The Japanese APCTP Committee

Noboru KAWAMOTO Chairman the Japanese APCTP Committee

During one of the AAPPS meetings we discussed the idea of establishing a theoretical physics center in Asia. From this initial proposal we needed to expend a great amount of effort in order to establish a real theoretical physics center in Korea. We had intensive discussions: where we should choose the site of the center, how we should solve the financial problems for the establishment, what could be the main purpose and the function of the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (APCTP) in Asia, etc. At this early stage of the development of APCTP, Prof. Y.M. Cho of Seoul National University. played a very important role by leading the discussions and organizing the meetings for the establishment of center.

Some of our members in the initial discussions considered the possibility that the creation of an original scientific idea is substantially influenced by the cultural background of the scientists. We dreamed of a situation where the genuine and original ideas of pioneering works would emerge from Asia in the future, possibly from APCTP. In these vast regions of Asia, there are is a wellspring of human resources, and thus this region inherently has tremendous potential ability. We considered that APCTP should have a function as being a center for higher education in Asia as well as a center of excellence. After serious discussions about where to choose the site of the center we decided to build the center in Korea, partly because of its geographical location in the Asia- Pacific region. Prof. C.N. Yang, who could be considered as the most well-known theorist of high energy theoretical physics in Asia and is a Nobel laureate, accepted the position of being the first president of the center.

In the early stages of the discussions there was an argument that the financial contribution for the center's establishment should reasonably be estimated with Korea, Japan and then the rest of countries (as a unit) each roughly contributing a third of the expenses. In reality, however, the economical balance at this time was such that Japan was economically dominant and thus was expected to make substantial contributions. This discussion, however, created difficulties since substantial financial contributions from member countries were not easily obtained. In particular, the Japanese commitment of 1/3 of the financial contribution was officially impossible since the Japanese government does not have this type of scheme that allows the spending of money outside of Japan, except for OED programs (financial help for under developing countries). At this stage, the possibility of making APCTP an organization under UNESCO was once seriously considered because, in this way, obtaining the Japanese financial commitment might have been easier. Y. Yamaguchi (Prof. Emeritus of the Univ. of Tokyo) proposed this idea and it was seriously investigated. However the Korean government was not positive on this idea at this time.

Eventually we decided to ask each of the member countries to contribute $10,000 per year as a membership fee. In the meantime, the Japanese side agreed to make positive efforts to get substantial financial support for APCTP from the Japanese government. For this purpose the working organization, the Japanese APCTP committee, was organized and the first meeting was initiated by Prof. A. Arima of the University of Tokyo, who later became a president of the University of Tokyo and the minister of education of the Japanese government.

The Japanese theoretical physics community has constantly supported the sound and steadily development of APCTP from the beginning. Y. Yamaguchi (Univ. of Tokyo), K. Fujikawa (Univ. of Tokyo) and I regularly attended the meetings and workshops organized by APCTP in the early stages. N. Nagaosa (solid state phys., Univ. of Tokyo), J. Yokoyama (astrophys., Kyoto University) and myself (high energy phys., Hokkaido University) supported the selection of postdocs as action committee members of APCTP at an early stage. We exerted substantial effort and gave support in order to help APCTP properly function, especially when it had a difficult time from an organizational point of view. At this time, the Japanese APCTP committee supported the development of a fund to send young, active physicists to APCTP so that the center would have more active researchers. At this difficult time for the APCTP, Prof. M. Kobayashi from KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization), who later became a Nobel laureate, made great efforts that contributed to the improvement of in-house research activities. It was an ironic situation that Japan couldn't support APCTP substantially while the Max Planck organization of Germany could support APCTP financially at 300,000 Euros per year for five years with the strong leadership of Prof. P. Fulde, the third president of APCTP.

H. Sugawara, who was previously a director of KEK, became the chairman of the Japanese APCTP committee, succeeding Arima, who had made various attempts to determine how Japan could create such a program of supporting APCTP financially. It was, however, difficult to generate such a program as no such funding program has ever been tried in the past. KEK has, however, generously supported the membership fee of Japan to APCTP with the leadership of H. Sugawara. Even though the amount of money regarding the membership fee to APCTP was not large for Japan, it was not a easy task to create a possible reason of financial support for APCTP since there are six cooperative theoretical physics institutes in Japan.

Historically the Japanese APCTP committee was created as a working committee to consider how to support APCTP financially. It turned out that it was not easy to find and establish a scheme of supporting an international cooperative institute outside of Japan. In the meantime, due to the constant efforts of the previous and new presidents (P. Fulde and S. Kim, respectively), the organization of APCTP has been well established financially, which has allowed the center to operate soundly. At the same time, the economic situation of the Asia Pacific region has changed drastically from the time of the mid 90's

According to these changes, the stance of Japanese APCTP committee has changed as well. The membership of the Japanese APCTP committee, which in the past consisted of voluntary members, now consists of elected members from each theoretical physics group. It may now function as a discussion platform on how Japan will actively contribute to international cooperative research activities, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, because in the Japanese APCTP committee there are excellent representatives of the various theoretical physics communites and institutes in Japan.