Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/59406

KEYWORDS : governmental 'control tower';political leadership of the Cabinet;science;technology and innovation policy;parliamentary system;council;bureaucracy;ministry

This paper begins by describing the establishment of the Scientific Technical Administration Committee (STAC) in 1948, the Science and Technology Agency (STA) in 1956, and the Council for Science, Technology, and Innovation (CSTI) in 2014 in Japan. These agencies have something in common in that they were somewhat expected to work as governmental ‘control towers (CTs)’ of Japan’s science, technology, and innovation policy, with political leadership in the contemporary Cabinet. Second, this paper shows some of the agencies’ similarities and differences, including the following: (1) they have been initiated and supported mainly by the industrial sector (and the STA would not have been established without a nuclear budget), (2) the STAC and the STA emphasized ‘comprehensive coordination’ as an important part of their mission between related ministries, though the CSTI is expected to be a ‘CT’ or a ‘headquarters’ for the administration to initiate resource distribution or science/technology policy decisions, and (3) the STAC and the STA showed their relatively positive attitudes toward a rather wide range of science/technology policies, though the CSTI is quite passive toward some policies such as research & development of nuclear and medicine, which are in fact directed by other ‘CTs’ or the like. Two hypotheses emerge from the discussion above: the ‘CT’ is a product of the Central Government Ministries Reform (2001); it can cause another authoritative dispute between some ‘CTs’ in the Cabinet Office. These two hypotheses will be tested through further research including the following: (1) investigating the background of the establishment of other ‘CTs’ and their relationships with the political leadership in the Cabinet, (2) analysing that leadership’s impact in the existing administrative system in the bureaucracy, and (3) describing in more detail the STAC, STA, and CSTI’s actual practices regarding their policy coordination/implementation and resource distribution.