Comment by mcyc
Ah, too bad we never crossed paths!Thanks for your comments here. I agree that a lot of labs were pretty unserious. One other thing that I should have mentioned in the article is that labs in Japan are like little contracting businesses, and the professors have to find funding in a way that seems much harder than the US. This leads to a lot of variability in the financial situations of labs, so yeah my concerns about funding/etc were probably understated (and my lab was likely one of the best funded in the nation).
As for domestic conferences, typically my lab used them as staging for their papers that they would send to top international conferences, so the quality was still pretty good. I do get the sense that the quality outside of the T1 labs drops off pretty quickly.
> ... but I never collaborated with them (in fact, our lab has hardly ever published a paper with >2 authors).
This was something I had in the original draft of the article, but it was removed for being a bit niche. TiTech (and perhaps other schools, but not universal) had a restriction in place where only one student could claim primary authorship on a paper for the purposes of their graduation requirements (typically 1 conference + 1 journal paper). Even if two students contributed equally, they had to sign a form designating one of them the "true" primary author. This massively discourages collaboration. I absolutely hated this policy, but there was basically nothing I could do at an institutional level to change it. I ended up being able to collaborate pretty freely, since I reached my publication requirements quickly, but this policy really hurts students who do their PhD in Japan just because of the numbers game. If two candidates are up for a position, and one has N papers (all first author, but 2-3 authors max) and the other has N + 10 papers (with <N first author, but all with huge groups), the one with N papers is at a disadvantage at first glance. And it just removes one of the primary skills you need to cultivate during a PhD: collaborating with other researchers.