Japan can be a science heavyweight once more if it rethinks funding
31 comments
·February 11, 2025Danieru
Prickle
That's interesting.
Japanese discussions I have had, and articles in Japanese seem to say the opposite. That Japan needs to invest more; because many talented Japanese researchers are emigrating to the USA or China.
The main topic that comes up is that both China and the USA provide better wages, as well as greater funding for projects overall.
But I'm just a local, and certainly not a researcher. Thanks for your POV!
Danieru
To be honest, those are all valid points which I think are true. I've never met an academic who thinks their country should reduce science funding. And the personal incentives do push researchers overseas for higher wages.
Personally though, I think how a country uses the money dominates over how much. Most countries have a pretty consistent level of funding. Sure some countries might double others, but overall funding tends to follow GDP. No country is spending 10%+ of GDP on research, nor do I think is that justifiable.
Thus the differences come from effectiveness of spend, not volume. Japan has an advantage here in the low English proficiency: you cannot be headhunted by the Americans if you cannot speak English. Thus when Japan does focus on specializations, as it did in the past with semiconductors, those researchers cannot be headhunted away.
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dang
[stub for offtopicness]
[see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018086 for why]
coliveira
At this point is the US that needs to rethink funding if it wants to continue to be competitive. The US funding for universities has been frozen (adjusted for inflation) for the last 20 years. It was enough when the rest of the world invested much less in science. But nowadays China is moving faster while US funding is still the same. Giving money to tech companies is not a substitute, because they only care about short term gains.
Hammershaft
It's ridiculous that returns on public basic research have been so great and yet funding has been so neglected. The chips act was a small positive step.
coliveira
This was the biggest change I expected from Biden, however it seems that giving hundreds of billions to big companies is the priority, instead of supporting national research institutions.
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epicureanideal
We can also improve the efficiency of allocation of existing funds.
TheCleric
It can probably become a science heavyweight simply by being here at the moment when science funding in the USA is about to collapse.
dang
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
It's clear why this happens and of course it's not ill intended. The mind naturally follows the most-traveled association path from a new stimulus back to something familiar.
Unfortunately, that is the anticurious direction. Swapping out a specific new topic for the nearest familiar one means replacing a potentially new and interesting discussion with a repetitive old one.
These large generic themes are like black holes: if you fly too close to one, you get sucked in there instead of going wherever else you might have explored, and then no new information emerges.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
scarface_74
The US is literally cutting funding now for science and letting politics get in the way of science.
We can’t have an honest discussion about this without addressing the elephant in the room.
Japan or some other nation has a chance to step up and fill the void that the US is creating. Some other countries universities could even partner with the US universities.
JoelMcCracken
I do get your point, and generally think it makes sense, but in this case it seems extremely relevant: There is a global competition for intellectual capital, and at the moment, the US' position here seems at the very least uncertain, given all that is happening.
nickff
The USA did quite well in applied research before the federal government became the dominant source of funds. That said, it would probably take some time (and some pain) to readjust, and theoretical/arts research would likely be dramatically reduced.
criddell
Arguably, the USA did even better with the feds funding research. I don't know of any program that had a higher ROI than DARPA's VLSI Project.
epistasis
Can you share any pointers on this topic about applied research success, I'm guessing in the pre-WW2 era? I have not heard anything about that and have not been able to locate supporting resources by a web search just now.
SketchySeaBeast
> The USA did quite well in applied research before the federal government became the dominant source of funds.
For my own curiosity, when did that transition occur?
vuln
Perhaps US Universities should tap into billion dollar endowments or slash the administrative headcount instead of raising tuition yet again.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/nih-trump...
ninetyninenine
nah. It's not funding. It's more a side effect of japans economic problems.
aaron695
[dead]
This article seems interested in suggestion Japan abandon its unique approach and adopt the approach used by other nations. That is silly.
Japan is one of the foremost funders of deep research. It funds large physics experiments. It has a long history of semiconductor innovations. MEXT scholarships have proven a brilliant method to attract smart men and women from around the world.
Here in Touhoku I've met so many bright international students on MEXT scholarships doing research within those exact project-funded teams. Switching to person-focused funding would be silly, do you really think a smart guy from Congo is going to be able to win funding? That Japan has a system where the product/team can focus on an established topic, then backfill with smart researches, is a strength not a weakness.
Of course Nature is in the business of publishing papers, not science. So it makes sense they would be blind to the reality of science: you measure it in results not papers. The academics I know are all focused on achieve specific goals, they rarely talk about the papers in the way the Canadian Acedemics I know did back home. Think "I want to automate boar trap monitoring so that farmers do not need to check it everytime, and so that non-boars do not get trapped". That is the sort of highly practical research you get when a supervisor knows their field and knows their country. It might not pay off in papers, but it will pay off for Japan as a country.
The world should be taking lessons from Japan, not the other way around. Team based funding. Scholarships for bright students from any country. Deep funding for physical research other than just ITER and LHC.