Chiba goes back to school to attract international business

How does one go about attracting foreign investment? It's a common preoccupation, but the Chiba prefectural government has come up with a novel solution: The prefecture's first private international school.

There's a lot riding on the new plan. For when it comes to foreign investment, Chiba Prefecture is lagging badly behind. According to the prefectural government, some 60 foreign firms had their headquarter operations within Chiba Prefecture as of fiscal 2005. In Tokyo, it was roughly 2,600 firms, and in Kanagawa Prefecture, some 300.

Officials say they hope the school, which will be located in Chiba city's Makuhari Shintoshin district, will not only increase investment from foreign companies, but also attract Japanese who are returning from overseas. This in turn, they say, will help stimulate the local economy.

Chiba is a special case. The city has been approved as a special deregulation zone for education, meaning that the school will be approved as a regular school under Article 1 of Japan's School Education Law, becoming the nation's first international school to be set up as an Article 1 school, according to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

The new school, to open in April 2008, will be able to accommodate an estimated 120 kindergarteners and about 290 elementary school children.

It is scheduled to be built on a roughly 10,000-square-meter plot located about 700 meters from JR Kaihin-Makuhari Station. The location is also close to the Makuhari Messe international convention facility as well as the large-scale France-based supermarket Carrefour.

Elementary school classes will have about 20 to 24 pupils per class, and lessons--with the exception of Japanese-language classes--will be conducted in English.

Previously, conventional international schools in Japan were considered "unapproved schools," because their academic curriculums do not meet the standards established by the central government.

This meant that not only were they not eligible for private school subsidies from the central government, but if a child of Japanese citizenship attended one of these elementary or junior high schools, the child's guardians would be held in violation of a law requiring children to be educated. (In Japan, only elementary and junior high school education are mandatory.)

But the new Makuhari international school will be treated just like any other.

Why a school? An official at the Chiba prefectural government's policy promotion department explains, "Foreign companies often determine the location of their offices and stores based on whether there is a good educational environment for their employees' children. We have had cases where foreign firms decided to set up office outside of Chiba because there were no international schools within the prefecture."

The international school is intended to welcome Japanese children who were raised overseas due to their parents' work obligations. By attracting families who lived overseas to live in Makuhari, the prefectural government hopes the city's population will increase, the local economy will be stimulated and the area's image improved.

The Chiba prefectural government also believes the new school will act in a similar way to draw foreign companies. And foreign companies that have the funding, technology and manpower to move overseas, the prefectural government believes, can be expected to make investments within the prefecture as well.

One example of this was the opening of Swedish furniture retailer IKEA in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture. Not only did the company create jobs locally but it also attracted more customers to local furniture stores.

The prefectural government plans to fund the roughly 1.4 billion yen in construction and maintenance costs for the school through donations from companies and individuals.
At a September meeting to promote the school plan and discuss the rough outline of its development, the Chiba prefectural government sought the support of 18 major companies including Chiba Bank and Oriental Land Co.

A foundation set up to prepare for the school's founding is to manage the costs. Neither the Chiba municipal government nor the Chiba prefectural government plans to contribute funding.

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200610240086.html