Re: [tlug] Fwd: SYMPOSIUM> Humanities Studies in the Digital Age and the Role of Buddhist Studies, UTokyo 11/16-17

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
>  > Hmmmm...I hate to ruin a "that's academia in Japan" party, but I think
>  > that's how things are in many places...  It's not "academia in Japan"
>  > but "academia"...
> I wish it could be disposed of that easily.  Unfortunately, at least
> in economics (my field), computer science and chemistry (I've done a
> lot of English review for neighboring faculty), there's a big gap
> between the behavior of researchers at top 10 U.S. universities and
> top 10 Japanese universities in this respect.  Todai is something of
> an exception, but none of the other national universities is, and none
> of the private universities get international recognition in economics
> or CS AFAIK (maybe Keio for its participation in WIDE, the project
> that has done a huge amount for promoting IPv6), dunno about chemistry.


Hmmmmm, I see your point.  I think Japan has a lot of national
conferences (in English or Japanese) which fulfil whatever obligations
there are to the grant funding agency, but outside of Japan, they
don't mean a whole lot.  Japanese institutes need to push their
staff/students to get out; not just to show the world the research
Japan is doing but also give its researchers practice in presenting in
English.

IMHO, grant funding agencies should look at local conferences and
journals and say that they count much less on a principal
investigator's CV than international ones.  i.e., literally force them
and their lab members to go out and meet people.  :-)


>  > Surely tax payer-funded research should be open to all, but there's
>  > also a dark side that's often ignored...  :-(
> True, but I don't really care about the taxpayers.  What I hate is the
> way the faculties are taking aim at their students' feet, and Todai is
> no exception there.


As for this and researcher behavior, I agree there is a big gap
between US and Japanese. But, the gap is probably bigger between US
and other Asian countries like China and South Korea.  Only when we
experience that will we realise the similarities between US and Japan.
 :-)

BTW, Japan's doing fine in my area (CS/bioinformatics) in terms of
international recognition.  Europe and US are still top.  But China,
South Korea, and Singapore are fairly aggressive now when it comes to
research (and research funding).   So,  things can easily change...

Ray