Strange bedfellows

Sometimes you see something that makes you wonder. In this case, a recent journal article I read thanked for financial support the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (I am not making this up!). Why any single funding agency should be supporting sumo wrestling, Noh theater, and condensed matter physics is beyond me.

In this case, I wonder if there's possibly a more bureaucratically messed up system than ours. . . .