The Japanese economic “bubble” is usually thought to have come to an end in 1991, and by some metrics, Japan is no longer the “rich” country it long claimed to be (as Japanese people often lament). Yet in some respects, there is still an awful lot of wealth on display, and this includes funding for academic research. Each year, billions of yen are distributed to thousands of researchers up and down the country. Writing applications for this funding is a big part of life for many Japanese academics. Although Japan is often seen as a country of modest understatement, nothing could be less true when it comes to these applications. The general goal is to make your project sound like the most earth-shattering piece of research ever attempted in your field and the level of “spin” has to be seen to be believed. These applications are considered by 3 “judges,” who will themselves be academics, though not necessarily in your field. They may be your colleagues, your friends, or even your partner, but statistically it is always far more likely that they are colleagues, friends or partners of the many people competing against you for the money. They know exactly who you are.
The results are announced around the beginning of March, bringing joy to some and despair to others. In the abstract, of course, one would assume that the money would go to (i) the best projects devised by (ii) the best researchers with (iii) the best track record of producing high level, internationally recognized research. In reality, it is so hard to see that this is the case that many Japanese academics refer to the whole system as a “lottery.” You may “get lucky,” they will say, or you may not. If it really is this arbitrary, of course, it’s very concerning and hardly conducive to improving the international ratings of Japan’s many universities.
In fact, I believe, the “lottery” idea is just a comforting myth. There is not a random pattern of success and failure. Some academics will get grant after grant, leveraging one into another, and burning through millions of yen of taxpayers’ money in the course of their careers. Some will never touch this money at all.
One result of this, that I’m often led to contemplate (coming from a somewhat poor, somewhat puritanical background), is the relative cost of research and the matter of value for money. Imagine 2 Japanese professors of English working on T. S. Eliot. The first gets no special funding and relies on the resources of their university library, with the mass of online materials, etc. The cost of the research is hardly more than the electricity used to power their computer. The second wins a grant of $20,000 claiming that to do the research at all, they need a new computer, to present their ideas at a conference in Hawaii before committing to publication, to make a research trip to the Huntington Library in California, and goodness knows what else. Each, in the end, produces one article. (The idea that $20,000 might produce just one article about poetry might seem like satirical exaggeration. It is not. With patience, one can work out just how much grant produced so much publication on any particular topic at https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/index/). So the second article cost about 10,000 times more to create. It is almost certainly not 10,000 times more important, but is it even 10 times more important? There is an exceptional reluctance to seriously address such questions in Japan, which is why Japanese academics will cling to the belief that somehow the second of my hypothetical professors just won the “lottery,” while the other didn’t.
(Full disclosure: I have worked in Japan for 24 years and applied for grants on 4 occasions. Just one application was successful.)