tokyo

Arima: an outspoken supporter of science. Credit: RIKEN

Physicist Akito Arima, a former president of Tokyo University and an influential voice in recent debates on how Japan should manage its science, was last week appointed education minister in the cabinet of Keizo Obuchi, Japan's new prime minister.

His appointment as head of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Monbusho) has raised hopes about the chances of much-needed reforms to the country's universities and changes in the way science is managed.

Arima's appointment was announced on 30 July, two weeks after he was elected to the Upper House of the Diet (Japan's parliament) as the top candidate of the proportional representation list of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP); this allocates seats to candidates according to the number of votes polled by the party.

Until May, 67-year-old Arima was president of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), the renowned research institute overseen by the Science and Technology Agency (STA).

Arima has been a member of various government panels, including the councils for central education and administrative reform. Given this background and the LDP's strong support for him during the election, his appointment is not surprising.

His supporters included the former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who resigned after his party's poor showing at the polls, and whose administrative reform plans Arima helped draw up last year. Hashimoto belongs to the same political faction in the LDP as Obuchi.

Arima has long been an outspoken supporter of Japanese science and a key advocate of reforms in its organization. For example, he was responsible for introducing the first external reviews of a Japanese university, and helped to shape the 1996 Basic Law for Science and Technology which was designed to increase Japan's spending by 50 per cent by the year 2001.

His appointment is seen as increasing the chances of success of the impending merger between STA and Monbusho. Many researchers have been concerned about the merger, claiming that STA's ‘top-down’ approach and Monbusho's education-orientated ‘bottom-up’ approach to research are fundamentally incompatible (see Nature 390, 327; 1998).

Scientists generally support Obuchi's choice of Arima, but many are concerned that the new cabinet may not last long. The latest public opinion poll conducted by Asahi Shimbun shows that there is only 32 per cent support for Obuchi, so Arima may lose the chance to make a significant impact during his term of office.