tokyo

Japan's Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Monbusho) is expecting a substantial increase in its science-related budget under the government's special one-off appropriation aimed at developing infrastructure for telecommunications, science, technology and the environment for the next century.

This is on top of its modest 1999 budget request for an increase of 1.8 per cent submitted last week, and will support university infrastructure and postdoctoral programmes (see Nature 395, 3; 1998).

Monbusho's core budget will receive ¥28.2 billion (US$213 million) from the appropriation. The money will top up its programme for upgrading the capacity of information networks linking universities across Japan and improving database and electronic libraries at universities (see table).

Table 1 Highlights of Japan's Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture budget request for fiscal year 1999 (in ¥ billion)
Full size table

It will also boost Monbusho's ‘research for the future’ programme of large grants that include support for postdoctoral research assistants. The funds would increase by nearly 23 per cent, and the number of five-year industrially related projects would increase by a fifth to around 300. Each project presently receives between ¥50 million and ¥300 million a year.

Monbusho also plans to expand next year's postdoctoral fellowship programmes in line with the government's scheme to increase the number of postdocs in Japan to 10,000 by the end the decade. Next year the number of fellowships will increase by nearly a quarter to 1,600.

The 1999 budget requests reduced funding for space science and high-energy accelerators by 13.6 and 13.9 per cent, respectively. But Monbusho has asked for a quantum leap in budget from ¥5 million to ¥10.4 billion for an ambitious project to detect neutrinos. This will be a collaborative effort between the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (KEK) and the Institute of Cosmic Ray Research at Tokyo University.

The Long Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment will send neutrinos from KEK's 12-GeV proton synchrotron accelerator through a 250-kilometre underground tunnel to detectors at the SuperKamiokande observatory in central Japan.