At the English language edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun, Waseda University Professor Norihiro Kato writes an op-ed piece about how the Japanese Literature Publishing Project was wrongly shut down by the Japanese government, based on two major errors: they don’t know how to count, and the budget screeners they sent knew nothing about the endeavor.

He writes:

[One of the evaluators] even went on to insist that governmental promotion of translation itself is unnecessary, quoting data that 470 book translations of modern Japanese literature are published overseas on average every year. This figure is far removed from the real number, which is an annual average of 30 books. And the reasons for these errors are truly pathetic. The evaluator concerned, Shinichi Ichikawa, when researching stocks of popular authors, confused the search system unique to that American university library with a worldwide search system. He also mistakenly took the number of hits from the Japanese Literature in Translation Search operated by the Japan Foundation to be the average number of books translated per year. By doing this, one collection of 35 short stories would be counted as 35 books, and three anthologies would be counted as 66 books.

The officials at MEXT could’ve seen that figure just by coming here! Also:

Of the six budget screening evaluators, four are experts in education, accounting, banking, and management and the remaining two are experts in interpreting (not translating), Japanese and communication (not Japanese literature). Not one of the six evaluators was a learned individual with knowledge and insight into translation of modern Japanese literature. At the very least, this is an oversight by MEXT as the promoter of budget screening…But even I didn’t know about this problem until the middle of July. It was my friend Michael Emmerich, the distinguished translator, who brought it up when he visited our university and spoke in my class. That was the first I knew of it. It isn’t something that would be widely reported in the media. And this is a clear indication of the severity of the problem.

Worth a read, even though it gives the whole issue a bitter after-taste.