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Some of the Japanese I had learned had quite an effect. One time, when the bus was taking a long time to get started, some guy says, “Hey, Feynman! You know Japanese; tell ’em to get going!”
I said, “Hayaku! Hayaku! Ikimasho! Ikimasho!”—which means, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Hurry! Hurry!”
I realized my Japanese was out of control. I had learned these phrases from a military phrase book, and they must have been very rude, because everyone at the hotel began to scurry like mice, saying, “Yes, sir! Yes sir!” and the bus left right away.
The meeting in Japan was in two parts: one was in Tokyo, and the other was in Kyoto. In the bus on the way to Kyoto I told my friend Abraham Pais about the Japanese-style hotel, and he wanted to try it. We stayed at the Hotel Miyako, which had both American-style and Japanese-style rooms, and Pais shared a Japanese-style room with me.
The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I’m partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, “Ohayo, gozai masu,” which means, “Good morning.”
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, “Ohayo, gozai masu,” and puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, “God, are we uncivilized!”
We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy’s standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were.
I had been working at that time on the theory of liquid helium, and had figured out how the laws of quantum dynamics explain the strange phenomena of super-fluidity. I was very proud of this achievement, and was going to give a talk about my work at the Kyoto meeting.
The night before I gave my talk there was a di
“Well, Feynman,” he said in a gruff voice, “I hear you think you have understood liquid helium.”
“Well, yes.”
“Hoompf.” And that’s all he said to me during the whole di
The next day I gave my talk and explained all about liquid helium. At the end, I complained that there was still something I hadn’t been able to figure out: that is, whether the transition between one phase and the other phase of liquid helium was first-order (like when a solid melts or a liquid boils—the temperature is constant) or second-order (like you see sometimes in magnetism, in which the temperature keeps changing).
Then Professor Onsager got up and said in a dour voice, “Well, Professor Feynman is new in our field, and I think he needs to be educated. There’s something he ought to know, and we should tell him.”
I thought, “Geesus! What did I do wrong?”
Onsager said, “We should tell Feynman that nobody has ever figured out the order of any transition correctly from first principles, so the fact that his theory does not allow him to work out the order correctly does not mean that he hasn’t understood all the other aspects of liquid helium satisfactorily.” It turned out to be a compliment, but from the way he started out, I thought I was really going to get it!
It wasn’t more than a day later when I was in my room and the telephone rang. It was Time magazine. The guy on the line said, “We’re very interested in your work. Do you have a copy of it you could send us?”
I had never been in Time and was very excited. I was proud of my work, which had been received well at the meeting, so I said, “Sure!”
“Fine. Please send it to our Tokyo bureau.” The guy gave me the address. I was feeling great.
I repeated the address, and the guy said, “That’s right. Thank you very much, Mr. Pais.”
“Oh, no!” I said, startled. “I’m not Pais; it’s Pais you want? Excuse me, I’ll tell him that you want to speak to him when he comes back.”
A few hours later Pais came in: “Hey, Pais! Pais!” I said, in an excited voice. “Time magazine called! They want you to send ’em a copy of the paper you’re giving.”
“Aw!” he says. “Publicity is a whore!”
I was doubly taken aback.
I’ve since found out that Pais was right, but in those days, I thought it would be wonderful to have my name in Time magazine.
That was the first time I was in Japan. I was eager to go back, and said I would go to any university they wanted me to. So the Japanese arranged a whole series of places to visit for a few days at a time.
By this time I was married to Mary Lou, and we were entertained wherever we went. At one place they put on a whole ceremony with dancing, usually performed only for larger groups of tourists, especially for us. At another place we were met right at the boat by all the students. At another place, the mayor met us.
One particular place we stayed was a little, modest place in the woods, where the emperor would stay when he came by. It was a very lovely place, surrounded by woods, just beautiful, the stream selected with care. It had a certain calmness, a quiet elegance. That the emperor would go to such a place to stay showed a greater sensitivity to nature, I think, than what we were used to in the West.
At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what they were doing and I’d discuss it with them. They would tell me the general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.
“Wait a minute,” I would say. “Is there a particular example of this general problem?”
“Why yes; of course.”
“Good. Give me one example.” That was for me: I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the begi
But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say, “Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can’t be right!”
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the begi
He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, “Wait! There’s a mistake!”
So in Japan I couldn’t understand or discuss anybody’s work unless they could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn’t find one. Of those who could, it was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a much simpler method of analysis.
Since I was perpetually asking not for mathematical equations, but for physical circumstances of what they were trying to work out, my visit was summarized in a mimeographed paper circulated among the scientists (it was a modest but effective system of communication they had cooked up after the war) with the title, “Feynman’s Bombardments, and Our Reactions.”
After visiting a number of universities I spent some months at the Yukawa Institute in Kyoto. I really enjoyed working there. Everything was so nice: You’d come to work, take your shoes off, and someone would come and serve you tea in the morning when you felt like it. It was very pleasant.