Japan’s Labs Open at Last : Technology: We clamored for access, and Japan finally agreed. Guess who’s likely to gain most?
After decades of scouring the world for new technology while keeping its own research closeted, Japan is sliding open the doors to its laboratories and letting outsiders take a peek.
Hundreds of foreign scientists are ensconced in Japanese university and government laboratories, supported by newly established Japanese government fellowships. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry has invited foreign firms to join in strategic national projects in such areas as factory automation, hypersonic jet engines and superconductors.
And Japanese corporations are for the first time beginning to hire foreign researchers, in some cases placing them in charge of important research.
But just as U.S. pressure to open markets has ended up making Japanese companies more competitive in finance and computers, Japan--not the United States--may ultimately be the primary beneficiary of this U.S.-pressured perestroika in Japanese research.
Foreign scientists are helping to bring fresh ideas to Japan’s insular labs--while alleviating its chronic shortage of researchers. Japan also needs innovative foreigners to help it in its push into new frontiers of science and technology.
On the other hand, the United States is only partially taking advantage of Japan’s new openness. Although American researchers are learning about how Japan organizes its research, few American researchers speak Japanese or are willing to relocate to Japan, making it difficult for the United States to fully benefit from Japan’s annual $80-billion expenditure in research and development.
Another key barrier to Americans is Japan’s heavy reliance on private corporations to conduct not only their own research but also much of the publicly funded research. Private corporations simply are not as open as the government with their research.
Meanwhile, Japan grows more aggressive in drawing on U.S. research.
Although Japan has caught or surpassed the United States in a growing number of technologies, including new materials and semiconductors, the country’s “technology trade balance” remains sharply weighted toward imports. In 1988, Japan paid $1.52 billion for U.S. technology. The United States paid only $590 million for Japanese technology.
With half the population, Japan has nearly 10 times the manpower for tapping U.S. efforts. Although 52,000 Japanese spent time studying or researching in the United States last year, only a few thousand Americans spent time in Japan, and few are conversant in Japanese.
Cynics think that’s why Japan has finally agreed to swing open its research doors.
“They called our bluff,” says an executive at a U.S. technology company’s Tokyo office. “They know that even if they opened up, there wouldn’t be that many researchers who had the Japanese language ability to take advantage of it.”
Suggests a U.S. science official with a more chilling rationale: “Japan is no longer worried about U.S. competition.” Instead, Japan is eager to counter the American perception that Japan is getting a free ride on U.S. research spending, just as it has on U.S. defense spending.
Japan also has more selfish reasons for bringing outsiders into its research effort. Japan’s Science and Technology Agency estimates that the nation will face a shortage of 510,000 researchers by 2005.
And while Japan could rely on its own research community to play catch-up to the West, it needs the West’s creative, free-thinking minds as it moves into frontier technologies.
Take MITI’s hypersonic engine program, a seven-year, $220-million Japanese government project to build a hypersonic jet that would cut the New York-Tokyo flight time to about four hours from the current 13 1/2. Japanese engineers, far behind in aerospace research, will work regularly with America’s best jet engine scientists. No matter how cautious U.S. companies try to be, Japanese engineers will absorb a wealth of information, executives experienced with such joint ventures say.
There is also a deeper, structural problem that obstructs the flow of technology from Japan to the United States. Although 40% of U.S. research is government financed, takes place in easily accessible university laboratories and represents the best America has to offer, only 20% of Japan’s research is publicly financed--and it is probably the poorest Japan has to offer.
Despite well-publicized calls for increased spending in basic research, Japanese public funding in science has been progressively scaled back during the past 10 years, leaving universities under-funded and ill-equipped.
“University research is dying in Japan,” says Yoshitsugu Nakagawa, a Tokyo University physics professor.
Government laboratories have a wealth of equipment, buy they have few researchers and technicians, according to Cristian P. Schulthess, a U.S. scientist doing environmental research at the National Chemical Laboratory for Industry in Tsukuba.
Schulthess works with an Indian and a Japanese researcher. The small group has almost exclusive use of such costly equipment as a $250,000 inductively coupled plasma spectrometer for analyzing the presence of metals in water. But it seldom uses the machine more than once a month.
A 15% drop in the budget for MITI’s 16 laboratories has forced cutbacks in full-time employees, administrators say.
“At this rate, we aren’t going to be able to support these international projects like the Human Frontiers project,” says Masahiko Kobayashi, deputy director for large scale projects at MITI.
The project was initially conceived several years ago by then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone as a grand $8-billion effort to illustrate Japan’s commitment to basic science. The project, based in Strasbourg, France, is still considered a serious effort in basic science. But its total budget this year is a scant $10 million.
Japanese corporations are increasingly doing impressive science. But their private laboratories are harder to get access to.
W. D. Gould, of the Extractive Metallurgy Laboratory in Ontario, Canada, couldn’t get a Japanese mining company to talk about its new process for preventing coal mines from leaching acid into underground streams until he worked side by side with the company’s researchers in a Japanese government laboratory.
Yoshikazu Goto, deputy director of MITI’s International Research and Development Cooperation Division, says he wants to see private labs more open and is working on a program to offer scholarships to U.S. scientists so they can spend time in corporate laboratories. A recent study by the Japanese office of the U.S. National Science Foundation found roughly half the corporate respondents receptive to taking in foreign “investigators.”
Japan’s NEC Corp. has hired several foreigners as research managers at its fundamental research laboratory in Tsukuba, north of Tokyo. In the past, Japanese companies have been too fearful of bringing “job-hopping” foreigners into their laboratories.
Still, even if Japan were to completely swing open the doors to its private laboratories, it is unclear how effectively the United States could take advantage of the opportunity.
Even the substantial amounts of information published in English do not reach the people in the United States who would find it interesting, says David Kahaner, a National Institute of Standards and Technology researcher now working at the Office of Naval Research’s Tokyo office.
The Japan Information Center of Science and Technology provides a database of more than 1 million Japanese technical papers and abstracts translated into English. The service, however, was used by only 300 people last year, triple the level in 1988 but still substantially below the estimated 8,000 researchers in Japan who are paying for access to U.S. database services.
With the exception of such companies as DuPont, International Business Machines and Eastman Kodak, which have substantial research operations in Japan, few companies have the resources or the interest to commit to Japan.
But U.S. researchers and companies who work in Japan are learning about Japan’s own unique way of organizing research, while making their way through Japanese research institutions like explorers in a new world.
One such researcher is Stephen Peters, an expert on intelligent robots from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He changes from shoes to slippers as he guides a visitor into a room equipped with a wealth of robots and computers in the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan’s largest government laboratory.
Peters, who has attended conferences, visited companies and became the first foreigner to participate in the laboratory’s planning sessions, says he was mystified when he kept running across the same people.
His surprising discovery: Japan is at roughly the same level as its U.S. counterparts in robotics research but, he figures, the country has about one tenth the number of scientists in the field.
Although researchers work separately in their own laboratories, Peters explains, they tend to divvy up the work to avoid redundancy. U.S. scientists, by comparison, often do the same research in an effort to compete for the same funds.
U.S. companies are getting hands-on experience in that system by participating in government projects that coordinate research between university, government and business labs.
United Technologies and General Electric, for example, plan to participate in the hypersonic jet program in cooperation with three Japanese and two European firms.
“It’s an extraordinary thing to have arch-competitors setting down in an environment of cooperation,” says Stanley Krueger, president of United Technologies’ Japan office. In the United States, because of antitrust laws and competitive pressures, “there hasn’t been a forum” for such cooperation, Krueger says.
In the United States, for example, a contractor has sole access to technology it develops for the Department of Defense. But in Japan the results of the engine project will belong to all members of the project.
“In the end everybody has the same nugget of technology,” Krueger says. “Then the question is, who gets to the market first.”
“This is Japan’s secret,” says MITI’s Goto. “This is what the (U.S.) companies will learn.”
THE U.S.-JAPAN RESEARCH GAP
The value of U.S. technology imported by Japan far outpaces that traveling from Japan to the United States.
U.S. Technology Imported by Japan billions of yen. ‘85: 4,772 ‘86: 4,825 ‘87: 4,667 ‘88: 5,495
Japanese Technology Exported to U.S. billions of yen. ‘85: 896 ‘86: 826 ‘87: 912 ‘88: 1,080 Source: Japan Management and Coordination Agency. SOURCES OF JAPANESE RESEARCH FUNDING
Unlike U.S. research, which is 40% financed by the government, Japanese research draws funding primarily from private sources. In 1988, for example, the government was the source of only 19.9% of research funds, compared with 80% from the private sector. Percentage changes are from the previous year.
FISCAL YEAR GOVERNMENT PRIVATE FOREIGN TOTAL 1983 1,721.4 5,451.1 8.2 7,180.8 *Change 3.3% 12.3% 17.1% 10.0% *Share 24.0% 75.9% 0.1% 100.0% 1984 1,777.8 6,108.6 7.6 7,893.9 *Change 3.2% 12.1% -7.3% 9.9% *Share 22.5% 77.4% 0.1% 100.0 1985 1,867.3 7,014.9 8.1 8,890.3 *Change 5.0% 14.8% 6.6% 12.6% *Share 21.0% 78.9% 0.1% 100.0% 1986 1,9555.3 7,229.7 7.9 9,192.9 *Change 4.7% 3.1% -2.5% 3.4% *Share 21.5% 78.4% 0.1% 100.0% 1987 2,111.8 7,716.6 8.2 9,836.6 *Change 8.0% 6.7% 3.8% 7.0% *Share 21.5% 78.4% 0.1% 100.0% 1988 2,117.8 8,501.5 8.3 10,627.6 *Change 0.3% 10.2% 1.2% 8.0% *Share 19.9% 80.0% 0.1% 100.0%
Source: Management and coordination Agency
