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Japanese Military Courts Academics With Money
Japan is allocating more money to academics conducting "dual-use" research [sciencemag.org] with both civilian and military applications:
In 1950, Japan's scientific community, chastened by the complicity of researchers in their nation's disastrous military adventurism, took an extraordinary vow. "To preserve our integrity as scientists, we express our firm commitment both domestically and abroad that we will never pursue scientific research for the purpose of war," declared the Science Council of Japan (SCJ), now the nation's equivalent to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Extended to broadly proscribe military research in 1967, the commitment held for 65 years—until Japan's defense ministry started a small program to fund university research with both civilian and military applications in 2015. Now, the ministry is sharply ramping up support for "dual-use" research—sparking an outcry among academics who see it as a dangerous revanchist policy.
The budget of the dual-use program, run by the Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Agency (ATLA) here, will skyrocket from $5.2 million this year to $95 million in the fiscal year beginning 1 April. In response, SCJ is considering amending its code of conduct to spell out conditions under which academic researchers can accept military money. That's not sufficient, some say: "I want the SCJ to clearly state that military research in academia is extremely inappropriate," Satoru Ikeuchi, an astrophysicist at Nagoya University in Japan, said at a 14 January symposium on the topic at Keio University's Yokohama campus.
The defense ministry's courtship of civilian researchers is another step in Japan's ongoing remilitarization, asserts Morihisa Hamada, a volcanologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokosuka. A key tenet of Japan's stance on promoting peace, he believes, "is not to take part in military research at universities." The new policy's supporters, meanwhile, argue that military research benefits Japan's overall science and technology efforts.
