Japan's Prime Minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, has met remarkably little opposition to his plan to merge the Science and Technology Agency (STA) and Monbusho, the ministry of education, science, sports and culture. That is surprising considering that the two organizations are about as compatible as oil and water. What is more, leaders of government research organizations throughout Japan are aghast at the manner and speed at which the plan has moved ahead (see page 327). But they have had no say in the decision.

The merger is very much the brainchild of Hashimoto, who was infuriated by the STA's failure to deal with a string of accidents at the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Corporation and who quickly killed more sensible attempts to upgrade the agency into a ministry. There was no discernible opposition to the move in Hashimoto's reform council, which has only one scientist — Akito Arima, president of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), who seems to have taken an uncharacteristically ambivalent stance on the proposal. Moreover, the merger has gone largely unnoticed by the public and media, who have focused their attention on Hashimoto's difficulties elsewhere.

Yet the merger of the STA and Monbusho is the most radical reform of Japan's public sector science system in decades. The two organizations could hardly be more different. The science and technology section of Monbusho is tucked away in a dark corner of one floor of the ministry's six-storey building. The ministry's brightest career bureaucrats spend at most a couple of years in that section before moving on to the ministry's much stronger sections in education. The STA, on the other hand, is the only government agency devoted entirely to science and technology.

Some proponents of the merger argue that STA officials will bring much-needed new blood to the education ministry and help to break the ministry's notoriously bureaucratic stranglehold on the university research system. But even if all STA officials move to Monbusho — which is unlikely, given that some sections of the agency are to be hived off elsewhere — they will be greatly outnumbered. Furthermore, the problems in the university research system are caused as much by a sclerotic combination of conservatism, favouritism, deadwood and inbreeding in the universities themselves as by the policies of Monbusho bureaucrats.

The potential pitfalls of the merger are many. One particularly dangerous idea is that the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) under Monbusho should merge with the STA's much bigger National Space Development Agency. The acute danger in that apparently rational approach is a loss of the virtues of ISAS, a remarkable organization that has shown the world how to run a dynamic worldclass space science programme on a shoestring budget.

So what benefits can be hoped for? The STA does have a greater awareness of the need for objective research assessment and may, with sufficient determination, be able to introduce such practices in universities that so far have insisted on ‘self-evaluation’. Furthermore, the STA has, through a ‘hands off’ approach, allowed RIKEN to become one of the most successful enterprises for basic research in Japan. The merged organization should apply the RIKEN model to university research institutes, in particular those for joint university use, such as ISAS and the National Astronomical Observatory — which could bring much-needed autonomy to these organizations and let them make better use of limited funds.