Japan pitches 'Society 5.0' to keep its edge in tech and science

TOKYO - Japan is showcasing its latest scientific achievements, ranging from sea and air to space, as the government aims to boost and propagate cutting-edge technologies despite the country's decline in international competitiveness in such fields. The Cabinet Office is co-hosting an event dedicated to "Society 5.0," a future society the government believes Japan should aspire to. A full-scale model of the deep-sea research vehicle Shinkai 6500, developed by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, is also being displayed at the venue. Defined by the Cabinet Office as "a human-centered society [helped] by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space," Society 5.0 is a concept intended to broaden the discussion of innovation from science and technology to all of socioeconomic activity. SkyDrive's "Flying car" also attracts the attention of visitors, who can observe a full-scale model of the SD-03, which performed the first successful public manned flights of a flying car in Japan in August 2020. In terms of research capabilities, "The international status of both the quantity and quality of papers continues to decline," said the report, although Japan has seen many Nobel Prize winners. Japan's share of international science publishing has been declining in the past years; Japan now ranks ninth in the world in the number of frequently cited "High-quality" papers - so-called top 1% most highly cited papers - whereas in the 1990s it ranked fourth.