From the late fifties to the early sicties, the concept of "cybernetics" was introduced in Japan and it evoked much interest, mostly among the scientists of engineering. However, it has been limited to that discipline and they have not followed the interdisciplinary aspect of cybernetics. To them "cybernetics" just means "feedback mechanism". As a result, almost no interdisciplinary scientific activity has emerged on the line of cybernetics and only few, such as the Japanese scientists, have been interested in international interdisciplinary communication of cybernetics. Although some social scientists introduced the new cybernetics "theory of autopoiesis", it is very much limited to either one discipline or even a personal level. These circumstances had the result that there has been no development of the concept of cybernetics or other meta-disciplinary concept like cybernetics in Japan.
This is the reason why I decided to make an interdisciplinary group of cybernetics in Japan. In the spring of 1992, five people who were interested in the idea of making an interdisciplinary group met in Tokyo. Prof. Komatsuzaki, whose speciality is in information science, became the leader of the group. The other members are from management science, library and information science, physiology, public health, and psychiatry. The name "post-cybernetics" was used because the word "cybernetics" strongly reminds people of mechanical and engineering feedback systems, and, besides we wanted to pursue the new meta-disciplinary concept, and not just to be limited to the conservative cybernetics.
Since then, once a month, we have a conference which includes a lecture and discussion. The membership has increased and we now have thirty names on our mailing list of which fifteen participate in each conference. The new members' specialities are artificial intelligence, engineering, cognitive sciene, sociology, accounting, marketing, and so on. In order to keep the conference active and to allow all participants to fully express their opinion, the current number of members is the limit. For the complementary we are considering a larger symposium or workshop in future, though it has not yet become a real plan. We also aim at publishing a book.
As usual in the cybernetics conference, the lecture themes in our group are various. We have had lectures regarding general consideration of cybernetics, social cybernetics, health care systems, evolution of information, cross-cultural psychology, learning models, the evolution of AI, mechanisms of dreams, and so on. The discussion has veen very stimulating and the participants express their strong interests, because this form of communication cannot be experienced in the ordinary scientific meetings. In other words, we enjoy not only the contents of the lecture, but also the context of the conference.
This is not a group which has concrete goals but one in which members are sharing ideas and empower each other through dialog. This is also the place where both abstract and concrete ideas can interact in the discussion. So the theorists and practitioners can communicate with each other. Actually what we found is that theorists often do not have nough opportunities to know the practical outcome of their theories, and practitioners do not know how to feedback their experience to develop a proper theoretical foundation to guide and develop their practices. We believe that these forms of communication have very fruitful outcome.
In addition, in the future, we hope to engage in the international or global interdisciplinary communication. Cross-cultural communication and interdisciplinary communication are very similar. In those communications, we have to be careful about the context of the others, and, more important, we have to be open minded for specific contexts. Through this introduction of our group, I hope that the readers realize the effort of interdisciplinary communication in Tokyo and that we will be able to expand the cross-cultural communication.
Contact: Makiko Okuyama, Ohmiya Child Health Center, 2-24-1, Toro-Cho, Ohmiya-Shi, Japan 336.
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