 Well, good afternoon, everybody. And I like to start by thanking Isawa-san, who I know for many years, for making it possible that I come here and address that honorable group, group of my little people, group of colleagues, group of friends. And what I would like to do is to give you my assessment that will come up in a moment after six years having been in Japan. So not everything will be pleasant, but it will be honest. And what I like to do is give you my view after now almost 20 years in science management as to what I believe would help Japan to prosper. And the first thing, the basis of all is, of course, science. You can see science brings tangible benefits to society. It brings it through rational thoughts and reliable evidence. There is nothing as an alternative fact. We have facts, period. So the science is using a systematic analysis to build and organize knowledge. In other words, you cannot fake science. It will be uncovered. Maybe not immediately, but it will be uncovered because it has to be reproducible. And science, initially, in generating knowledge is also the basis for innovation. That is, if you wish, the practical implementation of knowledge into something that is good for society. Now, having said that, we have experienced in the last 10 to 20 years quite a shift of science and technology and innovation. And you can see here, Xi Jinping, what he has said in one of his speeches, scientific and technological innovation is the most important fighting ground of the international strategic game. So if you translate this sentence into simpler words, science and technologies are now a political tool to assure power. Let me turn it around. Unless you are a leader in science and technology, your political influence will cease. So how is Japan doing in this analysis? How is Japan doing at the global scale of innovation? Well, let's first look at the number of different general analyses. This is the Global Innovation Index of 2022. And you can see that Japan hasn't made it into the top 10 of global innovation countries despite the fact that it's the third largest economy in the world. What has happened? And we've heard a little bit of that previously. What has happened is that three other players in Asia have superseded Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and in particular China. Japan is ranked number 13. So where is Japan good? What is its strength? What are the weaknesses? Well, you can see that Japan is very good in some areas. Knowledge and technology output is strong. Business sophistication, market sophistication, institutions. What is lacking is human capital and research. We've heard the number from Lothar who has said that the number of PhD students is much higher in Germany. So the number of young, highly trained students supersedes what Japan produces. And what is also particularly weak is creative outputs. Now, this is even more worrisome because from the cabinet office, you can get probably even later numbers. You can see that the real GDP growth rate goes down ever since the mid-50s. So Japan had a wonderful group of entrepreneurs in the 50s and 60s. But what you see is the GDP has been going down ever since, and it's still going down. Sometimes it's actually the growth rate is negative. And what is the interpretation thereof? This is coming from a recent study of McKinsey. Japan's industrial R&D departments are no longer achieving world-beating performance. At the macro level, the country has slipped in global rankings for productivity growth and intellectual property generation, even as the total, I emphasize that, the total R&D investment is high. And at the micro level, this is a bad sign because it reflects the current opinion of your R&D leaders at the micro level, our research reveals that R&D leaders in Japan have lost confidence in the ability of their organizations to meet the challenges they face. So how can Japan strengthen its innovative power? Because that's the question we should all address, all of us that work here in order to strengthen at the end of the day the productivity to strengthen the well-being of the Japanese people. Now, this is a bit of a complex slide. But what this slide should show is in schematic drawings what an innovation network looks like. And you can see there are several players, universities, research organizations, government as funders, large firms, small firms, venture capital. So what I decided to do for this talk, I wanted to analyze each player in order to find out which of these players is performing properly and which of these players is not. I can, as an analogy, we can look at this whole system like a gearbox. A gearbox consists of many gears. Here I have three. But if one of the gears drops out, the whole gearbox doesn't work anymore. And this is a little bit what Japan currently is facing. Now, my friend and colleague, unfortunately, who passed away has said something very simple but yet very powerful. Everything which is new has to come out of fundamental research or else it is not new. So basic research is the source of new information. As lengthened the life expectancies, fed the world, taught humanity about our planet and the universe, basic research in general prepares humankind for the challenges of the future. So if what we need to reverse the climate change and curing diseases are all possible, it is the researchers that are going to open and show solutions for these problems. So what our problem is, bringing together these researchers, give them adequate space and means in order to let them work. So what is the situation with universities and research organizations in Japan? Well, first of all, like we heard about Germany, there are many players. And also, unfortunately, a few different analyses, every country is a little bit different. Germany is specifically different than I come to this in a moment. So we have universities as educational centers. Some of them, of course, are top universities. As regional centers, so some not so well-known universities, yet they may have an important role in a smaller prefecture in order to educate and study specific issues that are important for the prefecture. We have, of course, the nonprofit research organizations, national labs, corporate industry, and R&D lab. So this is a little follow-up of what Lothar has just showed. It compares three of the issues between Germany, China, Germany red, China yellow, United States in blue. And you can see immediately that some of the countries are similar, some are very dissimilar. On top, if you look at the sector share, so the percentage of funding, you can see that the China and the United States invest more in universities than Germany does. If you take the next step and look at the nonprofit research organizations, however, you can see Germany has a huge amount that is spent on the big four in Germany. That's the reason for it. And what you can see here, Helmholtz, German research, Max Blankleibniz, Fraunhofer in brackets, because Fraunhofer is an applied type of organization. So the top three contribute to one-third of Germany's scientific research output. So this is very important to note, because many universities in Germany and in Japan have two functions. They have an educational function, and the educational function in most universities is a huge effort. Because you have to train undergraduates. Take, for example, Caltech, one of our examples that OIST is looking for as a benchmark. Caltech has about 1,000 undergrad and 1,000 graduate students. So this is a different type of teaching. So bottom line is in universities, and I think this is true in most Japanese universities and German universities, you have to bridge the task of educating large numbers and doing high level research. This not always is going well together. The national labs, you can also see China has a huge investment comparatively in national labs. We all know, for example, that the Chinese Academy of Sciences runs labs that are fully paid for by the government. So universities, as I said, education and research, non-profit organizations, we have here some examples. On the left, there is one research organization in the United States, completely privately funded by Howard Hughes. In the center is a Max Planck Institute, in which our latest Nobel Prize laureates, Wanda Pebo, is working. On the right, you see the recon center for quantum computing. So individual institutes have a very specific kind of task. But we all need the national labs. Of course, there are some that are huge projects. The XFEL laser in Hamburg accelerators. We have here the Nanotech in Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, or the antenna and IC design in Hong Kong, or ocean drilling vessels. These are research support systems where each country can maybe have one. Sometimes the countries cannot afford it. Take CERN. CERN has to be financed multinationally, and there's only one CERN in the world. So some of the activities you need to have an international consortium. Now, I'm coming to this in order to document to you what basic research will be doing, or what basic research has contributed to humanity. You see here, beginning in 1961, with Sidney Brenner, who discovered the mRNA, and by chance also was the founding scientific father of OIST. And then you can see, I'm not going through this, that all these people have contributed over the course of 60 years to discover components that allowed us to not only understand what mRNA is good for, but also how you can utilize mRNA. And it is this woman here on the right, that's unfortunately not very highly resolved. And this woman was the one that, working in the laboratory of Beyond Tech, has actually made a breakthrough because that resulted in a stable RNA that was not degraded within the cell. So what am I saying? Beyond Tech and Moderna are startups. When I go around, I talk to people. People tell me, why was not any vaccine uncovered in Japan? Well, I think this is the key reason. None of the biggies, Pfizer included, has come up with a concept of this sort. It had to come out of startup technology. And Pfizer has had nothing to do with this. But they are, of course, very well-drained to distribute and increase the production. That's why you need them. So in any case, for us, we need to remember that if you want breakthrough technology, don't go looking for established companies. This is another example where I show the impact of a technology that no one was able to actually assess what it will do. And you can see here, this is done for the Americas. You can see that the federal research was supported by three give and take $3 billion. It generated 152,000 jobs, 850,000 associated jobs, 265 billion economic impact, direct federal tax revenues, 5.2 billion, so that the federal return of investment is almost one to five. This is what we should tell the Minister of Finance. Because at the end of the day, the money invested yielded five-fold more money from the society. There are other kinds of discoveries that were relying on a whole plethora of things. So no one, for example, could predict the winner, unless you are Stephen Jobs, of course, because Stephen Jobs was a genius who put together the large number of technologies to run an iPhone. And you can see there were Nobel prizes given in some fields. There was CERN involved, Stanford involved. There was the DOE Department of Energy. There was Department of Defense, DARPA. So what it took was a genius who realized what he needed and found this at various places and put it all together. This is one of my most liked slides. Because what that shows is an analysis where in the United States, a research group has looked at every patent written for 10 years. So 10 years, the analysis of the patents and what you can see here, 73% of the scientific references in these patents come from publicly funded research. So let me turn this around. Without publicly funded research, these patents would never have been written. This is very hard to translate into expenses for the finance minister, but for the world. This is, I think, an extremely important statement. And at the bottom of this slide, what you see is a most highly cited paper, top 1%. These are normally the ones that a group where you want to be in has a much larger impact than a lower paper that is not cited often. So these are the messages of two of the studies. And you can see governments hoping that the research they fund will foster innovation should, therefore, emphasize research excellence. When mediocre research is supported, neither science nor innovation is likely to gain direct benefit. The same statement in 2019 from another group. So what does that mean? If you invest in research, the only research that matters is research that is giving you new information that is recognized by the scientists and industry alike. So now let's look at the next chapter. How is Japan doing in terms of science excellence? Well, this is the top 1% of all of the highest group of papers cited worldwide. By the way, the top 10% looks very similar. And not surprisingly, you can see the top group, which I call here Major World Leading Research Universities, almost all US universities or research institutions. Then is a group which is called International Competitive Research Universities. And you can see there is Recon. I added, I'm saying there is Recon and OIST. I added Recon not because it's a university, but because of its also high standard of research delivered from Recon institutes. And then you have the top Japanese research universities that is further below. So the average quality of a Japanese university is much lower than the average quality of many universities around the globe. And it has gotten worse. If you look at this, and I found that interestingly, it's of course from the Japanese S&T indicators, but it was published by the Asahi Shimbun. And you can see that Japan's scientific competitiveness has even decreased over time. You see, in 19, around 2000, Japan was number four at the high-ranked papers. Number six, around 210. And now it's number 12. Now look at the blue marks. China, 13, second, first. Look at Germany, constant throughout because of additional investment. So that's what you said. Unless you can maintain your competitiveness, you will go down the drain. Maintaining competitiveness means, as one part, of course, also more funding. And this is what happened to the Japanese science output. You can see here that the bar is going down in areas that all matter for technology transfer. Physics, material science, engineering, biochemistry, computer science, and others. You can see in all these fields, Japan has lost competitiveness. So what can we do? How can we change the situation around? Now I'll give you now a little introduction into what constitutes excellency. And you will forgive me, but I spend almost 30 years in the Max Planck Society in various positions that I use the Max Planck Society as an example. The Max Planck promotes outstanding researchers from all over the world and grants them full autonomy. Full autonomy means no one tells you what to do, what experiments to do, what area to do research in. The Max Planck Society has very many, 86, or maybe by now 90, flexible research units. And we can react very quickly on new challenges. I, for example, founded an institute in Cologne on aging. The recent one that is founded is one on cybersecurity. So what you can do is, since they are packaged nicely, let's say four departments, you can have several institutes in various locations in a particular field that is necessary to meet the challenges of the time. Very important, independency of young research leaders. This is an issue that I feel needs to be addressed in Japan, that young people have to be independent. Quality control, very important. Every five years, a group of experts is assessing the quality of the research being done. And that is something that I like to call high trust funding, because it allows a scientist to have creative experiments following the curiosity in five years' terms. If the subsequent evaluation comes to the conclusion that wasn't any good, you can take away the research money. You can keep it stable, or you can move it up. And this is very critical, because this is the only way where you can drive creativity without the need of being in mainstream, internationally oriented. I believe when my time, Max Planck had about 40% of our directors, non-Germans. All right, so technology transfer, yes. And this is the result of a proper constellation in funding research. So you can see that the Max Planck Society has generated these were people working at Max Planck at the time of the Nobel Prize. We have talked about Schwanter-Piebel, 22, 21, there were two, 22, there were two, and so forth, and so on. So there are 23 Nobel Prize laureates, plus 15 Nobel Prize laureates from before the war when we were called Kaiser Wilhelm Society. So that's a total of 38 Nobel Prize laureates in an institution that now, at its height, has only 20,000 people. This is Japan's number. So I believe Japanese are not less intelligent that the Germans or the other ones working in the Max Planck Institutes. So the conclusion you have to draw is very simple. Unless you have the appropriate framework conditions, you cannot deliver this at a level that is highly competitive. So now, what are the design principles to maximize creativity? Research, excellent, very clear. You need a long-term strategy. You have to assure the scientists, this is nothing that is over next year when you change the program into something else. Small group size, large scientific context is also very important. Every group that is larger than eight goes down in efficiency because you have to delegate your authority to, let's call them, lieutenants or other scientists. You cannot drive yourself anymore. Multidisciplinary context, crucial because a lot of Nobel Prizes have been worked out on the interface between different fields. Early independence, I cannot emphasize that enough. Research-driven education and innovation, so your education is going along with the top research. I trust funding. As I said, core institutional and flexible external funding, Max Planck has been over the years 85% to 15%. 85% comes from both Federal Republic and the States. 15% is third-party income. By the way, Isawa-san, we are now by between 10% and 15% at OISO beyond the way. And excellence in leadership and management that also is a cornerstone of good scientific governance. You need to have a structure the scientists can believe in. So I have written here up a few examples of institutions that have high trust funding and are rated internationally very highly. Basic research examples, Max Planck and Rieken, but we have the other four are all privately funded structures. Whether it's welcome, Allen Institute, Broad or Howard Hughes, they use private money and distribute this money in fragments of five years. And I come back to this. There are goal-oriented research institutions, which are very important. Take NIH, largest goal-oriented medical research institution in the world. Look at the Department of Energy. Look at Helmholtz. These are goal-oriented research organizations that get stable funding. And we have something in between. I have two examples here, CNIS in France and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They are sort of in between. There are institutes that are free in their research. There are institutes that are goal-oriented. So now let's look at the Japanese funding structure overall. And this is what I call low-trust funding. So the low-trust funding is JSPS, JST, and anything else where you have to write a grant. What you can see here, countries with a larger share of competitive project funding also tend to be less efficient at converting funds into publication. So this is not the most efficient way to get to publications. Because Japan lacks in research funding efficiency. If you look at the United Kingdom on the top, Japan is here, I don't know. I would say probably number 15 or 16. So not only is the amount of money that is spent by the public to R&D in Japan low. On top of this, it's spent in an inefficient way. This is just one example of OIST. And as I said, OIST has a similar kind of funding principle that Max Planck has with high-trust funding, which has, and Isawa Sen kindly has mentioned that, which has led to ranking the total output normalized by the number of professors leading that in Japan, OIST is number one and within the world in the top 10. And it is not a surprise to me, because if this is the case that we can hire the best people, of course, statistically speaking, we also will get, once in a while, someone who gets the highest awards. And this is one to people. And as Isawa-san said, since May of 2020, he has led the Human Evolutionary Genomics Unit at OIST. We can talk about the work he wants to do, which I find extremely exciting, actually. So now let's look at the money. Because in my job, I have to, of course, explain to politicians and colleagues likewise what the money is that we spend and if this is competitive money. And what you can see here are competitors. By the way, I should say this table was taken off the Isawa Review Committee about OIST. So it's updated, it's a newer version thereof. But what you can see that OIST's excellence per PI costs less than that of its international competitors. So this is an issue that you have to decide at some point. Do you want excellence or do you want metriocracy? If you want excellency, excellency you cannot get for a cheap price. Excellency is costing money and OIST is actually very efficient compared to the leading institutes worldwide. This just shows you the overall funding that you get per year. We have about 8.6 per faculty. Look at Rockefeller, 37. I'll take MIT, Stanford much higher. So bottom line is the excellence research is costing money. And if you want to have excellent research, you need to be prepared to give to those that can do this the money they need. This is a very, let's say, it's a full slide, which I also took from the external review panel. And the most important sentence is on the top. Because at this point of time, OIST has only 90 professors. And we follow very much the recommendation of the review panel that OIST needs to grow. So here we are now at a very crucial juncture. What is the funding situation, the R&D funding situation in Japan? Well, first of all, I want you to introduce this lady. Because this lady is an economist at the University College London. And she has done studies that showed literally what she says that it is the state or a country that is crucial to steer innovation in areas that are not covered by industry. So key point is, take home message. The country has to invest in R&D if you want to be innovative. Now, I show you what many people like. Because if you look at the sum total of R&D, in R&D spending from corporates and government, you can see Japan is on number four. And this is what you always read. But what you don't read is this. What you don't read is that the portion, the fraction, that is coming from the public. So the portion that is driving real innovations, this portion is exceedingly small. I have here no Germany spends about 1%. I think Switzerland, my Swiss colleague was here. 1.3 and other countries are very high. And this is what everyone needs to understand. The plot shows the GDP per capita. And the function of HIRT means the investment from the public. And all you need to know is the red. More public R&D spending leads to a higher GDP. So if you invest more from the public, from the taxpayers' money, your people will be better off. That's the message. So major index unfortunately shows a different picture. While Japan spending on research and development as a share of the GDP is among the world's highest, I just showed you number four. The government's budget for science and technology has essentially remained flat since 2001. Meanwhile, other countries, Germany, South Korea, China have significantly increased their spending. So now we know there is a new type of funding model that will come out probably next year, 2023, the 10 trillion Yen University Endowment Fund. Now, we calculated whether or not the 10 trillion Yen University Endowment Fund can help Japanese universities to produce world-class research. I'm obviously not excluding that it will be better to have a little than have none. But this is also the sad truth. Japan currently is in higher education ranking. Japan is here a number of whatever from this group is towards the end. Japan with the fund is a little higher, but still below the OECD average. And you guys are number three of the world's highest productive countries. This is not sustainable. So what the message is of this is also very clear. It is a good start if you come up with a 10 trillion fund, but it is not sufficient. Large firms, for time reasons, I think I will go over this. That is something which I want to show you because it shows the principle between large companies, R&D and public R&D. The large companies make incremental innovations. Incremental innovations are responding to market pull. They are responding to the market. That's why very rarely is a product that we could call a breakthrough innovation product coming out of the larger companies. We can talk about this because I was for four years the chairman of the Seaman Science and Technology Council. So I can tell you what the issues are in large companies, R&D. Breakthrough innovations, however, you get through technology push. And the technology push in turn comes from new ideas, new concepts that open up the market completely. There are dozens of examples. Look at the TV, let's screen versus the old type of TV. Germans TV production literally crumbled because they didn't follow it. So but this is just one example out of many. Venture capital, very, very, very critical for your country. So what you can see here is that this plot shows that Japan is about in the middle if you talk about venture capital and in entrepreneurs. And you can see that the entrepreneurs in your United States and Germany are more active. This is the amount of venture capital available in Japan. And you can see that Japan as the third largest economy, its proportion of venture capital is very small. Israel we didn't put in because it was out of scale. Israel, it's off the chart. So you can see every other country has a higher volume of venture capital compared to Japan looking at what they, looking at high and wealthy rich countries. So here on the right side, there are some numbers. 3% of the capital raised in the United States is available in Japan, 15% in Europe. Average deal size, 3 million, 15 million in the US. Limited funding for early startups, but it is the early startups that can bring the largest success. 50% corporate venture capital. The corporate venture capital, if it comes from big companies, is dedicated to increase or improve their own product line. You will not see concern completely new. It will not come out of it. So 50% of the venture capital, I can tell you, will be incremental innovation, not breakthrough innovation. This is just a glimpse at OIST. We have been very successful recently by attracting a 5 billion OIST venture fund. And this 5 billion OIST venture fund will provide us with probably enough funding for 50 to 100 startups. So startups. What's the situation in startups? This is important for you to know, because if you look at the impact, the economic impact of startups, you can see here that new businesses younger than five years account for nearly all net new jobs and almost 20% of the job creation. And this here shows there are 535 unicorns in the world. Unicorn is a company that is worth more than $1 billion US. Four are out of Japan. This tells you the deficit that within Japan, there is not enough entrepreneur spirit, not enough venture capital to come up with new companies that could make it to become a unicorn. I think I skip this and just show you towards the end that this is what OIST is planning now. OIST is here in the forefront. You'll see our compass as the compass will be in about 20 years, or maybe 30 years, or if the government would invest more, maybe in 15 years. And there is a new township here. And this new township shows the land we have that with private investment should be built up to be an innovation park in Okinawa. We can again discuss this. So let me conclude and come up with some, unfortunately, not very pleasant news to people in Japan. Science and innovation will shape the future. No doubt about it. Science and innovation will have an impact on a nation's prosperity and on its geopolitical role. Japan's innovation power must be improved. Japan needs to meet the challenges along the entire innovation value chain. These are models, which I very much like and I would very much recommend that decision makers should take a look, for example, in particularly on ERC programs, because the ERC European Research Council has two programs, one in starting grants and one in advanced grants. And these two programs support young excellencey and the excellencey of mature scientists in a way that you have the high trust funding for five years. It's perfect for Japan. A program of this sort with a higher number of fellowships in the starting grants for the young people could revolutionize Japanese universities from within. So my recommendations then are reform structures and functions of national universities. You need to take a look at governance. You have to establish early independence of principal investigators. Every job, every professorial job, not just the full one that I've propagated here, is and should be advertised internationally and should be decided by a council that has international standards. Differentiation in the research system is recommended in terms of mission and model of value creation for society. So you may actually take a good look at Helmholtz and put an umbrella of the many smaller independent institutes in order to give it a common governance, give it common principles, and give it a common funding structure. Review the triple helix model that has been successful in funding research between government, universities, and industry. I think it's high time to take a good look at the triple helix funding in order to see if this money, some of the money, is not better used by establishing venture capital and startups. Increase funding and incentives for venture capital. Very important because if you want to get a company or young entrepreneurs coming from the United States here, you have to make it attractive. So there are ways to do this, like tax cuts, special economic zones, and the likes to bring these people here to have the companies. And I would very much encourage the decision makers to bring in a high level international committee. You should have a mixed committee between the international and the Japanese in order to have a systemic analysis of the Japanese R&D system. I think this is high time, and it would be very beneficial to the entirety of the system. So as I said, this was my talk today. I have addressed individual elements that I believe can be addressed properly if you have the right tools, if you have the right decision makers. And it is with this conviction that I believe if enough effort and money is put into the system, Japan can come back to where it was in around the 50s or 60s. So Japan needs to meet the challenges along the entire innovation value chain. With this, I thank you very much for your patience and I'm open for questions if you have some. Thank you very much. This is Shintaro speaking. I'm a director of the interspecial bill of the Liberal Party. Thank you for such meaningful lecture or speech you just made. I just want to make one specific question regarding the last paragraph you said. Of course, to make innovation, we need to reframe the new structure needed to use destinations. So I'm just wondering if somebody can show the last page at the center you mentioned R&D funding border. I think this is a key. I'm just wondering what is the criteria to choose the board members. The criteria is not feasible or not adequate or inadequate. Maybe this board will choose the wrong choice on research. And also, this member should not be too permanent because as time goes by, the criteria might change. I would like to hear your opinions. Thank you very much for the question, which is a very relevant one. First of all, the board, the governance structure, the board has to be completely independent. No mix between supervision and management. This will, mixing leads to body-body business. It will not work. And none of the major players in the world has it mixed. They have a supervisory board in Max Planck. It's called Senate. Otherwise, we call it Board of Governors. The world has other names, but the principle is all the same. So your governance board has the supervisory board has to be neutral. So your question as to what is the composition of the board? This is a good question. We have, for example, in the Max Planck and also at OIST, we have people from a variety of fields. Scientists, top people with Nobel prizes. We have people from industry banks, people from the public domain like people from the press. So what this board should reflect is an opinion of the people. So it should be a mix of people. Now, we also were worried about the time of service. And my, what we have now introduced at OIST is two terms, three years each. Unless you elected the chair or so. If you are the chair, of course, one person needs to run the chair, by the way, has to be one of the board members, not the president. So that's that's very important that you separate these two issues. And I don't know, was that. Did you ask a second question or so? It's not as a couple questions, but. So I would, I would definitely considering, see the issue that I find in Japan. Most of the decisions are made at a national level. Science, there's no other field globally that is more international than science. It doesn't matter where you discover some things. And in different than in sports, there is no number one, two or three. It's only the number one. So bottom line is you need to have a stronger influx of international talent. We've heard that Germany made it. And you know, Germany, like Japan, we also don't speak native English, but you can adjust it. You can, for example, the courses for the graduate students. You can teach in English. But for me, more important is the evaluation of the end of an international at the international level to assure the Japanese tax. I mean, you are responsible for how the taxes spent, whether it's spent well or not. You need to internationalize at that level as well. Thank you very much for a very, very impressive talk. I mean, I completely agree with what you said, actually. And I have a question about the German system is a present. I think as you mentioned, you have this academic freedom, that autonomy for the science. And you now have a reasonable international talent that's exactly merged within your community. And I'm very much impressed with this. And I think this is not all tradition. If I recall about the year of 2000, a little bit before, if you visit the German Institute, they were speaking German. And I was not very pleased to see that I cannot understand anything. So I think you had a tremendous effort to change this culture. And within this 20 or 30 years, completely changed. So I think Japan can also do it. And as a matter of fact, you're still continuing to change. And especially for your support for the young people. I think that started only 10 years ago or something. It's not very old. German system had a very huge hierarchy. The professor was very, very strong in all days, but gradually changing. And I think we, Japan, also started to think about making the young people independent situation. But what difference is that money they put to the individual ones? So if you divide the money that is paid for the youngsters, it's something one order smaller. So if we seriously have to think about making the dependency of the youngsters, I think we have to probably triple or 10 times support. Otherwise, the people will have to be stuck to the faculty and do a little bit of independent work. But do you think that this difference between complete independence of the youngsters needs some startups, which is quite a money? But I personally believe that this is very essential for Japan. And another one is these hiring international talents that we probably have to change the language. The business language of English should be more broadened to. And do you think this will help our university system? Absolutely. And you made three points. The first is the students. And when did the German system change, I think? This was for the students, I would say probably 10 years or less, that the universities decided to teach after the bachelor, after bachelor, also in English. Not all of them, but some of them. The top universities teach in English. So that's one. The second is that the influx of international talent has been ongoing. I would say this is probably also 10, 20 years. But we have a lot of foreign talent coming to Germany. And this is what you want in areas where you need highly educated people. So as I said, I'm in Max Planck in my time, that was about 40% of the people I hired were non-Germans. Now, the reform was actually based in a fairly long ago, 1968. 1968 was the student revolution. And the student revolution has led to a dismantling of the hierarchy. So this has then been, of course, it took a couple of years. But by now, every professor, whether it's a full professor associate or we call them junior professor, they are all independent. The hierarchy is very dangerous. I give you one very simple example. If you talk to Nobel Prize laureates when they did the experiment that led to the Nobel Prize, most people were younger than 42. So this gives you my answer. If Japan does not increase the spending for the young talent, you will not get more Nobel Prize laureates. Very simple equation. So from what I showed you, Japan has a deficit. You have only 0.4% of the GDP that comes from the public. Germany has 1%. United States has 0.9%, 0.89%, something like this. But how can that be? A country like Japan, you are relying. You are relying on the young and the intelligent people that drive your economy. That's your dedication. How can it be that you have 0.4%? And what I showed you is the consequence thereof. Neither enough people educated, no enough know-how in order to come up with new companies. That's the issue. It's a very simple equation. So my pledge for Japan is a gradual increase. So how could you do this in terms of young people? Look at ERC starter grants. You give every year, I don't know, say 30, 40 starter grants for young people. The advantage is it could be run by JSPS or JST or whatever. But it should be, of course, the quality control should be at the highest level. And those people with the ERC, they can go to any place they want. So let's just say a person A gets a grant, decides to go to Kyoto. Perfect. Bukouka, no problem. Ois, also welcome. So the people vote with the money they bring. Very simple. This revolutionized in Europe the entire, sorry, it revolutionized the standing, the elite. If you are part of it, you are elite. And that's what it takes here. So in our country, we started the so-called Sohatsu program for the young ones. But the amount that paid is one order magnitude smaller. So I just want to emphasize my government. Because then this doesn't work the principle. You should give a person a five years worth of funding complete. This is ERC. And we are talking about probably two parrots, two to three postdocs, secretary, and full funding. So that's what it is. If you do this, I can assure you, not only do you get the best Japanese, you also get the best people from abroad.