First Machine Ethics grant in Japan?

At last Japanese Government agreed that Machine Ethics is an important topic. Or my Japanese in previous applications was too bad?

This fiscal year started off with a surprise. Few years of applying for a Japanese Ministry of Education grant (Kakenhi) with Machine Ethics topic without any success and finally reviewers have shown some interest in the topic. For sure it got some publicity - last year Scientific American article has mentioned my approach and I ended up translating it to Japanese edition. Then, this year, the very simple (fast) version of GENTA's morality judgement module (one I was working on at Stanford) was shown during NHK program about robots that will enter our lives. Prof. Anderson, thank for mentioning me in your article, Prof. Araki, thank you for showing my program on national TV!