Hoshi Yuichiro and Yamashita Go froze. Everyone in the office was dumbstruck.
And that was not all. Shortly after the video was uploaded to his personal blog, the entire Japanese academic community erupted.
Just as everyone had hoped, Shinichi Mochizuki openly stepped forward and responded to the removal of his paper from his personal blog and the mathematics department's website.
Only, his response was not what people wanted to hear at all.
In a sense, Japan's academic community was relatively insular compared with the global academic community.
That insularity did not manifest in academic exchanges themselves, but in an exclusionary atmosphere that permeated Japanese academia, driven by extreme self-confidence.
Put simply, they had nothing against anyone in particular. They just instinctively assumed that all the foreign scholars present were trash, with no country receiving special treatment.
This exclusionary culture, rooted in the subconscious, made it difficult for foreign scholars to fit in. Japanese scholars were also rarely willing to engage with the wider world on their own initiative. Of their twenty-two Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, and biology, twenty had simply kept their heads down and worked away on the islands, and their English was invariably very "average."
In such an atmosphere, if a Japanese scholar was challenged by a foreign scholar, Japan's academic community would assume the world was wrong unless the evidence before them was utterly irrefutable.
And if someone actually bowed in apology or did anything similar, it could only be because they could no longer withstand the pressure.
For precisely that reason, compared with "academic fraud" or "scandal" itself, Japan's academic community felt a deeper sense of shame over "having an error exposed."
To understand why, one only needed to look at the top ten names on Retraction Watch's retraction leaderboard.
Of those ten leading