My Search for Ramanujan

by Ken Ono

  But this morning turns out to be no ordinary day. Suddenly, his rear wheel kicks up a large stone and flings the projectile in a fateful arc straight through the large plate glass window of a small tailor shop, smashing it to bits. He halts his bike. The thunderous sound of crashing shards and the crowd of onlookers that gathers frighten him. In a panic, and afraid of facing the shopkeeper’s wrath, the boy mounts his bicycle and disappears down the crowded street.

  After school, he chooses a different route home; he is afraid to face the consequences. Later that night, overwhelmed with shame and guilt, he vows to visit the shop the next day to pay for the repairs. The next morning, after some further soul-searching, he musters his courage and makes his way to the shop.

  To his horror, he arrives to find a giant crater where the shop had been. The previous night, as was common at that time, a fleet of American bombers had conducted a long-range firebombing raid. The shop has disappeared, as has almost the entire block. There is no shop-owner to repay; he is one of many innocent casualties of war whose lives have been extinguished for reasons the boy doesn’t understand.

  That boy is Takashi Ono, and he will become my father, whom we call Takasan in reverence.

  This story is one of the few that my father tells about his childhood. My parents were born and raised in Japan. My father was born in 1928, and my mother in 1936. They came of age during World War II and the subsequent difficult postwar reconstruction.

  Takasan, ca. 1935

  My father has a small number of stories about his childhood that he likes to tell and retell. Some involve his athletic prowess; it seems that he was a fast runner in high school. However, the crucial ones, the stories that must be understood to penetrate our family, all involve war. They are stories about fire and smoke, weeks of hunger, and the stench of death. They are the stuff of nightmares, but for my parents, they are more than bad dreams. Those nightmares are their history, their daily reality when they were growing up in Yokohama and Tokyo at a time when surviving to the next day was the only goal.

  It was difficult for the Japanese to grasp what was happening. Their country was supposed to be everywhere triumphant. In the eighty years preceding the war, Japan had transformed itself from a feudal state to a world power thanks to a major investment in industrialization and modernization.

  That development was accompanied by a rise in militarism, which led to Japan’s quest to conquer Asia, beginning with victorious wars against China and Russia. During those conflicts, the Japanese military committed unspeakable atrocities against the civilian populations. The Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing, is perhaps the most infamous war crime committed by the Japanese military in the years immediately preceding World War II. Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, fell to the Japanese army in December 1937. For six weeks, Japanese soldiers raped, looted, and murdered Chinese citizens with impunity. The murders were justified by the pretext that large numbers of Chinese soldiers were disguised as civilians. It is estimated that 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war perished.

  Such atrocities contributed to the worldwide opinion, which persists in the minds of some today, that the Japanese are a barbaric race. But the Japanese were taught otherwise, that they were superior to all other races.

  In the nineteenth century, Japan had a spiritual government, the “State Shinto,” which promoted the unity of government with certain aspects of Shintoism. The Japanese emperor was considered divine, and government leaders often performed religious ceremonies in which they communicated with the Sun Goddess. Japanese citizens were taught that self-sacrifice was the greatest virtue, and sacrificing oneself in service to the nation was regarded as the greatest expression of patriotism.

  In the early twentieth century, as an extension of some of the principles underlying its isolationist policies of the mid-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, the imperial government reinforced the notion that the Japanese were an exceptional race. Government scientists even offered proof of this superiority by noting that the Japanese had a higher forehead-to-nose ratio, less body odor, and less body hair than other peoples. In contrast, the Americans were little more than yaju, wild beasts.

  The Japanese government maintained this propaganda throughout World War II, even as firebombs devastated the neighborhoods of Tokyo. That was the Japan of my parents’ youth, a tumultuous time when everything they had been taught about their country crumbled before their eyes.

  For a people that had been taught that their emperor was a god and that their race was superior to all others, this change in fortune was unfathomable. Finally, they were confronted with the undeniable reality and humiliation of resounding defeat and unconditional surrender. What happens to a nation’s psyche when its divine leader and superior race of warriors are defeated by a nation of wild beasts? How does a nation recover?

  A nation recovers ultimately from the recovery of each individual, and for my father, the path to wholeness was through mathematics. Perhaps mathematics was his escape from a brutal and inhuman existence. He had always been good at math, and as a young man, he joined with other young Japanese men to create a community of self-taught mathematicians. Their goal was to escape their dreary lives by making a mark in the world of mathematics. They had to learn from one another: their universities had been decimated by war, and the few professors remaining were unaware of the current research that was being produced in Europe and the United States.

  My father got his big break thanks to the generosity of André Weil, who had emigrated from France to the United States in 1941 and was now a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey.

  Weil was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was a founding member and the self-styled leader of the Bourbaki group, a collective of mostly French mathematicians who aimed to reformulate mathematics based on extremely abstract but self-contained formal foundations. They wrote a series of books, published under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki, that codified several branches of modern mathematics.

  Weil met my father in 1955 during a trip to Japan to attend the Tokyo–Nikko conference on algebraic number theory, at which time my father was a graduate student at Nagoya University. The conference was an important opportunity for Japan to reengage with the world in the name of science. In his opening address, Zyoiti Suetuna, the chairman of the symposium, proclaimed,We can say that this kind of an international meeting, which aims at the cultural development of mankind regardless of all the political, social, and racial differences, will exert not a small influence on advancement of international cooperation and peace in the world.

  The conference was a tremendous success in this regard. In addition, the conference was the unexpected site of one of the most famous events in twentieth-century mathematics, though it would be recognized as such only many years later.

  At the time of the symposium, Weil was a professor at the University of Chicago. Weil and Jean-Pierre Serre, a fellow Bourbaki member and future professional acquaintance of mine who had been awarded the Fields Medal the previous year, were two of the distinguished speakers at the conference. The Fields Medal, which is awarded at the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians, is regarded as the “Nobel Prize” of mathematics. The self-taught young Japanese mathematicians were thrilled to have the opportunity to mingle and chat with some of the world’s best mathematicians.

  For many of those young Japanese mathematicians, including my father, that meeting changed the course of their lives. These men had been toiling away for years on their research in solitude and isolation, first during World War II and then during the postwar reconstruction. They were poor, and they were hungry, and not only for knowledge, for they had little to eat, often getting by on nothing more than an occasional bowl of rice. Despite their circumstances, they set their sights high, and they aimed to make a mark in the world of mathematics. The conference was their opportunity to share the fruits of their labor
with important mathematicians with access to the entire world of mathematics outside of Japan. These young men hoped finally to be rewarded with international recognition.

  That dream became a reality for a surprisingly large number of them. Impressed by their work ethic and their accomplishments, Weil used his influence to arrange scientific opportunities for some at places like the Institute for Advanced Study. Thanks in part to his generosity, the best among them eventually secured professorships at top universities in the United States, the nation that Japan had ruthlessly attacked on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. That cohort included Jun-Ichi Igusa (Johns Hopkins), Shoshichi Kobayashi (Berkeley), Michio Kuga (SUNY Stony Brook), Ichiro Satake (Berkeley), Goro Shimura (Princeton), and Tsuneo Tamagawa (Yale). My father, who gave a lecture on orthogonal groups at the meeting, eventually landed a prestigious position at the Johns Hopkins University.

  Part of the group photo at the 1955 Tokyo–Nikko conference (Top row: second from left, Jean-Pierre Serre; third from left, Yutaka Taniyama. Third row: second from left, Takashi Ono. Second row: on left, Goro Shimura. Bottom row: third from right, André Weil)

  Anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1940s

  Coming to America

  Every family has its story, and my parents’ reads like a fairytale. It is the story of a young starving Japanese couple who sought a better way of life than could be had in postwar Japan. My father, an aspiring mathematician, impressed the distinguished mathematician André Weil, who then provided the opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to study and work among the best in America, arranging a research position at the Institute for Advanced Study, “Einstein’s institute in the woods.”

  The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research. It promotes curiosity-driven research in the humanities and the sciences. The Institute was founded in 1930 by the American educator Abraham Flexner with funding by the philanthropist businessman Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Its picturesque campus occupies eight hundred acres of former farmland outside Princeton, New Jersey.

  The Institute consists of four schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. However, it is not a school in any usual sense. The Institute doesn’t offer degrees, and it doesn’t offer courses. In fact, the Institute doesn’t even have any students. The Institute is a place for deep thought where roughly thirty permanent faculty members in its four schools, together with visiting scholars, pursue knowledge for its own sake.

  The Institute opened with five of the world’s leading mathematicians and physicists: John Alexander, Albert Einstein, Oswald Veblen, John von Neumann, and Hermann Weyl. Forty of the fifty-six Fields Medalists and thirty-three Nobel laureates have been members of the Institute. The Institute is a place where the world’s best theoreticians think deeply about mathematics and physics without worrying about real-world applications.

  The Institute is difficult to find; you must seek it out. If you visit the quaint town of Princeton, you will find yourself embraced by the Princeton University community. But you will see no evidence of the Institute; you won’t find prominent signs indicating its location. That is intentional. The Institute is a tranquil oasis, set apart from the rest of the world in a nature preserve. It is a haven for brilliant minds. The campus consists of several red brick buildings in the Federal style connected by paved walkways surrounded by expansive fields and forests, and a housing complex for visiting scholars designed by the well-known Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer.

  Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study (photo courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study)

  My father’s professional story has a happy ending, perhaps even a fairytale ending. But his path to professional success is but a part of a larger story, one that raises questions about the price that was paid. My parents never intended to live their lives separated from their families in Japan. Their original plan was a short-term stay in America followed by a return to Japan, where they would raise their family with relatives nearby.

  My father made the most of his stay at the Institute. He proved groundbreaking theorems that brought prestigious job offers. The University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University competed for his services, and Hopkins won out in the end after they sweetened their offer by throwing in a Steinway grand piano. As a result, our family ended up in Lutherville, Maryland, an upper-middle-class suburb of Baltimore, and the prospect of a return to Japan receded into the distance. In view of those lucrative offers, compared with the impoverished postwar conditions in Japan, it is no wonder that they chose to settle in the United States.

  For many years, my mother held out hope that the family would one day return to Japan. It is perhaps for this reason that my parents did not become American citizens until 2007, almost fifty years after they came to America. Obvious challenges accompanied my parents’ decision to remain in the United States. They had to learn a new language, and they had to adjust to customs that were at odds with their Japanese upbringing. On top of such formidable challenges, they also had to withstand the weighty emotional and psychological toll of racism.

  Life in America in the 1950s and early 1960s for Japanese immigrants was a harrowing gauntlet, in which they suffered abusive insults and stares from some of their former enemies. It was a fresh memory in the American psyche that in 1941, Japan had attacked the United States in a brutal act of war, leading to four years of intense warfare, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs that destroyed the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At home, in 1942, the American government responded with the forced relocation and internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans.

  It is then no surprise that there were deep wounds that bred animosity between Japanese immigrants and U.S. citizens after World War II. Such unbridled animosity could be found even among senior government officials. In his testimony before congress in 1943, Lieutenant General John DeWitt proclaimed,I don’t want any [Japanese] here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty … It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty … But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.

  In a public opinion poll published in 1950 by the Institute of Pacific Relations, thirteen percent of the American public was in favor of the extermination of all Japanese. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this statistic. After all, the U.S. military supported the slaughter of innocent Japanese citizens with their firebombing raids and the nuclear annihilation of two major cities. Those actions saved American lives and brought the war with Japan to an end.

  Before 1952, Japanese immigrants were not even allowed to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Japanese-Americans were viewed with suspicion at best, and outright hatred at worst, and that sentiment would take decades to fade away.

  My parents arrived in America at a time when Japanese were not welcomed with open arms. On the contrary, they came to an America where their actions and intentions were viewed with suspicion and disapproval. And they were readily identifiable by their Japanese accents and facial characteristics.

  My mother told us stories about mundane trips to the neighborhood grocery store in which an attempt to buy bread or eggs was an invitation for verbal abuse. Shoppers would curse them, calling them “Jap” or “Nip,” and blame them for war atrocities such as the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were refused service at gas stations by attendants who pretended not to understand their accented English.

  Such hostility faded over time, and the public perception of Japanese-Americans improved. Yet they have not vanished completely. In the 1970s and 1980s, anti-Japanese sentiment was displaced onto envy of Japan’s industrial success, such as the rise of the Japanese auto industry at the expense of Detroit, as portrayed in the film Gung Ho.

  In spite of improving attitudes toward Japanese-Americans, there were still instances of outright criminalit
y. I am old enough to remember several hate crimes against our family. While most of our neighbors embraced and welcomed us into their homes, my early childhood in Lutherville, Maryland, in the 1970s was marred by several racially motivated incidents. Once, the teenaged son of neighbors shot out the windows of our kitchen. That same young man left a burning paper bag filled with dog shit on our front porch. During a road trip through Alabama, we were intentionally rear-ended on the highway. The headlights of the attacking driver’s car were smashed, and the man forced my parents to pay for the repairs. It was clear that he was enjoying verbally torturing us while we waited helplessly and patiently for the repairs to be completed at a service station.

  In the worst incident that I recall, I was the victim. The same wicked neighbor who shot out our windows together with one of his friends committed a hate crime against me, a defenseless second-grader, as I was playing in our backyard. They seized me and dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the forest behind my house. There they tied me to a tree. They pulled the rotting carcass of a dead bird from a paper bag, and they shoved it down my back. I can still see that neighborhood teenager, the one who hated us, clad only in cutoff Levi’s and his trademark red baseball cap, as he toyed with his Swiss Army knife while asking me whether I knew what he liked to do to “Nips.” Then they left me, tied to the tree, in a pile of dried oak leaves. I was left there in the summer heat for what seemed like hours, sobbing, while flies gathered. My mother finally found me and brought me home.

  My parents never called the police, and they didn’t confront the culprits or their parents. I thought they were supposed to protect me. I couldn’t understand why they preferred to pretend that nothing had happened. Whom were they supposed to protect, me or my wicked neighbors? Why did they choose to do nothing at all?