US vs. Japanese Culture
Freshly minted Nobel Prize Winner Professor Ei-ichi Negishi addressing the announcement press conference.
West Lafayette, IN - Today finds me on the campus of Purdue University making television for a Japanese television network. Professor Ei-ichi Negishi won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling. As I understand it, the process will revolutionize many industries from electronics to DNA marking to possible cures for cancer.
Here's the cultural difference.
Professor Negishi is Japanese. The Japanese media and people are praising him as a hero, someone to be looked up to and a roll model to follow. In fact the parking lot here outside the Dauch Alumni Center is crawling with Japanese print and electronic media tripping over themselves to get this story out. It ran live on all the national morning shows in Japan. They are still here preparing for their evening news shows. (Japan is ahead of eastern time by 13 hours.)
As for US media, two of the local TV stations showed up for the 11:00 a.m. presser. One rolled tape and left. The other went live at noon, then left. There was a shooter from Associate Press TV that shot the presser then uploaded the video to the home office. If you see anything about this on any of the national networks, that is probably where it came from.
There were no other takers from the US media.
Had this been Mel Gibson with his highly public foot in his mouth again, some wayward sports star busted in a massage parlor sting or the latest octo-mom type of event, the US media would have been the ones tripping all over themselves. The morning show bookers would be slitting one another's throats trying to get that exclusive one on one interview. Photographers and satellite trucks would be camped on the street outside the subject's home waiting for the slightest glimpse of the even subject's cat so they can be first on the air with it. Neighbors that never met the subject would be getting face time while explaining their take on the incident d'jour.
The US Media does publicize winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Take for instance Jimmy Carter's 2002 win, apparently for rolling over and playing dead rather then nipping that Iranian thing in the bud while we had the chance. Let us not forget the 2007 award went to Al Gore for his work strengthening The Church of Global Warming.
But you are going to be hard pressed to find more then a couple paragraphs buried in the back of the paper or more then a 15 second mention on television about anyone winning an award of any kind for the hard sciences.
So while the Japanese media publicize Nobel Prize winners, we in the US would rather check out Lindsay Lohan's latest screw up. One of us is doing something wrong. The standings of US students in the world rankings should be no surprise to anyone.
If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
- Richard P. Feynman