In the 150 years since the Meiji Restoration, progress in science and technology has been one of the key driving forces behind Japan's modernization. Today, however, the overall prospect of the nation's scientific research isn't all that promising. While rapid progress is being made in computer science and robotics, various data show that Japan's scientific research is on the verge of stalling. The government, universities and other research institutes must take the situation seriously and take rational steps to address the problem.
Since 2000, 17 Japanese have received Nobel Prizes in the natural sciences. But because most Nobel laureates receive the honor for what they accomplished 20 to 40 years earlier, such numbers do not necessarily reflect the nation's current scientific power. Conditions of Japan's scientific researchers have in fact deteriorated over the same period. The government's research and development spending has been flat since 2001 while other countries like China, South Korea and Germany have substantially increased their expenditures. In 2004, when the status of national universities was changed to one similar to independent administrative bodies, government grants to them began to fall, with the fiscal 2017 figure 10 percent less than in 2004.
The British scientific journal Nature reported last March that Japan's share of high-quality papers in the Nature Index dropped 6 percent between 2012 and 2016 and that publications by Japanese authors in high-quality natural science journals fell 8.3 percent over the past five years. The journal quoted the Web of Science, an online-based scientific citation indexing service, as showing that Japan's publications in 2015 was more than 10 percent fewer than in 2005 in materials science and engineering — historically Japan's strong areas — and 37.7 percent fewer in computer science, although publication of papers in medicine, mathematics and astronomy increased.