NASA-Japan Relations in the Early 1960s

Apart from the spectacular transmission of the 1964 Olympics held in Tokyo, space relations between NASA and Japan during the early 1960s remained very superficial and were limited to sharing data and flying small probes in sounding rockets.13 Two factors hindered NASA’s cooperation with Japan during the early years. First, there was the controversial domestic behavior by Itokawa who sought autonomy for his ISAS group, coupled with open hostility between the Japanese scientist and NASA authorities. Itokawa complained to the State Department that, unlike the United States Air Force, which was more cooperative, NASA always imposed some terms or conditions that made the cooperation unattractive. He particularly resented an incident that occurred around 1962-1963 when he visited the United States as a representative of the government of Japan to arrange for the use of Wallops Island facilities for launching Kappa rockets that had grown too large for the Akita range, only to find that his requests were flatly turned down by NASA.14 Arnold Frutkin put the blame squarely on Itokawa’s shoulders. “The team at ISAS was not open to international cooperation,” he said in a recent interview. “We offered them collaboration exactly as we did to the Europeans and they were more laggard than the Russians in picking it up.”15 Frutkin also deeply resented Itokawa’s interpretation of NASA’s launch policy that the Japanese sci­entist published in a national newspaper, pointing out that “Itokawa wanted to develop a launch vehicle and was willing to completely misrepresent what we were willing to do and were not willing to do in order to get a free hand in Japan.”16 This mutual mistrust undermined any hope of productive cooperation.

The second factor subverting durable space collaboration with Japan was the diffused nature of space activities in the country. In 1962, Richard Barnes, chief of cooperative programs for the Office of International Programs remarked that

[t]here is clearly a substantial reservoir in Japan of the scientific and techno­logical resources (manpower and facilities) needed to carry out a sophisticated space research and development program. These skills are, however, not con­centrated in any one segment of the Japanese community. They are diffused among universities, government laboratories, military and industrial organiza­tions. Also, the close working relationship which exists between the U. S. sci­entific community and the U. S. government is nonexistent in Japan. . . there is currently no Japanese “NASA” i. e. an organization with the assigned mission of promoting and coordinating space research.17

Barnes concluded that without strong central direction the internal divisions in the country would seriously impede both the construction of a coherent national program and substantial cooperation with the United States.

As pointed out earlier, the NSAC chaired by Kaneshige was well aware of these difficulties and was determined to remedy them. He was helped in that goal by the first Chinese nuclear test that led the American authorities to move proac­tively at the highest levels to collaborate with Japan in space, notwithstanding NASA’s qualms.