PREFACE Opportunity and reason for the study My first encounter with Japan was on a research trip in the spring of 1989. The research was conducted on behalf of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The aim was to form an impression of policy making on science and technology in Japan and on underlying research activities, such as technology forecasting, assessment and policy analysis. My interest for science and technology originated in my work for the University in Delft, my interest in policy :making in research in the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy and in three years research in the Department of Public Administration of Leyden University in the Netherlands. The visits in Japan were well prepared by the Science Counsellor of the Netherlands in Tokyo. During two hectic weeks I travelled, together with two fellow researchers from the Dutch Center for Technology and Policy Studies, through Tokyo and visited a large number of private and public research institutes and advisory bodies. The resulting impressions w ere overwhelming indeed. Subsequent analysis back home, however, showed that the collected information was far from complete and not void of contradictions, paradoxes and other puzzles. My curiosity was further raised and I looked for an opportunity to enlarge my knowledge of the reality of policy making on science and technology in Japan. The official Japanese policy of internationalization of research offered this chance. The Science and Technology Agency (STA), in the framework of its foreign fellowship program, could provide for the necessary living allowances and research funds. I applied at the National Institute for Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) for permission to work there for a year as a research fellow. After receiving the invitation, the fellowship grant was awarded by STA and the Delft University permitted me to work in NISTEP from May 1990 to May 1991. This period was later extended with three months. I used the research period to visit more persons, bureaucratic organizations and institutes, involved in research for underpinning science and technology policy. Besides I had the opportunity to refresh my knowledge about the state of the art in a number of key technologies, by attending conferences and by visiting national research institutes and public research corporations. The main purpose of the research, however, was to get a better under-standing of the way policy was formed and carried out in the for Japan very important sector of science and technology. one of the reasons for my specific interest in the Japanese situation was that this country obviously has been very successful in development of its science and technology, resulting in an amazing economic growth. It seemed of value to study these developments and try to find out whether, to what extent and in which fields important political and bureaucratic influences on this success could be identified. Object and methods The research focused on past and present developments in science and technology in Japan and on public policies, aimed at the promotion, control and guidance of these developments. objects of study were official explicit policies, cognitive foundations underlying these policies, and relations between decision makers and policy researchers. The role of policy research institutes and the actual and normative utilization of knowledge in rational decision making had to be taken into account. Special attention was given to concrete measures and activities, intended to steer the progress of science and technology, and on the actual impacts of these measures on the scientific and technological paths. Science and technology policy is not an isolated phenomenon, but is embedded in a wider policy domain. Therefore economic and industrial policy making also had to be taken into account. The accessibility of information in Japan for foreigners is steadily improving as a result of the official internationalization policy. The concrete measures of this internationalization are, socially, a more open attitude and transparency of Japanese officials in their contact with foreign researchers, and, linguistically, in the translation of many official documents. Ministries and other agencies, e.g. the Foreign Press Center, play an important role in this regard. Valuable sources of information where available in NISTEP. This organization is one of the more open and internationally oriented research institutes for policy research in Japan. It employs a disproportionate large number of foreign researchers, some of which work in the framework of the fellowship program of the Science and Technology Agency. The institute frequently organizes seminars, in which some-times foreign researchers are invited to present and discuss their results. The institute holds a yearly international symposium, in which foreign policy analysts are exchanging their ideas and findings with domestic researchers and policy makers. The staff of the institute appeared to be very helpful and cooperative. And the embedding of the Institute in the Japanese bureaucracy, especially in the STA, offered a smooth entrance to bureaucratic circles. Nevertheless the problems in acquiring information are numerous. Important written material is still only available in Japanese. An attempt to master the Japanese language sufficiently to be able to read information at a policy research level is far too ambitious for a fellowship of just 15 months. Japanese children spend 1000 hours spread over 9 years to master about 2000 Kanji ideographs, necessary for reading newspapers. To be able to decode more technical and bureaucratic material, not only requires knowledge of more abstract and complex characters, but also mastering of a specific bureaucratic jargon and style, which even for Japanese people appears difficult to decode. Due to the absence of a promulgation law, many important documents belong to the so- called grey literature, which is not open to the general public, journalists or researchers. The accessibility of the most important library, the Diet library, is hampered by a policy to remain exclusive for parliament members. Its computer catalogues exist only for Japanese literature or in Japan published books and the system is technically below the state of the art. Procedures for externally borrowing books are complicated and time consuming. The amount of foreign written material is limited and the selection criteria are difficult to gauge. As for access to verbal information, the self confidence of Japanese people to use the English language is not always sufficient for fruitful interviews. For these reasons I had to confine myself to the available English literature, and to meetings with a selection of English speaking informants in industry, research institutes and universities. The employed methods in this research consisted in discussions with these 'interviewees and primary and secondary study of recent literature and documents. The report contains an annotated bibliography and a list of inter-viewed persons. As some interviewees preferred not to be identified with their answers, no systematic explicit references to persons are made.