Combating the R&D Perception Gap
Does Japan lag behind the US and Europe in technology R&D? Don't believe everything you read in the English-language media (unless you read it in Computing Japan, of course).by Steven Myers
Those who live long-term in Japan and study the language and culture in depth eventually realize that the gap between the Japan they know and the Japan depicted by the Western media is huge. This perception gap is especially noticeable in the area of science and technology, where the efforts of Japanese researchers have not only gone largely unnoticed and unheralded by their Western counterparts, but have also been branded as imitative and unoriginal by the foreign media.
In writing Computing Japan's R&D Focus column each month, I frequently have the privilege of visiting computer science research and development labs at corporations and universities in and around Tokyo. It has been surprising to discover the high amount of top-notch work being done at these labs that is virtually ignored outside of Japan. Few, if any, of the related technical papers have been translated into English, and those papers that have been published in English often contain significant inconsistencies and/or omissions when compared with the Japanese originals.
The simplistic explanation for this situation is that it is not feasible for Japanese research institutions to provide perfect English translations for even a fraction of the papers they produce. Yet, as Japanese organizations move prominently to the forefront of so many different areas of scientific research, access to this information by non-Japanese becomes more and more crucial.
Results published by institutions in Japan rarely go unnoticed by other Japanese organizations, and there is a fairly high amount of coordination between these institutions. In general, both corporate and academic research labs take strong measures to reduce duplication of effort (unlike most corporate labs in the US, which tend to go off in their own individual directions, rarely sharing results or looking beyond the narrow confines of their own facilities).
The problem is not that Japanese researchers are trying to withhold information or restrict access to public-domain research results. Indeed, almost all of the Japanese computer scientists I know are extremely open and willing to talk about their work. But they point out (quite rightly, I think) that just as they have had to actively seek out articles pertinent to their fields that were written in a (for them) foreign language, it should not be unreasonable to expect other scientists around the world to do the same where results of Japanese R&D activities are concerned.
Those ignorant of R&D are doomed to repeat it
Essentially what has happened, then, is that Japanese scientists have quietly gone about conducting leading-edge research and writing papers and technical reports that, while not always earth-shattering in their impact, nonetheless have the potential to be extremely useful to other researchers in the same field. Lacking easy access to these results, though, scientists in North America end up repeating many of the same experiments and go chasing after papers written in English that are far less pertinent to their own work.What is needed in order to deal with this problem are more institutions and programs for training scientific and technical professionals in spoken and written Japanese. Only a handful of such programs so far have made their way into some of the more progressive US universities, such as MIT, Stanford, and the University of Washington. The aim of these universities is to supplement their standard science and engineering curriculum with essential courses in Japanese language and culture, and to provide students with the opportunity to live and work in Japan for a year or two. Unfortunately, although such "Technical Japanese" programs will become increasingly important, with the exception of the elite schools mentioned above (and a very few others), awareness of the value of such a program is still low.
Why is there so much indifference to these programs on the part of most institutions? For one thing, too many people continue to believe what they read in the popular media about Japan being "behind in the technology race" and "lacking the proper infrastructure to compete in the information age." Amazingly, the "copycat" stereotype of Japanese R&D work is still quite common in the US, and a majority of US scientists remain woefully ignorant of Japan's many technological innovations and strengths. Although a few prominent scientists such as David Kahaner and the University of Arizona's Rick Schlichting are starting to receive attention for their efforts at making Japanese R&D developments more accessible to foreign researchers, many of their discoveries and reports have fallen on deaf ears.
The plain truth of the matter is that, today, Western nations do not dominate scientific and technological areas as they did 30 years ago. The playing field has leveled, and a much broader outlook is now required on the part of Western scientists. Until more foreign researchers wake up and realize the value of having some kind of Japan/Asian Technology Program within their own organizations, the Western scientific community will continue to miss out sadly on a wealth of valuable Japanese research data. This situation can only be remedied by fostering strong programs for cultural exchange and language study among our own budding scientists and engineers.