The Japanese are looking closely at York's bio-science genius. RON GODFREY talks to the trio who helped to draw their attention to the city

GISMO gurus in York gawp at Kaoru Hasegawa's mobile phone, but as she takes her own photo with it and instantly sends her attractive image downline to her distant caller, she shrugs.

This gadget, says Kaoru, Yorkshire Forward's representative in Tokyo, is now part of the cultural currency in Japan.

Nodding furiously in agreement are Paul Murphy, York's Inward Investment Board's chief executive and Professor Tony Robards, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of York who with Kaoru both took part in a mission to "sell" York to the Japanese last November and are again preparing to fly out there.

Mr Murphy says: "It's like being cryogenically preserved and waking up in a technologically advanced society.

"Their use of mobile telecommunication is straight out of science fiction. Their electronics technology is way in advance of the west's."

Ironically, one of the reasons Kaoru was rendezvousing with the two men at the Innovation Centre in York's Science City, was because of a different but equally crucial area of Japanese industry where, comfortingly, they are playing catch-up with us.

All three were plotting strategy to keep up the momentum for a Yorkshire drive to attract the attention of Japan's powerful but relatively rudimentary pharmaceutical industry - a campaign which so far is succeeding beyond all expectations.

This weekend Mr Murphy and Kaoru were playing host to a top scientist from a Japanese pharmaceutical company visiting York to assess its internationally-recognised bio-science expertise and the possibility of forging close links with the city - perhaps, one day, even setting up a drugs research and development establishment here.

Included in the tour were visits to healthcare company Smith & Nephew whose research and development building in York is now bearing fruit - and profits - as well as a glimpse of the major laboratory buildings being developed on the Science City site next to the university.

Two similar visits to York by representatives of separate Japanese pharmaceutical firms are planned over the next few weeks and all this activity is no coincidence.

It stems from that November mission when the two men took a team of eminent scientists from York to Tokyo and Osaka and addressed delegates from some 140 companies.

Investment and industry officials at the British embassy had warned them that typically, the Japanese always took a long time to respond to trade missions, but even they were stunned by the enthusiastic reaction.

It was hardly surprising. The Japanese pharmaceutical industry, operating in a lately-stagnant economy, is only too painfully aware of its need to "globalise" if one day it is to compete against the occidental giants like Smith Klein Beecham or Glaxo Wellcome.

They simply had not forged the same links within Japan between industry and academia, and so the mission title: Drug Development From Concept To Clinic was alluring indeed.

Of course the Japanese were aware of the bioscience expertise of Oxford and Cambridge as well as some Scottish universities - all heavily subscribed by research companies - but these visiting speakers were now opening their eyes to Yorkshire as a region of huge possibility.

The combined research strength of York, Leeds and Sheffield universities, they learned, was every bit as powerful as Oxford and Cambridge and a lot more accessible.

The White Rose universities had the equivalent share of market income; and as many research staff in departments internationally renowned for quality.

They were also hugely impressed by the famous Yorkshire-based scientists, including Professor Rod Hubbard of York's Department of Chemistry who has solved the problem of the oestrogen receptor; and Professor Norman Maitland from York's Department of Biology, who with his team has made a breakthrough in understanding cervical and prostate cancer.

What a temptation for Japanese companies or research institutions, hungering to involve themselves with drugs related to frontier-of-science discoveries!

The mission cost about £40,000, some £30,000 of which was provided by Yorkshire Forward and £5,000 apiece from the York Inward Investment Board and Science City York but it was to prove to be money well spent.

Kaoru says: "Over the last two months there has been a huge response to the follow-up conducted by my Yorkshire Forward office in Tokyo - a follow up which included contacting all 140 companies plus another 40 who wanted to come to the seminars but were unable to make it.. In many cases the response was not just interested but enthusiastic."

On the back of that interest, Paul Murphy plans to jet off once again to Japan on March 25, while Professor Robards has been invited to address the annual conference of the Japanese Chem-Bio Industries Association in Tokyo in July.

Professor Robards says: "As a university man, I can say that for far too long we have had people going out to Japan saying: 'We are great.'

But if instead we say: 'Here is a cancer researcher in the forefront of cancer treatment, and you can be involved' then that captures their attention."

Mr Murphy said that the prediction that a pharmaceutical research link can be made between the Japanese and York within three to five years is easily achievable "but the process of persuading a Japanese company to set up a permanent base here will take longer.

"The first phase is to get a steady tramp of people from Japanese organisations to see for themselves the regional capability. Out of that will evolve the next stages."

Kaoru will yet again help to steer the two men through the complexities of Japanese business life.

But at least she has the comfort of knowing that when her countrymen need to translate an English word into Japanese they can look it up on their all-colour mobile phone Internet screens.

"Like this one," she says, her face framed in it in a liquid crystal smile.