I am in Tokyo this week and next (part vacation—the sumo was excellent, thanks for asking —and part study tour with the University Vice-President’s Network), so of course it’s time for another of my periodic attempts to sum up what’s going on in this always-fascinating country.

Japan is—or at least was—known as a “hi-tech” society. But this, oddly enough, never meant that it was a “science” society. Japan for the most part did not get rich by developing its own technology; it got rich by (among other things) reverse-engineering other peoples technology and then got really good at making small incremental improvements to it. In other words, for Japan, applied science is not a poor cousin to basic science.

(There are deeper patterns at work here too. Japan never had an educated mandarinate the way China did and so was several centuries behind in the development of educational institutions. There were institutions of higher learning, but they mainly served the cause of Buddhism rather than function as a training ground for government the way they did in China. Whether this was a cause or consequence of a couple of centuries of civil war in the early modern period is an open question).

You can see this gap in basic sciences a bit in the pattern of Nobel Prizes that Japanese citizens have won over the years. Since 1990, there have been 20 winners in all, of which only ten were awarded to scientists who made their discoveries while working in Japanese universities; of the other ten, six came from scientists working in the US and four came from scientists working in industrial concerns like the Nichia, Shimadzu, and Asahi Kasei (Canada, which is about a quarter the size of Japan, has a much higher proportion of its Laureates working in US institutions, although this is mostly an Economics and Medicine phenomenon; most of our physics Nobels work in the country). 

Japan is quite sensitive about international comparisons like this (something that goes back to the Meiji period) and so the global status of its universities has always been something of an obsession. Even before the notion of “world-class universities” became a forum for contesting soft power, Japan was worried about how its top universities compared to those in other countries. It was one of the first countries in the world to implement an “excellence program” for its universities, and it has been revising its approach to such programs on a regular basis, which suggests both a lack of consistency and—more recently—some actual policy learning.

One of the things that the Japanese government has long thought the country has got wrong is academic culture which was seen as overly conservative and risk-averse (and in some respects has traditionally resembled that of Germany with its strict professorial hierarchies). Twenty-odd years ago, in what was locally known as the “Big Bang,” universities—formerly part of government where academic staff were civil servants—suddenly became independent “Foundations” with separate legal personalities and budget responsibility, capable of pursuing aims independently of government control. The theory was that freed from government control, institutions would suddenly become hives of entrepreneurial activity. 

You can guess how that turned out. Universities relished the idea that they didn’t have to talk to the Ministry of Education so much anymore, but to a significant extent a lot of that independence and autonomy was used to keep the status quo ante of institutional culture unchanged. Japan thought it was giving up some institutional control/accountability in return for greater individual professorial responsibility in a more managerial and outcome-focused system; in the end, it got neither.

This failure to some extent changed the way the Japanese looked at Excellence projects. The early versions of this program were mostly about spreading tiny bits of research money around: a couple of million per institution per year, nothing that would move the needle in the slightest. But over the last versions of these projects, two things have happened. First, the amounts spent per institution are much larger, and second, the purpose of the projects has shifted. No longer are these projects solely about research: there is a fair component of cash earmarked for things that the government believes are going to create institutional change. And that change, specifically is “internationalization.” This is not just about attracting foreign students and creating international partnerships; it’s also about attracting international academic staff, on the theory that such “fresh blood” from countries with more dynamic higher education systems might invigorate Japanese institutions as well.

Add to all that four other interesting pieces which I think make Japanese higher education an interesting place to be right now.

First, as I pointed out a little while ago, Japan is one of only a handful of OECD countries where funding has been increasing in the last couple of years. Most of the increase has come through competitive research funding.

Second, twenty years after the Big Bang, the government is finally learning how to steer the system indirectly through performance-based funding (see an overview of the Japanese system by Yutaro Tsuji here). I am not super-impressed by the design of this PBF system – too many indicators with not enough money at stake meaning individual indicators aren’t worth all that much and hence unlikely to influence big changes in institutional behaviour—but the point here is that there is some serious policy learning going on, which I think bodes well.

Third, the Japanese government has hit on a genuinely innovative funding mechanism for some of its new excellence initiatives, in the form of a 10-year taper function. One of the primary criticisms levelled at excellence projects, whether they are big international efforts like the World Bank’s African Centres of Excellence projects or our own Canada First Research Excellence Fund is that at the end of a funding cycle, the funding simply falls off a cliff. Year 1: $10 million. Years 2-5: also $10 million. Year 6: zero. The assumption is that somehow the project will become “sustainable” by attracting other funds, but this almost never happens in a straightforward way, so the result is a very real and painful funding cliff. Instead, what the Japanese government does is take away a tenth of the value of the funding each year, in effect front-ending the money and allowing institutions and/or research groups much more time and space to adjust to changing funding levels.

Fourth, and perhaps less promisingly, increased government activism in funding is leading it to try to gain more control over what exactly gets funded. Specifically, the government is trying to exercise more control over the Science Council of Japan, much to the displeasure of academics. This might sound a little Trumpian, but things are a little bit more nuanced than they seem. There aren’t many places in the world where academics have so much say, and elected politicians so little, with respect to how research funds are spent as Japan (think of the SCJ as being like the Royal Society, only if the Royal Society ran the granting councils). And of course, things were set up this way deliberately in the aftermath of WWII on the assumption that Good Scientists would always be able to keep potentially militaristic politicians at bay, so there is always a peace/war overlay to discussion which really should be more technocratic. The point here is that there is probably room to compromise even if no one at the moment seems minded to do so.

In any event: it all makes for a fairly interesting policy environment; to my mind maybe the most interesting anywhere in the OECD.