Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Broke

As you may have heard, the Japanese Govt is broke: "We've got our backs against the wall and need to do our best to avoid that situation."

This is of rather more than academic interest for your humble correspondent. As things stand, our institute has no budget for next year. Bad as that sounds, our (jules' and my) situation is actually rather worse. The institute budget will be sorted out somehow, there is little doubt about that (albeit it could be cut a bit). However, we aren't paid directly from the core budget, but have been carefully manoeuvred onto the contract research end of things, supported by the Kakushin project. This is a 5-year project that winds up next March, and it won't be directly continued as such. There are ambitions to set up a new 5-year project that follows along somewhat similar lines, but it has to be proposed anew, and it seems we need to justify it as more urgent and vital than rehousing tsunami victims, which is a rather tough sell to say the least. Moreover, during the current Governmental meltdown, no-one is signing anything anyway, it seems...

Interesting times.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fingers crossed for you two!

James Annan said...

Thanks, I expect something will turn up. And if not, there's no harm in a bit of a holiday :-) TBH we long ago reconciled ourselves to the fact that just about every foreigner here gets unceremoniously kicked out at some point. It would almost be a relief if it happened due to force majeure rather than the whim of some random boss.

P. Lewis said...

Go south young man.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110629/full/474553a.html

Anonymous said...

Present those beautiful photographs in a book. We all benefit.

John McCormick