JAPAN’s parliament has approved the first instalment of a huge budget
increase that will boost the government’s annual spending on research and
development by almost 60 per cent over four years.
The decision reverses decades of neglect of basic research in Japan that has
left the country’s universities desperately short of cash. Some chemists have
had to use coffee jars instead of beakers, while physicists have had to comb
rubbish heaps for discarded equipment.
Despite the technological prowess of Japanese industry, the Council for
Science and Technology, which advises the government and proposed the budget
increase last June (In Brief, 29 June 1996, p 11), argues that Japan’s poor
showing in basic science will eventually undermine the country’s economic
success. But there were fears that the budget increase would be slashed by the
finance ministry to help control Japan’s growing budget deficit. In the end, a
budget of around 3 trillion yen (£15.3 billion) was allocated for 1997.
This is 97 per cent of the amount requested.
“The important thing is that we are on track for the five-year allocation,”
says Hidekazu Chayama, deputy director of the coordination division of the
Science and Technology Agency, which sets the framework for science policy. The
plan envisages a 12 per cent annual increase in public research funding until
2000, when the annual science budget would be around 4.3 trillion yen. That
would bring Japan’s spending on basic research into line with most other
industrialised countries, at just under 1 per cent of GDP. Even allowing for
Japan’s low spending on defence research, government spending on science and
technology currently makes up a much smaller proportion of the national total in
Japan than in other industrialised countries (see
Japanese scientists welcome the increase, but some complain that the new
money is being poured into a few disciplines that the government sees as
potential money-spinners. “Molecular biology and genetics are getting a
tremendous increase in budget, but in other fields we’re getting nothing,” says
Shoichi Kawano, a botanist at Kyoto University.
The plan also includes a package of organisational reforms for universities
and other publicly funded labs. It aims to end a system of promotion that
rewards researchers mainly by age, and will introduce short-term contracts for
researchers, to encourage more flexibility. At present, most researchers are
employed on permanent contracts.