Highlighting JAPAN

COVER STORY: Living in Japan—Home from Home

Caption: Waseda University, one of Japan’s premier private universities, presently has 3,600 international students enrolled in its courses and plans to increase intake to 8,000 over the next ten years.
Credit: COURTESY OF WASEDA UNIVERSITY

Living in Japan—Home from Home

The number of foreign visitors entering Japan in fiscal 2008 was 7.58 million, an increase of 2.68 million compared to fiscal 1998. In the same year, the number of “registered foreign residents,” that is people who have registered as permanent residents or for medium- to long-term stays, hit a record high of approximately 2.2 million, a 1.5-fold increase compared to ten years earlier. By easing require-ments for issuing visas, the government is signaling enhanced personal exchanges with other countries, attracting tourists from overseas as well as foreign nationals with a high level of knowledge and skills, and also focusing on accepting exchange students.

In terms of exchange students, the government is aiming to accept 300,000 such students by 2020. In 1998, exchange students numbered about 50,000 and by May 2009 the number had reached a record high of 132,000. They come from an extremely wide range of countries, from Asia to Europe, Africa to Oceania. For example, at Akita International University in Akita Prefecture, northern Japan, about 15% of students are international students. They come from twenty-two countries, and almost all classes are conducted in English. International stu-dents today study in all forty-seven prefectures and municipalities of Japan.

“I want Japanese and international students to enhance their ability through friendly competition,” says Mitsuhide Shiraki, dean of the Center for International Education of Waseda University, which had the largest number of international students among Japanese universities in FY2009. “I also hope that on their return home, the international students will serve as a bridge between our countries.”