The basic requirements of science and technology journalism are the same as for ordinary journalism. In addition, however, science and technology journalism has to address the questions of whether science and technology are the means to achieve the sustainable development of human beings, and how the outcomes of science ad technology affect the receivers. Further, science and technology journalists are required first to properly assess the importance of each RD theme; second, they have to accurately judge the stage of the research; third, they have to monitor the development in particular fields without being hostage to commonly accepted ideas; fourth, they have to examine the impact of science and technology on other areas such as the economy, the military affairs, and international relations among others and vice-versa; fifth, they shold, without failure, inquire about the costs of the scientific and technological undertakings in questions. Thus, the science and technology journalist has to conduct a sort of technology assessment. Finally, the author argues that science and technology journalism should be independent, interdisciplinary, hold broad viewpoints, and be oriented towards policy, systems and the future.

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This essay presents the author's views on the current conditions and trends regarding science and technology journalism. The conditions encountered in Japan do not follow the general patterns found in journalism in as much as they do not reflect the social situation of science and technology but rather the public's optimistic or pessimistic views thereupon. He mentions by way of illustration that the publications of articles on science and technology in newspapers has been reduced and the fact that journalists themselves consider that the publication of a high number of articles is not an indicator of the activity of journalists in the area. The author also presents the general view on the issue held in the U.S.A. where the public consider articles on science and technology as important as those in other areas and deem that it is unreasonable to reduce science news even when journalists are being retrenched. Futher, he presents his view on the First World Conference of Science Journalists held in Tokyo in 1992. With regard to trends, the author reckons that , judging from the contents of textbooks on science journalism used at universities in the United States, journalism purporting to divulge knowledge on science and technology in terms understandable to the general public has undergone a change into reporting from the standpoint of how science and technology affect society. Finally, he expresses his view that advocative science and technology journalism with its lesser emphasis on social aspects will give way to critical journalism reporting on the actions taken by the Establishment, government for example.

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This essay discussed the documentary TV programs on the history of science and technology produced by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). An outline is first given of the role played by directors in the production of TV programs inferring therefrom that the quality of a program depends on the director's knowledge, particular plans and personality. He then focuses o the development that the director's intentions underlying the documentaries have undergone to find out that from 1960 to 1967 directors tried to put forward positive evaluations of science and technology, from 1967 to 1971 they not only purported to educate but also to warn and even launched accusations, from 1971 to 1978 they delved into the social significance of science and technology, and from 1978 to 1988 they laid emphasis on entertaining rather than on evaluation. Finally, the author touches on the problem of training directors to enable them to produce science and technology documentary TV programs.

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This article describes the situation of popular scientific magazines in Japan from the mid-1970's to the present by referring to the "Shuppan Shihyo Nenpo" (Annual Report of Publications Index) and to comments by the chief editors of the popular scientific magazines. These magazines seem to be in decline as the decrease in the total number of their publications attests. The author suggests however they might show signs of growth again since they are not meant for the masses and are not regarded as advertising media in Japan. The best-selling popular scientific magazine in Japan, "Newton", started publication in 1981. In this period many other popular scientific magazines appeared. The sign of this boom lay in the rise of new popular scientific magazines in the United States that included many color-illustrated pages. This, in turn, influenced the existing popular scientific magazines in Japan. This boom declined in the latter half of the 1980's when many popular scientific magazines offered discounts or resorted to smaller print runs. In the 1990's the remaining magazines were able however to hold the decline of their publication numbers. The author cites various comments by the chief editors of popular scientific magazines pointing to the role of these magazines during the last fifteen years in making science accessible to the public, to the fact that no scientific magazine engages in scientific journalism in Japan, and that it is difficult to decide the issues for each number.

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The author has carried out a ten-year project on science, technology and society in postwar Japan during which he looked into the publishing activities of the industrial, governmental and academic sectors. Till the 1970s science and technology journalism aimed at rendering science and technology understandable to the general public; later however, it focused on issues that became the concern to the general public such as pollution. The author describes the various stages science and technology journalism have gone through, from its incipient role in the nineteenth century when it was used as a way to enlighten the general public and as a public relations tool for the scientific community, to the atomic age when journalism became aware of both the positive and negative aspects of science and technology by remained at a loss on how to go about reporting it, to the space age when enlightenment aim became predominant again, to the antipollution campaigns that used the visual mass media to great effect, to the debate on gene recombination with scientists addressing the general public on the issue. Science, the author points out, needs now feedback from the general public since it has acquired a new and expanded ability to control people's lives.

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This essay discusses a number of issues concerning global warming to illustrate the ways through which scientific information is distorted and international policy decided based on such inaccurate information. To this aim the author analyzes a period of seven years running from 1985 when a few scientists estimated the influence of global warming to the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The analysis sheds the following major points: 1) In 1985, when the first international conference on global warming was convened, scientists did not conduct a scientific review but rather a "scientific assessment", striving in so doing for consensus and thus engaging in a collective decision-making exercise of a volitional nature; 2) Journalists did not report the original views of scientists on the subject to the general public and sometimes put out news that oversimplified the subject; 3) Reports on the contents of discussions among scientists are often misunderstood by the laymen; 4) Journalists and the general public take the results of computer simulation to be reliable scientific predictions and disregard the intrinsic limits of such methodology; 5) Scientific articles include the political scenarios of reducing exhaust carbonic acid gas by inserting this aim as a fact in the simulation exercises; 6) The terminology used by scientists conducting research on global warming permeates the language used in the clauses of the international convention.

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"Pop-Science" (Popular Science) is a "culture" that does not share the norms of the scientific community. The author believes it was established in the U.S.A. during the 1920s and 1930s when science magazines were published that became the model for the present ones. Several factors have marked the rise of "Pop-Science" the first being the view of technology as "The application of the sciences to the useful arts". The development of electrical engineering by inventors who had not received a university education was another important factor that shaped "Pop-Science". Further, the images given rise to by the so-called "Future Boom" in the 1930s - when much research from industry and academia went along economic policies to stimulate consumption by suggesting images of future cities and consumer durables - were spread by popular science magazines.

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[in Japanese]

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To procede the huge and extensive research and development project inwhich many organizations are involved, it is necessary to have the faultlessly hierarchal phased and organized procedures to procede the project. This paper reveals the method to make the faultless procedure to procede the hierarchally phased project to realize the objective result systematically in the extent phsychally feasible, and shows the actual example.

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