October 12, 2025

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

This year’s Nobel Prize winners have been announced. Professor Sakaguchi Shimon of Osaka University received the Prize in the Physiology or Medicine, and Professor Kitagawa Susumu of Kyoto University was awarded the Prize in Chemistry.

What these awards demonstrate is that groundbreaking achievements that bring tremendous progress to humanity can only emerge from long-term research driven by intellectual curiosity and thinking out of the box.

At their press conferences, both laureates appealed to the Minister of Education, Science and Technology to strengthen state support for basic research.

However, the government has cut basic funds, such as national university grants supporting basic research, and has instead allocated them to competitive research through its “selection and concentration” policy. As a result, the number of fixed-term researchers has increased, leading to a loss of diversity.

Some local national universities allocate annually as little as 20,000 to 30,000 yen per researcher for research expenses. Japan’s ranking for the number of high-quality papers has fallen from 4th to 13th in the world over the past 20 years. In order to create a research environment with sufficient resources across all fields, the government should increase the number of regular faculty members and research support staff, as well as duration of research projects.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in its budget request for fiscal 2026 requested a record-high budget allocation for national university grants, an increase of 63.2 billion yen compared to the previous year. To restore an environment that prioritizes basic research, the government should drastically increase the amount of basic funds.