Minato In the end, when was the Vice-President system introduced?
Imura The system was introduced in my last year as president. My presidency began with the beginning of university autonomy and concluded in a sense with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the University.
During my tenure as president, I had a very difficult time with liberal arts education. The deregulation of the University Act abolished the subject category of general education and led to the dismantling of liberal arts departments at universities across the country. Kyoto University established the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies and the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies based on its liberal arts department, but it had been unable to provide a clear answer as to who should provide liberal arts education, how, and with what kind of content. What I finally asked for was a small group of about 10 students, just for one semester, to educate them on the rudiments of research. I asked faculty members to create opportunities for students to make contact with them, instead of having students listen to lectures in large halls. This gave birth to pocket seminars, or small-group education courses, that began in 1998.
Minato Liberal arts and common education are still a pending issue. Faculty members from each department gather at the Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (ILAS) to plan and manage liberal arts and common education, but we feel that it is still not functioning adequately, and we need to review the institutional design and the way the curriculum is designed.
Pocket seminars, made possible by your idea, were reformatted as ILAS seminars in 2016 and now are included in nearly 300 courses. ILAS seminars are now the signature of Kyoto University. Kyoto University has introduced a research-centered approach, known as the Humboldtian model, and has aimed to educate through research, so it is necessary to further enhance small-group education.
Imura Pocket seminars were based on the education provided at University of Oxford. In the past, University of Oxford was a boarding school, where each student had a tutor and lived together in a dormitory. Education is provided one-on-one, or as tutorials. The spirit is still alive today, based on personal knowledge transfer, and it values thinking for oneself instead of imitating others.
Minato There is a big clue there. Among the Ivy League, which consists of eight prestigious and traditional American universities, Princeton University and Columbia University, which focus on education, emphasize small-group education.
ImuraI believe that the element of thinking independently, which is the foundation for academic study, is acquired through interaction with the teacher.

Minato However, at the beginning of the new millennium, when then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi proposed the Millennium Project, you put together the concept as a member of the Council for Science and Technology.
Imura Let me explain the background leading to the proposal. We had to be prepared on a regular basis so that we would be able to respond to any urgent requests for advice, so we formed a private committee to discuss the promotion of the life science field in Japan, which we had always felt was lagging behind.
When then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi heard about this, he incorporated our idea of creating research centers in the priority fields of genomics, development and regeneration, plants, and bioresources directly into the project. Eventually, four centers were established at RIKEN, which led RIKEN to steer away from physical chemistry and toward life sciences.

Minato At that time, the Council for Science and Technology Policy had the ability to communicate and was heavily involved in the planning and coordination of science and technology policies.
Imura There were several reasons for this, but I think it was largely due to the presence of dedicated politicians, frequent discussions with ministers, and four full-time council members.
The functions of the Council for Science and Technology were strengthened in 1995 with the enactment of the Basic Act on Science and Technology by the Diet to promote the promotion of science and technology and to make Japan a Science and Technology Creative Nation during the lost decade of the early 1990s. In response to the law, the first Basic Plan for Science and Technology was formulated in 1996, which included expansion of research funding and a plan for 10,000 postdoctoral fellows, and I was involved in this as the president of Kyoto University.
In the course of these developments, there were influential council members who were enthusiastic about the activities, and the Council for Science and Technology was meeting once a month, attended by the Minister of Finance and Minister of Education, in addition to the Prime Minister.
Minato Meetings were attended by ministers.
Imura About half of the one-hour meeting was often devoted to topics such as what the decoding of the human genome, which was in progress at the time, could do for us. I think it was very important to have a forum for the academic and political worlds to discuss the latest science and technology.
The relationships I built there were instrumental in finally obtaining a large budget for the aforementioned issue of aging facilities at national universities.
Minato What did you mean when you said there were full-time council members?
Imura We appointed three full-time council members from academia and one from industry in 2000. So we could often discuss and keep up with new academic trends. In addition, university professors were invited to study the latest topics, which were then used to determine the focus of the next budget request and propose it to the ministries. We evaluated what was discussed in each ministry and finally spoke with the Ministry of Finance.
Minato So, the Council for Science and Technology was linked to the academic policy of Japan as a whole and was a forum for policy recommendations. In those days, the political and academic worlds worked together healthily to think about science and technology in Japan, but things have changed over the past 25 years. I feel that we have come to a point where the government decides the role universities should play in the industrial structure.
Imura All the government demands is that universities create innovation. While it is important for universities to innovate and contribute to society through their results, at the same time, there is no future for universities or Japan unless we continue and develop the tradition of basic science.
Minato The same goes for relations with industry. What used to be a collaboration of roles and responsibilities has become a situation where one of them seeks to take the place of the other.
Imura One of the main reasons for the breakdown of cooperation was that many companies stopped conducting research in the 1990s. In the past, many companies had their own laboratories and conducted basic research.
Minato Such laboratories became an active place for people who trained at universities and motivated them to continue their research.
Imura There may be multiple reasons for this, but one major reason may be that shareholders have become more vocal in the midst of a prolonged recession. They want to make quick profits without doing basic research.
Minato This is another concern not only for universities but also for the future of Japan.

Minato Lastly, what do you expect from Kyoto University in the future?
Imura In fact, I have one concern, and I am wondering if the postwar school reforms were really appropriate. Higher education, which used to be three years for high school, three years for university, and four years for medical school, for a total of six years, has been shortened to four years. I am from the last generation of the old school system, and I learned all the required subjects in my three years of high school, but they have all been discontinued under the school system reforms. Meanwhile, academia is evolving at a rapid pace. Adverse effects are inevitable.
Minato Indeed, how much is taught in four years of undergraduate study?
Imura The postwar educational reforms were influenced by the U.S., and in reference to state universities, one university per prefecture was established, which critic Soichi Ohya ridiculed as "ekiben daigaku" (minor local college). This helped to raise the level of the country as a whole, but did not lead to further improvement. The postwar educational reforms led to only imitations of state universities and not much thought was given to the establishment of research universities.
Minato In the case of the United States, state universities are based on the Ivy League universities.
Imura Moreover, the U.S. has an excellent graduate school system. In Japan, on the other hand, companies want to hire "uninfluenced" young people, and the bureaucracy has cut down on discussion about graduate schools, partly because it is impossible to become a vice minister after completing a graduate degree.
Minato So, because of this, it was impossible to move toward an emphasis on graduate school in the 1990s. I am the chairperson of the Graduate School Subcommittee of the Central Council for Education, and there are many issues to be addressed, such as improving the quality of education.
Imura That is because we have not discussed matters consistently. I personally believe that the only solution to the weakening of higher education due to the postwar school reforms and the neglect of graduate school is to strengthen graduate schools and post-doctoral programs. Kyoto University, as a research university, should take the lead in this issue.
Minato The utilization of human resources with degrees is a major issue. Japan has not developed a system for utilizing post-doctoral fellows and has only been patching them up post-failure, resulting in a contradiction. Students may be hesitant to become researchers if they do not see it as a career path.
In addition, no matter how many human resources with degrees a university cultivates, they will have nowhere to go if companies do not actively recruit them.
Imura Companies that have stopped conducting research cannot cultivate their own researchers, so they will have to change in the future.
Minato I agree. The various issues that have emerged since the 100th anniversary of the founding of the University, such as university autonomy, the state of liberal arts education, governance, and the relationship between industry, government, and academia, are also issues that we are facing today. There are aspects that have deteriorated over the past 25 years, and Kyoto University's responsibilities, such as graduate school enrichment, are all critical.
Imura The factors may vary. We cannot blame everything on politics, so I hope that you will take the opportunity of the 125th anniversary of the founding of the University to make changes where changes can be made.
Minato Many of the stories were new to me and very interesting. I was able to become better prepared for the upcoming 125th anniversary of the University's founding.
Thank you very much for your time today.