Japan’s Cabinet Office runs the Moonshot Research and Development Program. It describes the program as chōsenteki na kenkyū kaihatsu, challenging research and development based on bolder ideas that are not an extension of what came before. The aim is disruptive innovation that starts in Japan. The state itself sets ambitious goals that are meant to fascinate people.

Goal 1 calls for a society, by 2050, in which people are freed from the limits of body, brain, space and time. Goal 6 calls for a fault-tolerant, general-purpose quantum computer by 2050. In February 2021, the Cabinet Office announced that 47 project managers had been chosen for seven goals.

In the supplementary budget for fiscal 2013, the Japanese government set aside 55 billion yen for ImPACT, the Impulsing Paradigm Change through Disruptive Technologies Program. Its stated goal was discontinuous innovation through high-risk research.

Each project was led by a puroguramu manējā, a program manager. The Cabinet Office describes the role as that of a producer who plans, carries out and manages the research, not that of a researcher. Twelve program managers were chosen in June 2014 and four more in September 2015.

Japan’s Second Science and Technology Basic Plan, adopted in 2001, set a goal for international science prizes. Japan was to produce winners of prizes such as the Nobel at the level of the major European countries: gojū-nenkan ni Nōberu-shō jushōsha sanjūnin teido, about 30 Nobel laureates in 50 years.

In 2026, a white paper of the Ministry of Education noted that 25 years later, more than 20 Japanese researchers had already won a Nobel Prize.