Photo/Illutration A statement from scientists of more than 10 major organizations urges a doubling of the budget for the government's Kakenhi research grant program. (Takahiro Takenouchi)

Japan’s scientific community is calling on the government to double the budget for a grant program to halt the country’s declining capabilities for academic research.

More than 10 major academic organizations on July 1 started petition calling for the Kakenhi funding program to receive an annual budget 480 billion yen ($2.98 billion).

They included the Union of Japanese Societies for Biological Science, the Japan Union of Chemical Science and Technology, and the Japanese Medical Science Federation.

With more than 1 million researchers and physicians affiliated with these groups, the campaign aims to gather a substantial number of signatures and present them to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida this summer.

The move comes amid recurring shortages in research funding due to such factors as a shrinking state budget for universities, rising material costs and the weak yen.

The Kakenhi program has been a vital source of funding for foundational scientific research, including the pioneering induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell project that went on to win the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In recent years, the total annual budget for the Kakenhi program has remained relatively fixed at around 240 billion yen.

However, competition for the grant program has intensified due to a decline in fixed government subsidies for universities, according to Yukiko Goto, UJSBS vice president and professor of molecular biology at the University of Tokyo.

This shift began in a 2004 reform promoting greater financial and managerial independence for national universities.

For research areas with high international acclaim, only around 10 percent of proposals secure government funding.

The approval rate falls below 30 percent in more general, established research categories. Compared with numbers from 2000, the actual amount of funding per project has decreased by 20 to 40 percent.

“The situation where young researchers or even world-class researchers are facing chronic funding shortages has become the norm,” Goto said.

The actual value of the Kakenhi program funding roughly halved in the past decade when adjustments are calculated to factor in rising research material and reagent costs and the depreciation of the yen.

The campaign is seeking support from both researchers and the general public through an online petition on Change.org.

(This article was written by Takahiro Takenouchi and Yu Fujinami.)

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