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The first kanji in 発見 has an action-packed life. 発 is derived from a pictogram showing a hand firing an arrow from a bow. In Japanese it means “departure” or “disclosure,” and it's also a counter for gunshots, explosions, aircraft engines, punches, punch lines, ideas and orgasms. 見 is less dramatic but still full of possibilities: an eye on legs, it means “to look” or “to see.”
For me, the English word “discovery” can feel like an endpoint: something that was hidden has been revealed. I've always found great satisfaction in this process. When I worked for the Bat Conservation Trust, someone wrote in asking where Nathusius’ pipistrelle got its name. Surprisingly, no one seemed to know. I dug through 19th-century books on the Internet Archive until I found the answer: The naturalists who first described the species named it after Hermann von Nathusius, an animal breeder who'd supported their work. The main effect of my discovery was that this fact could be added to Wikipedia, but for me it felt like an achievement: mystery solved, mission accomplished.
発見, for me, highlights a different aspect of discovery. It's a starting point, a piece of knowledge that will send you off in a new direction (sometimes whether you like it or not). And the rich life of 発 makes me think about the emotional impact of a discovery: the surprise, the laughter, the ecstasy or the devastation.
*****
When I submitted my DNA to a genealogy service, I thought I might discover the truth about my great-grandfather. I'd known for a while that he hadn't been who he said he was: Charles Daniel Henry, born 23 April 1896 in a small town in Pennsylvania. When he'd shown up in my great-grandmother's life in 1922, he'd said he was the child of immigrants who died when he was an infant, and had been raised by an Amish family until he set out to seek his fortune. That story fell apart as soon as it became easy to research it, and public records yielded no trace of his existence before he and my great-grandmother married.
When my DNA matches turned up a close-ish cousin I'd never heard of, I scrolled through their public family tree, hoping to find a man of similar age who'd disappeared from the record in the early 1920s.
I only had to go up two branches, and there he was. Charles Daniel Fagley, born 23 April 1896 in a different small Pennsylvania town. In 1922, a new surname and birthplace were all you needed to establish a new identity ... and to stop your new fiancee from learning about the wife and two children you'd abandoned in the next state.
The discovery was like an explosion: shock, exhilaration, triumph. I wanted to tell everyone (and soon heard from relatives demanding I keep quiet).
But what I'd found was troubling, too. My great-grandfather's first wife had been 14 and pregnant when they married. (My great-grandmother was 16.) She divorced him in absentia around five years after he abandoned her (by which point he'd been married to my great-grandmother for three years and had a third child, my maternal grandfather). She moved states, started a nursing career and eventually remarried. But in between came years of great hardship. While Charles Daniel Henry won sympathy with his story of orphanhood, Charles Daniel Fagley's children spent time in orphanages because their mother couldn't support them alone.
I don't think those children ever learned what had happened to their father. And now that I have, I feel as if my path in life has slightly changed.
*****
I'm old enough to have been taught, with no qualifiers, that “Columbus discovered America.” I fear that future American children may be taught the same. Sometimes I think the world is divided between those who discover things in order to claim them, and those for whom discovery is a way of travelling beyond themselves.
Nathusius’ pipistrelles migrated across Europe for millennia before any humans took notice. Their discovery means that we can go with them.
One of my favourite films starring Fukuyama Masaharu is Midsummer's Equation, which is streaming for free with English subtitles on the JFF Theatre website until 4 November 2026. Like Suspect X, this film is based on one of Higashino Keigo's Detective Galileo novels. I didn't like the book as well as The Devotion of Suspect X, but I think the film adaptation is far more artistically successful. Director Nishitani Hiroshi eliminates some of the book's subplots and reveals some of its plot twists up front to focus on the story's emotional core: the unlikely friendship that develops between the nominally child-hating Professor Yukawa (played by Fukuyama) and Kyōhei (Yamazaki Hikaru), a little boy staying in the same seaside town.
Shipped to his aunt and uncle's hotel to get him out of his parents’ way, Kyōhei latches on to Yukawa as the only adult who treats him without condescension. At first he claims to hate science, but Yukawa helps him build a rocket made with a plastic bottle and a mobile phone which lets him see the area's famous crystals on the sea floor. In an ingeniously shot scene, we see the viewing capsule under the water and the boy's delighted face on the phone screen.
Meanwhile, of course, there's a murder to investigate. And Yukawa gradually discovers something that has terrible implications for Kyōhei. What's more, he knows the child's newfound love of science and discovery means he will one day figure out the truth. Very little of this is spelled out; Fukuyama communicates it through his troubled and compassionate performance.
“You'll encounter hard problems,” Yukawa tells Kyōhei before they go their separate ways. “I will too. But if we keep growing, we can find the answers. And until we do, I'll think with you.”
Discovery is a departure. But where we go is up to us.