Science is Universal

When not writing in praise of shadows and the superiority of the traditional Japanese toilet as a place of spiritual repose and poetic inspiration, Tanizaki likes to dream - somewhat dangerously, I'd suggest - of an Oriental science that would stand in radical opposition and contrast to the knowledge forms and mechanical innovations developed in modern Europe:

"Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our ... everyday gadgets, our medicines ... have suited our national temper better than they do? In fact, our conception of physics itself, and even the principles of chemistry, would probably differ from that of Westerners; and the facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms might well have presented themselves in different form."

Now, to be fair, Tanizaki immediately pulls himself up at this point and admits that he is merely indulging in idle speculation on matters of which he's entirely ignorant. But it needs to be emphasised just how mistaken and insidious this view is - not least of all in this age of irrationalism, relativism, and anti-scientific stupidity in the name of diversity, otherness, and traditional wisdom.

For whilst each and every nation can have its own cuisine, its own art, its own cinema, etc. it cannot have its own science in the sense in which we today talk about and understand science; the scientific method isn't peculiar to one group of people and the facts it discovers about the world aren't merely local interpretations. Ultimately, science is universal and not determined by race, religion, ideology, or culture. There's no such thing as Soviet biology or Chinese medicine; nor is there Christian evolution, or feminist physics.           

When scientists talk about the Big Bang, for example, they are not simply playing a language game or indulging in empty metaphor; nor are they constructing an oppressive grand narrative. They are, rather, attempting to conceptualise the universe as it exists in mind-independent actuality. By observation and experimentation carried out within a theoretical context, they are making a noble effort to verify that their statements about the world are as objectively true as it's possible for statements to be (whilst still remaining open to falsification in the light of new evidence).

Science is universal not because it's a humanism, but because it describes an inhuman universe ...

See: Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, (Vintage, 2001), p. 14.