NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
TOKYO REGIONAL OFFICE
The National Science Foundation's Tokyo Regional Office periodically reports on developments in Japan that are related to the Foundation's mission. It also provides occasional reports on developments in other East Asian countries.
Tokyo Office Report Memoranda are intended to provide information for the use of NSF program officers and policy makers; they are not statements of NSF policy.
The State of Mathematical Sciences in Japan
The following report was prepared by B. Brent Gordon, Program Manager in the National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematical Science. Dr. Gordon traveled to Japan in July and August 2001 under a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Short-Term Invitational Fellowship. Professor M. Hanamura at Kyushu University served as his host.
A brief report on the research that Dr. Gordon conducted at Kyushu University appears as Special Scientific Report #01-03. He may be reached at bgordon@nsf.gov.
For the first two weeks of my three week stay in Japan I collaborated with my host, Professor M. Hanamura, at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, and Professor J.P. Murre, visiting from Leiden University, on mathematical research concerning algebraic cycles in degenerating families of abelian varieties. Then I spent two (business) days in Kyoto, to meet with mathematical scientist both at Kyoto University and the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) located there; then two days in Osaka, to attend an Algebraic Geometry Symposium taking place at the Osaka University department of mathematical sciences and visit with some of the other participants; and finally one day at the Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Tokyo, to meet and talk with several of the faculty there. My observations, impressions and thoughts on the present state of the mathematical sciences in Japan, based primarily on my discussions with 25 to 30 mathematical scientists during these latter five days, follow.
World-class mathematics. Let there be no doubt—Japan has world-class mathematical scientists producing world-class mathematics. I want to emphasize this, and ask you to keep it in mind while reading the comments below.
The top mathematical sciences departments. Out of 99 national universities and nearly 7000 tertiary education institutions, the consensus of the Japanese mathematicians with whom I spoke is that about a dozen have strong research departments in mathematical sciences: the seven formerly Imperial universities of Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Tohoku (in Sendai), Kyushu (in Fukuoka), and Hokkaido (in Sapporo); Tokyo Institute of Technology, which is a national university; Tokyo Metropolitan University, supported by the prefecture of Tokyo; and Waseda and Keio Universities, both private institutions in Tokyo. In addition to these departments there is one mathematical sciences research institute, namely the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS), located on the campus of Kyoto University. RIMS has about 35 permanent faculty, plus three lines that it reserves for visitors typically of three months duration (i.e., up to twelve visitors per year). The RIMS faculty also teach and supervise graduate students, who get their degrees from Kyoto University. Of course there are also excellent mathematical scientists other places than these.
For foreign visitors to Japan. Of all the public institutions mentioned above, RIMS appeared to be the best prepared to accommodate foreign visitors, in that it has positions for them and staff to help with lodging or visa problems. The University of Tokyo seems to be the next best prepared, for the Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences there has quite a bit of experience with foreign visitors, especially graduate students and post-docs. All the Japanese faculty with whom I spoke were pleased that sometime in the past few years rules were changed to permit them to use grant funds to support visitors or their own travel (versus having to apply separately for those purposes).
The public university mathematical sciences departments seem to feel that it would not be a problem for them to support a short-term visitor, but that they don’t have the money for long-term visitors. Since faculty positions are permanent, there is no provision for a visitor to support him- or herself even partially by teaching. Of course, subject to eligibility the JSPS fellowship programs would be natural funding sources to consider.
Foreign visitors usually need a pre-arranged host to take care of various local administrative and financial arrangements.
Graduate education in a state of chaos. A majority of the people with whom I spoke felt that graduate education in the mathematical sciences in Japan is in a chaotic state. About ten years ago the mathematical sciences departments at the Universities’ Colleges of General Education, which have the primary responsibility for teaching (lower level) undergraduates, were merged into the graduate departments of mathematical sciences. (This created a new inconvenience for the graduate faculty, for they then had to take their turns teaching lower level courses, often at a separate campus on another side of the city.) Following that merger the graduate departments of mathematical sciences were considered a unit of the Faculty of Science. But then sometime later the Ministry of Education decided to put more emphasis on graduate education, so it reversed the prior arrangement by making the Faculty of Science a unit of the Graduate Faculty, and then it approximately doubled the number of graduate student positions (at the national universities, including RIMS). At most places the number of matriculated graduate students in mathematical sciences did not actually double, but it did increase substantially while the number of faculty positions remained constant. For this discussion it should be noted that somewhere around 75% of mathematical sciences graduate students leave with a master’s degree.
Having graduate students teach seems to be a relatively new idea in Japan (as opposed to the U.S., where it is built into the system at the mathematical sciences departments of most large universities). The University of Tokyo has instituted optional graduate student teaching assistantships, but so far only a very small percentage of graduate students has expressed interest. The idea is being discussed elsewhere, such as in Kyoto, where the thought is that some teaching experience may be advantageous when a student goes looking for a job; but the evidence for that rationale was not entirely clear to me (see below).
Changes in the governance of national universities. For decades the national universities in Japan have been centrally governed by Ministry of Education policies. In the past five to ten years spending on science, mathematics and technology has increased even as the overall budget has been shrinking. Now it seems that within some framework the Ministry wants to give the national universities more independence to manage themselves. According to my most reliable source, a very senior professor who serves on the governing board at the University of Tokyo, as a practical matter there are two ways a university can respond: One is to create something along the lines of an outside board of visitors; the other seems to involve including some “outsiders,” perhaps such as business people(?), on the university’s governing board. Since it doesn’t want outside people telling it what to do, the University of Tokyo has opted for the latter course. Although most universities have implemented few if any changes as yet, apparently there are already examples of institutions that have already created some (temporary) post-doctoral positions; this is noteworthy in Japan where, until now, all mathematical sciences faculty positions were permanent.
Implicitly concomitant with the increased autonomy for the universities is an increased degree of competition among them for limited Ministry yen, and this in turn has been a source of both legitimate and unfounded concern among faculty. As best I can tell, the national universities will continue to be funded by the Ministry of Education at some level, but may eventually have to compete for additional funding. The problem is, no one yet has any idea what criteria the Ministry will use when it does its first evaluation five or so years from now. (Like people everywhere, the Japanese don’t like to make decisions that result in some people coming out ahead and others behind, and moreover such priority-setting has been avoided pretty successfully until now; so it should not be a surprise that Ministry and university officials may be having a hard time setting the evaluation criteria.) It seemed to me that in addition to not knowing what the Ministry criteria will be, many faculty also don’t know what the priorities of their own university governors and administrators will be. Thus the fear and misunderstanding among the faculty with whom I spoke is that RIMS, or their universities, or their mathematical sciences departments, may be called upon to become self-supporting. This especially frightens the pure mathematicians, who know the difficulty they have “selling” the value of their research and teaching.
Fewer assistants in major mathematical sciences departments. Mathematical sciences faculty in Japan for the most part are Professors, Associate Professors, or synonymously Research Associates or Assistants, where the latter rank is supposed to be comparable to the rank of Assistant Professor in the U.S. (except with tenure). There are also a few Lecturers, this rank lies between Assistant and Associate Professor. Among several of the people with whom I spoke there seems to be a feeling that at the major research universities (i.e., the former Imperial universities), with the exception of Kyoto University and RIMS, the number and proportion of assistants is shrinking. This phenomenon is most visible at the University of Tokyo: a decade ago there were comparable numbers of professors and associate professors, and about twice that number of assistants; then the number of research associates shrank to approximately equal the number of professors or associate professors; and now there are 29 professors, 27 associate professors, and 6 research associates. The exceptions in Kyoto and the stability of the earlier pattern for many years would seem to support the Japanese contention, as I heard it, that this demographic change is not necessarily a consequence of jobs being permanent plus the aging of the faculty.
The situation for new and recent Ph.D.’s in the mathematical sciences. Until about a decade ago it was not unusual, even at the leading research departments or RIMS, for a strong student to be hired at the completion of his masters degree, following which he would work on his Ph.D. Then over some time the pattern changed to where new faculty were hired only after the completion of their Ph.D.’s. In recent years the pattern has shifted even further, to where a small number of new Ph.D.’s are hired directly as assistants at the strong research departments (compare the previous paragraph). According to several of the faculty with whom I spoke, a typical pattern these days for a good young mathematician would be: Upon completing the Ph.D., he or she gets a non-renewable three-year postdoctoral award from the JSPS (I was told that the success rate for these is around 70%). In effect, this buys some extra time to find a job, which frequently happens after one or two years, and is likely to be at a smaller or private university. Sometime later, if the person is a strong mathematician, he or she might be hired by one of the major research universities as an associate professor. Many of the recent Ph.D.’s with whom I spoke were skeptical, despite having good jobs themselves; they felt that it is getting harder to get that first job, even with a private university, as positions are increasingly filled and not turning over.
Compared with the U.S., Japan’s mathematical sciences community may be five to ten years behind in realizing or accepting that their role must change to include training Ph.D. students for something other than academic research positions (even though the sluggishness of the Japanese economy reduces the demand for people with advanced mathematical training outside the academic sector). I suppose the beginnings of this realization contributes to the chaotic state of graduate education in the mathematical sciences as well. The only place I heard any discussion about offering anything other than a classical mathematical sciences curriculum was at the University of Tokyo, where there was an idea in the air about offering a course or a program in mathematical finance; and even there they were just barely beyond the “wouldn’t it be a good idea but who will teach it?” stage.
The situation of women in mathematical sciences. The only women in the mathematical sciences that I saw during my three weeks in Japan were a few apparent graduate students passing in the hallways, and about five women out of an audience of about fifty or so at the symposium in Osaka. In particular, despite its size and leadership position among the major mathematical sciences research departments, the University of Tokyo Graduate School in Mathematical Sciences has no women on its faculty. There does seem to be a stated goal of having women comprise 15% of the mathematical sciences faculty by 2008, and further there was a hint (from someone probably in a position to know) that there might be a woman hired “soon;” but that it has taken until now, and as yet there is still no change, leads me to be quite pessimistic about the University of Tokyo meeting its goal.
At the conference in Osaka I spoke with two women, one a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, the other a relatively young faculty member (still an assistant or perhaps recently made associate professor) at Tokyo Metropolitan University. Independently both solidly agreed that there was no chance of a woman being hired if she already had a child. Since being hired the faculty member has had a child, and she sharply contrasted her experience in the U.S. where day care was availability right on the university campus with the total lack of any such infrastructure or support in Japan. (In her case her mother cares for the child while she works.)
This faculty member also mentioned some slightly more subtle obstructions for a woman in the mathematical sciences. It seems that there may be still some sort of (unstated?) social constraint about talking to someone of the opposite sex: For example, if a woman (probably unmarried) goes to the office of a male colleague (perhaps married) with some mathematical issue on her mind, say, she says the man might misinterpret her purpose (and think that she wants to become his mistress). How true this is or what male faculty members would say about it I don’t know, but the fact that this is a concern of a woman faculty member, although maybe less for herself than her (unmarried) younger female colleagues, is still an indication that there is some issue about attitudes about women that poses an obstacle to the full integration of women into the department. In any case, these examples led me to conclude that Japanese men have definitely not accepted women as equals in the workplace.
While the graduate student could not speak directly about hiring or on-the-job problems, she did offer a different insight about the absence of women from mathematical sciences. At the private girls school she attended, out of a class of about 250 about 50 wanted to go into medicine, and about 50 wanted to go into math or science; but of those latter 50, there were only 2 who expressed interest in the mathematical sciences, this student and another. The other one went to the U.S. to do her Ph.D., and presently has a job in the mathematics department at a large state university.