【正文】
sults. (2) Shift towards basic research by both the government and private sector panies While some doubt still remains over the validity of such criticism, there was a shift by both the government and private sector panies in Japan towards carrying out more basic research. The government moves included the steps taken in 1981 to inaugurate the Technology Research and Development Program for NextGeneration Industrial Infrastructures to replace the Development Program for LargeScale Industrial Technology (known as the “l(fā)arge projects”), which had led to major successes in catching up with leading Western panies in the puter industry since its establishment in 1996. This new program was set up with the aim of further improving originality and creativity by regarding the former large projects category as representative of efforts to catch up in technological terms. Since then, the weight of basic research has been increased under projects led by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Another move taken in 1981 was the establishment of the Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology (ERATO) by the Science and Technology Agency. As evidenced by the fact that projects under this program took on the names of individual researchers, the emphasis has been placed on the ideas of the inventors and researchers involved rather than their ultimate purposes and applications. This has served to strongly orient the program towards the national policy of focusing on basic research has had a major positive impact in terms of enhancing the infrastructural technology that supports the basics in various areas of industry. (3) Two problems in the shift towards basic research From the viewpoint of industrial petitiveness, however, this shift towards basic research has raised two problems. The first relates to what many see as an excessive emphasis on basic over applied research in many areas. This has led to a significant cutback in the number of largescale research and development projects that entail shared final objectives (., highperformance mainframe puters, largecapacity memory systems, and superhighdensity LSI applications). Moreover, this trend of shifting towards the basics has not been limited to government efforts only. Similarly, private sector panies have seemingly responded en masse to the nation39。s shift towards basic 3 research—a phenomenon that is perhaps best symbolized by the number of basic research laboratories established by major Japanese panies. Like the boom in setting up central laboratories that occurred in the high growth era of the 1960s, a similar rush to open laboratories devoted to basic research started to take place. For example, Hitachi, Ltd. established a basic research laboratory under its central laboratories in 1985. While one would assume that the relative importance of basic vs. applied research is not a matter to be determined by the proximity of mercially feasible applications, some panies were so caught in this basic research boom that they tended to neglect research and development activities in fields that were only steps away from practical realization. As a result, efforts to strengthen petitiveness in typical hightech products such as semiconductors, magic memories, optical munications, and liquid crystal displays (LCDs) were neglected. The second problem in the shift towards the basics by the government and the private sector was the climate of