Recently, Anita Byrnes, Japan correspondent for Computergram, was privileged to visit three of the national research institutes in the academic garden city of Tsukuba, one and a half hours north of Tokyo in Ibaragi prefecture. Here is her report.
Tsukuba in its essential character provokes controversy in Japan because it was set up as a specialised, artifical city to cater for the national research community. Unlike cities like Tokyo with its hustle and bustle and vibrancy of human contact, Tsukuba reminds one of planned single-employer cities such as Canberra where life is physically easier and lived in more pleasant surroundings and where there are are correspondingly more suicides. Tsukuba apparently has trouble keeping its best people; one of the most famous members of the Electro-technical Laboratory recently defected to prestigious Tokyo University, leaving a gap difficult to fill. The Electro-Technical Laboratory, like the other research institutes, fall within the domain of the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, a division of the Ministry of International Trade & Industry. Of its 600 employees, 557 are resarchers.
Josephson
It is the largest research laboratory in Japan and has a budget of just under $66.6m. Its main areas of research are electronics, energy, data processing, and standardisation and measurement technology. Significant work is being done in the fields of Josephson Junctions, new semiconductors devices, excimer lasers, local area networks – for the Sigma project, handwritten Kanji recognition techniques, space manipulators and such. In the Movement & Intelligence Research Laboratory, robots are being developed for work in extreme conditions where humans cannot go such as space, fires, and deep sea environments. Research is currently focused on making maninpulators previously developed see and distinguish shapes better through measurement techniques, and permit better control by humans through multi media vision and graphics processing. In the laser research lab, there are three main topics of research: ultrashort pulse lasers; extreme UV lasers; and pulse X-ray generating lasers; considerable research is focused on excima lasers, with the hope of eventually being able to model a human body in three dimensions for diagnostic purposes. In the Device Structure Research lab, there are two focuses: as part of the Sunshine Project, work is being done on solar batteries, this has by far a larger part of the $1m or so budget than the other main activity which is centered on producing smaller silicon chips technology. In the latter research channel widths of 0.1 micron have been achieved, and the focus is on achieving similar levels of microminiatiarisation in the thickness of the layers. This work is proceeding despite small budgets and far from modern clean rooms. In another research lab, the Industrial Products Research Lab, the focus of research was previously in evaluation and improvement of industrial products, and on work that would help handicapped and similarly disadvantaged people in society. Attention has now turned to other aspects of research into human interactions, such as development of a thinking aids model for design processes such as designing a laser printer – this was being done in K-Prolog; work on man-machine interaction with keyboard and software; and a knowledge-based approach to the linguistic representation of smells; this last effort has direct application in the development of sensors that will be able to replicate the human sense of smell.
Polymers
Finally the Research Institute for Polymers and Textiles, which was originally set up as an institute for study of silk technology, and contains a polymer chemistry department, in which the world’s only highly-conductive polymer has been developed; a bioengineering department which focuses on the biological function synthesis of biopolymers, biomimetics and development of biocompatible materials; a material physics department which aims at the development of new polymers with novel functions or better performance; an
d the material design and engineering department. Overall through the visit, one gained an impression of dedicated and not necessarily well-paid or well-funded researchers, some of whom are obviously doing quite original research. However, the bright lights of private enterprise research, with the impetus of business stimulus must seem quite attractive to Tsukuba residents.
