contractor, Developmental Studies Center (Oakland, CA) and Mills College: Japan Science Education Project, 1999 (May-November)
Senior Research Association (Independent Contractor), Brintnall & Nicolini pharmaceutical marketing research, Philadelphia, PA, 1998 (January-July)
Visiting Research Fellow, National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Tokyo, 1996 (June-September)
Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Asian Business & Language Studies, University of New South Wales, Australia, 1996 (January-May)
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, 1989-1996.
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cleveland Ohio, 1988-1989
Associate Director for Research and Program Development, North Carolina State University Japan Center1982-1988.
Fellowships and Research Grants (Postdoctoral)
Scholar's Award, Studies in Science, Technology and Society, National Science Foundation, 1995-1996
Scholarly and Creative Development Award, University of Oregon, 1992
Advanced Area Research Grant for Japan, Social Science Research Council, 1992
Scholar's Award, Studies in Science, Technology and Society, National Science Foundation, 1990-1992
Travel Grant, Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council, 1989
Faculty Development Award, Ohio State Board of Regents, 1989
Selected Writing Related to Japanese Science and Technology, Research Methods, and Japanese Culture and Society, 1982 - 2009
2011 Japanese Advertising: How Different, How Similar!
2009Teaching Culture in Japanese Language Programs at the University Level: Insights from the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Japanese Language and Literature, 43: 319-333.
2009An Anthropologist Looks Back—And Looks Forward. Osaka Bioscience Institute 20th Anniversary Commemorative Publication. Osaka: OBI.
2006 Getting Cooperation in Policy-Oriented Research, in Doing Fieldwork in Japan, Theodore C. Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, & Victoria Lyon Bestor, Eds. (pp. 109-123). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
2002Kenshoo: Naze Nihon no Kagakusha wa Mukuwarenai no ka? [An Investigation: Why Aren’t Japanese Scientists Rewarded?] Translation, with Yoko Iwatate, of Japanese Science: From the Inside. Tokyo: Bun-ichi Sogo Shuppansha.
2002The Creation of Japanese and U.S. Elementary Science Textbooks: Different Processes, Different Outcomes. Catherine C. Lewis, Ineko Tsuchida, and Samuel Coleman. in National Standards and School Reform in Japan and the United States, Gary DeCoker, Ed. (pp. 46-66). New York: Teacher's University Press.
2001What’s Wrong with Japanese Basic Science? JPRI Working Paper No. 74. Japan Policy Research Institute.
1999Japanese Science: From the Inside. Foreword by Arthur Kornberg, Nobel Laureate. London: Routledge.
1996Obstacles and Opportunities in Access to Professional Work Organizations for Long-Term Fieldwork: The Case of Japanese Laboratories. Human Organization 55 (3):334-43.
1995Industry-University Cooperation at Japan's Protein Engineering Research Institute: A Study Based on Long-Term Fieldwork. Human Organization 54 (1):20-30.
1992Nihon no Saiensu ni Dokujisei wa Aru no ka? [Does Japanese Science Have Originality?] Kagaku Asahi 52 (1):113-118.
1990Riken from 1945 to 1948: The Reorganization of Japan's Physical and Chemical Research Institute under the American Occupation. Technology and Culture 31 (2):228-250.
1990Kagaku wo Taishou to suru Bunka Jinruigakuteki Apurouchi [Anthropology in the Social Study of Science]. Kenkyuu Gijutsu Keikaku/Journal of Science Policy and Research Management (Special Edition on Science, Technology and Human Creativity), 5 (2):204-209.
1986Applied Japanese Studies for Science and Engineering at American Universities. Richard J. Samuels and Samuel Coleman. Engineering Education 76 (4):206-210. Also published in Getting America Ready for Japanese Science and Technology, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars / MIT-Japan Science and Technology Program, Washington, DC (February 1985). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
1983Japan and North Carolina State University. Occasional Papers of the North Carolina Japan Center, No. 2 (November). Reprinted in Congressional Testimony, The Availability of Japanese Scientific and Technical Information in the United States. Subcommittee on Science, Research and Technology, Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives, 1984 (March 7).
Sam Coleman Interviews Sam Coleman on Japanese Science and Technology
Sam: You were a “deanlet” at North Carolina State in the ‘80s. Is this where you set aside your medical anthropology, population and birth control specialties?
Sam: Right. The job market told me to. At that time Japanese corporations were pouring capital into the sunbelt states, and the newly formed Japan Center was meant to attract more “reverse investment” to the state while adding a scholarly dimension to the effort. I had just finished a marvelous postdoc at the Carolina Population Center in Chapel Hill, and was wrapping up writing my book on Japanese birth control. I lobbied the NCSU folks shamelessly til they hired me. The school was gloriously aggy and engineering, which I liked, but … there was no school of public health where I could lecture on Japanese condom use and abortion.
S: I guess not! What did you accomplish at NCSU?
S: I conceived and executed fund raising for an endowed scholarship program known as the Harry C. Kelly Fund for US-Japan Scientific Cooperation. It began as a $496,000 endowment at North Carolina State University that gave financial aid to students in the sciences who took up Japanese language study. I just heard from John Baugh, the current Director of the NCSU Japan Center, and the fund still going strong! I’ll take the liberty of quoting from his September 22 ’09 e-mail: “[The Kelly Fund] has been an extremely important and ongoing source of support for the center, particularly for our science and technology students in study-abroad programs.”
S: That must be gratifying. So you became a program development specialist, and your efforts managed to pay off well afterward.
S: I also crafted a research payoff from the project. The fund memorializes Dr. Harry Kelly, a physicist who had been the science advisor to the American Occupation of Japan, so I researched the incident in which the US Army destroyed Japan’s research cyclotrons--the crisis that had first brought Kelly to Japan--and published off of that. That was my first experience in both archival research and oral histories.
S: That job at NC State did eventually provide a springboard for you into a genuine assistant professorship, though. Isn’t that what you’d always wanted since grad school days?
S; Yes--Emphatically! It was in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. They were strongly oriented toward medical anthropology, but they also wanted to expand into the anthropology of science and technology. Enter Sam. The university gave my wife a tenured associate professorship in the modern languages department, the same status that she had at NC State.
S: CWRU didn’t last long.
S: I left CWRU because my wife was offered an infinitely better arrangement for her career at the University of Oregon, so I went with her there as an assistant professor. I thought I’d benefit too, but I was regarded as a “trailing spouse.” That’s what she was at CWRU, though, and turnabout is fair play, right?
S: What did this stage of your professional life give you, intellectually speaking?
S: A lot. I learned about the production of knowledge from my comparative ethnographic study of American and Japanese biomedical labs. My participation in the Mills College Japanese Science Education Project gave me some good ideas about how textbooks should be constructed. I learned a lot about the structure and function of a university from setting up the Kelly Fund at NC State. I learned first-hand about a highly functioning anthropology department from my year at Case Western Reserve. And Oregon taught me a lot about the politics that surround personnel decisions when my tenure and promotion case was reversed at the Provost level.
S: Yes, I can imagine.
S: Don’t tell the old guard at Oregon, but I actually benefited from that experience because it gave me a visceral understanding of the motives that underlie academic promotion decisions. I applied it to my analysis of the Japanese university system in my book on the organization of biomedical research in Japan.
S: You have some private sector experience, I see.
S: My brief stint in interviewing physicians in the US and Japan for product messaging in pharmaceutical marketing research at Brintnall and Nicolini—fascinating!--gave me insights about the significance of the emotions attached to the evaluation of scientific facts. Those folks at B&N do interviewing right. My boss there was an anthropologist who had been a fellow grad student. Brilliant and driven. If his company had had a Los Angeles office, who knows, I might still be working there. Working for B&N meant being alone in Philadelphia—an arrangement the Japanese call “tanshin funin.” Life outside the office was pretty lonely.
S: It was good to get back to your family, wasn’t it?
[S: nods in strong agreement.]
S: But the crowning achievement was your second book.
S: With a foreword by the now departed Nobel laureate, Arthur Kornberg. It’s too bad that Routledge priced the book in the stratosphere. That’s what happens when you’re owned by a British multinational publishing conglomerate. Here’s a link to the review in Nature—speaking of price tags, my apologies if you have to pony up for a subscription to read it.
