RIKEN

RIKEN, formally the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, was founded on 20 March 1917 in the Komagome district of Tokyo, modelled explicitly on Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The chemist Jokichi Takamine first proposed a national Japanese research institute in a 1913 speech to more than a hundred business and scientific leaders, and the businessman Eiichi Shibusawa organised the private funding, roughly two million yen, that let it open four years later after the Diet passed a supporting resolution in 1915; its first director was the mathematician Baron Dairoku Kikuchi. Now headquartered in Wako, Saitama, on Tokyo's outskirts, with roughly 3,000 researchers across seven campuses, RIKEN conducts basic and applied research across physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, and operates the RIBF particle accelerator facility, where element 113, nihonium, was synthesised and confirmed in 2004, the first element discovered in Asia.