Japanese university professors are busy in this period of year in general for writing applications to JSPS fundings. The JSPS funding called “KAKENHI” (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research) is the main funding resource for us. Nowadays, (as professor Osumi, the Novel prize laureate mentioned,) the base budget from university is not sufficient, and thus, we have to get research funds outside.
The financial situation in the labo is quite important, not only for the research project for faculty members but also for students. In the Japanese system, students have to pay their tuition fee and they are not paid from research budget. And most of the cases students are assigned to laboratories irrespective to the budget situation. Thus, the situation for students (in a sense of research budget) is strongly dependent on the funding situation of the laboratory. For top universities (including our university) budget is healthy for most of the laboratories. But not for the other universities, even though the tuition fee is equal for all the national universities. This situation means that the research budget for each student drastically depends.
Nevertheless, I have to write my applications. This year I am attempting for two applications. One of them is just a normal one for our research group only. For the other application, I have to act for a group of professors to get rather big funding for collaborative research. For these applications I am writing the application forms that have more than 50 pages in total… Very tough, but it is important task. My own research projects are paused.