e-Rad (Japan)

e-Rad is Japan's cross-ministry system for competitive research funding. Ministries and agencies publish their calls through it, applications are submitted through it, and awarded projects are managed in it. If a Japanese competitive fund exists, it is almost certainly here.

Its purpose is unification. Before it, each ministry ran its own application system with its own formats and its own identifiers, and nobody could see across them, including the government, which could not tell whether the same work was being funded twice. e-Rad exists so that one researcher, one institution and one project have one identity across all of it.

Two identifiers matter. Institutions have an institution code, and individual researchers have an eight-digit RESEARCHER NUMBER issued through their institution. Both must exist before an application can be submitted, and neither is obtained in an afternoon.

The listings are terse by European standards. A call gives its title, ministry, agency, dates and a link to the agency's own documents; scope, eligibility and budget live in the linked PDF, usually in Japanese only. The system is a submission channel that also publishes, rather than a portal designed to be browsed.

For a foreign researcher the practical route is almost always through a Japanese host institution, which holds the institutional code, manages the researcher number, and is usually the entity the funding formally flows to. Applying as an unaffiliated outsider is not the normal path.