Big Government Projects

With an eye turned to society 10 years in the future, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology established three visions: "Secure sustainability as a developed country with an aging population and declining birth rate," "Create a living environment with a high quality of life as a prosperous and reputable country," and "Establish a sustainable society with vitality." The Center of Innovation Science and Technology based Radical Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program (COI STREAM; hereinafter "COI") is a project to provide support for challenging/high-risk research and development related to those visions for up to nine years, with awards ranging from 100 million yen to 1 billion yen per site. Ritsumeikan University was selected as a "Health Innovation to Promote Exercise in Life" site, for which the University serves as a research leader.

"Bright Future for All Ages with Health Innovation by Daily Exercise" (name changed at the time of selection) sites aim to "create a sustainable and prosperous society," and transmit leading-edge models to the world.

See the "Bright Future for All Ages with Health Innovation by Daily Exercise" website for details. (Japanese Version Only)

The Global COE Program is a project aimed at providing focused support for the formation of internationally prominent education and research sites, thereby promoting the creation of internationally competitive universities. The purpose of this is to strengthen and enhance further the education and research functions of Japan's graduate schools and develop creative human resources who will lead the world on an internationally prominent research infrastructure. (Project period: 2007 - 2009)

This research site is a further evolved version of the 21st Century Center of Excellence Program “Kyoto Art and Entertainment Innovation Research” in which digital archives and databases of tangible and intangible cultural assets related to Kyoto and Japanese culture have been created in an aim to integrate the humanities with information science.

See the Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures website for details.

This center gathers people's experiences and stories of illness, aging, disability, etc., analyzes the relationship with society, conceptualizes people's future lifestyles, and shows the means to achieving the ideal world and society.

See the Center of Ars Vivendi: Forms of Human Life and Survival website for details.

This research site aims to promote educational research to protect cultural heritages and the historic cities that surround them from disasters, expand those principles to an international scale, and develop human resources who will be leaders in protecting cultural heritages from disasters not only in Japan but around the world as well.

See the Global COE for Education, Research and Development of Strategy on Disaster Mitigation of Cultural Heritage and Historic Cities website for details.