Class Dismissed

Hisashi Kubodera could have had his pick of universities. But the Japanese student, who speaks three languages and has an aptitude for applied mathematics, knew that getting a degree in his home country was the last thing he wanted — Japanese schools are just too easy, he says. Now a freshman at Yale, he recalls sitting in on a lecture at a Hokkaido-based college to get a feel for the place. The class was "so boring and terrible," Kubodera says, he can't even remember the lecture topic. "In Japan, if you get into college you can graduate no matter what," he says. "In the U.S., it's hard to get in and harder to graduate."

Kubodera may be an exceptional student, but his decision to seek higher education overseas is all too common among Japanese youth these days. Japan's universities have fallen on hard times, their reputations so dented that many ambitious students no longer consider them even as a last resort.

Beset by international competition, hampered by outmoded curriculums and cloistered, change-resistant administrations, universities are seeing enrollment and tuition revenues decline. The total number of higher-ed students in Japan fell from 2.87 million in 2005 to 2.83 million last year, a loss of some 37,000, according to Japan's Education Ministry.

Education experts say that nearly 40% of universities and colleges can't fill student quotas, forcing some schools to relax admission standards and others to merge or close.

This troubling trend is partially due to Japan's chronically low birth rate. The country's student body is shrinking. The number of 18-year-olds — a group that accounts for 90% of first-year college students — plunged 35% between 1990 and 2007, from 2 million to 1.3 million, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Simply put, there are fewer and fewer Japanese students to support a system that was built for heavier class loads.

As a result, Japan's famously Darwinian educational environment, in which high school students crammed day and night so they could beat their peers on standardized tests and get into good universities, is fading. Instead, even average students now breeze into colleges that are becoming less selective about who fills their hallowed lecture halls.

Educators have a phrase for this phenomenon: daigaku zennyu jidai, which literally means "an age when all are accepted to college." Big schools such as Tokyo University, which receives 40% of its funding from the government, are trying to goose head count by establishing more graduate schools and by adding postgraduate courses for working professionals and retirees.

Smaller, underfunded colleges must take more drastic action. For example, Osaka University and Osaka University of Foreign Studies merged in October; two other Osaka schools — Kwansei Gakuin University and Seiwa College, both of which have been around for more than a century — are slated to combine next year.

The problems facing the country's higher-education system run deeper than mere demographics, however. Japan may be the world's second largest economy with a reputation for technological prowess, but its schools aren't making the grade. Critics say student bodies are stultifyingly homogeneous, teaching methods are obsolete, and there's a dearth of courses taught in English, the lingua franca of international education and commerce. "Japan's schools are third-rate by international standards," says Robert Dujarric, director of Temple University's Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies.

In the 2007 Times Higher Education Supplement, an influential U.K.-based annual survey of universities all over the world, only four Japanese universities ranked in the top 100, compared with 37 from the U.S. and 19 from the U.K. "If your aim is a Nobel Prize in chemistry," Dujarric says, "you don't come to Japan."

This is another big reason why Japan is struggling to fill its classrooms. To offset dwindling enrollment, faculties need to reach out globally to attract foreign students as well as top-notch foreign teachers, who bring with them the ability to win lucrative research grants. But foreigners who opt to study in Japan sometimes regret their decision. Martin Rieger, a German attending Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo, says that after one semester, he worries that he's falling behind his peers at his home university near Luxembourg.

"I'm writing about topics and issues that will help no way in my future," says Rieger, 26. Bruce Stronach, president of Yokohama City University and the first Westerner to head a Japanese public university, says Japan is "not on the radar screen" of overseas students.

These problems are well known. Kiyoshi Shimizu, director general of the Education Ministry's higher-education bureau, acknowledged shortcomings in the system during recent meetings to establish an OECD-administered mechanism for measuring the performance of universities worldwide.

Some schools are trying to adapt. In November, Tokyo University — or Todai, the 130-year-old "Harvard of Japan" — partnered with Yale to increase its visibility abroad. Tokyo University President Hiroshi Komiyama says he wants to double the proportion of graduate courses taught in English to 20%. (About 8% of Todai's students are foreigners, compared with an average of 3% for all Japanese universities and colleges.)

Another campus that's reforming is Tokyo's Waseda University. Four years ago, Waseda launched a new School of International Liberal Studies as a testing ground for "enforced artificial internationalism," as Paul Snowden, the school's dean, describes it. All classes are taught in English. The school as a matter of policy recruits one-third of its students from overseas, from countries as far away as Iceland and Uganda. The strategy seems to be working. Since it opened, the program has seen enrollment grow at an annual average rate of 15%. "This school is dragging Waseda kicking and screaming into the 21st century," Snowden says.

But Japan is a country that clings to tradition and carefully guards its culture. Teaching in English and courting outsiders remains anathema to many faculty members and administrators. "The structure of universities and research institutes is so intransigent that it's hard to implement solutions," says Stronach, the Yokohama City University president. "These reforms are crucial right now, and yet there's an awful lot of dithering going on."

Japan dithers at its peril. Nations such as South Korea are building education systems geared to produce an internationally competitive workforce. "Our students need to globalize to be leaders," says Yuichiro Anzai, president of Keio University, a top private university in Tokyo. Do they have an international outlook today? "Not yet," Anzai says. "We are lacking a sense of the crisis that we face," says Akiyoshi Yonezawa, an education expert at the Center for the Advancement of Higher Education at Tohoku University in Sendai. "This society is becoming more and more disadvantaged year by year." For Japan, the "age when all are accepted to college" may turn out to be less carefree than it sounds.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1719890,00.html

Education, Career, Automotive and Real Estate Sites See Gains to Start the New Year

TOKYO, JAPAN, February 29, 2008 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its January 2008 rankings of the largest and fastest-growing Internet properties and site categories in Japan, based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. January saw increased visitation to education, career, automotive and real estate sites as many people in Japan focused their Internet activity on planning for the New Year. Several news sites, including J-Cast.com, Sponichi.com, and Jiji.com, saw significant gains in January, with elections in Osaka, the Sumo wrestling tournament, and the Chinese food scandal being major topics in the news.

“The New Year marks a time when the people of Japan begin planning and looking ahead, especially to the beginning of the new school and job year in April,” said Maru Sato, Managing Director of comScore Japan. “Real estate sites also saw gains as visitors sought housing information for both buying and selling.”

About comScore comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/boilerplate

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2082

Japanese surfers are interested in education

There is more going on with Japanese surfers than visiting social networking or media websites. As the New Year moves full steam ahead, Japanese surfers have become very interested in bettering themselves through education and career planning.
by Kristina Knight

“The New Year marks a time when the people of Japan begin planning and looking ahead, especially to the beginning of the new school and job year in April,” said Maru Sato, Managing Director of comScore Japan. “Real estate sites also saw gains as visitors sought housing information for both buying and selling.”

According to a new report from comScore, training and education websites were the highest traffic gainers in January, growing from 1.7 million users to 2.6 million. This is a 47% increase in traffic year over year.

Real estate websites grew from 3.5 million users to 5.2 million users (45% increase) while Business/Finance and News/Media websites tied for the third top gaining sites moving from 7.8 million users to 10.3 million users. That is a 31% increase for both categories.

Among the Top 10 Gaining properties were J-Cast.com with 82% increased traffic in January. Sponichi.co.jp saw 65% growth for January while Jiji.com saw 28% growth and Fresheye.com saw 24% growth. Yomiuri.co.jp saw 20% growth in January, rounding out the top five.
http://www.bizreport.com/2008/03/japanese_surfers_are_interested_in_education.html

Cover Story: Culture shock

Tokyo's Minato Ward, home to nearly 22,000 foreign residents and the most embassies in Japan, is making a move that seems belated for such a cosmopolitan city: It is setting up its first administrative office to deal with the needs of foreign residents.

It's not that the ward has failed to help foreign residents live comfortably; that work has been outsourced to an auxiliary group.

Instead, Minato Ward and many other municipalities are being forced to review their international affairs offices or auxiliary organizations set up during the economic boom years to help foreign residents.

The governments have come under financial strain and pressure to streamline operations. In addition, some governments say the idea of creating specialized departments for foreign residents and treating them differently from Japanese is outdated.

Minato Ward has the highest percentage--11.8 percent--of non-Japanese residents among Tokyo's 23 administrative wards.

As of Feb. 1, 21,915 foreign residents and 75 foreign embassies were based in Minato Ward. They are also a major source of tax revenue for the ward.

The Minato International Association has been handling most of the ward's international-related work, from providing translations of official city bulletins, to organizing Japanese language classes and enhancing international awareness among Japanese residents.

The association operates on subsidies from the ward as well as private and corporate donations.
But last year, the ward said it would stop providing subsidies to the association after fiscal 2008 as a cost-cutting measure.

The ward said membership at the association, one of eight external groups proposed for consolidation, had declined, making it more dependent on subsidies.

The association's budget was 42 million yen in fiscal 2007.

The ward initially considered divvying up the association's work among existing sections. However, staff and some assembly members warned that work sharing would be impossible.

Yoko Watanabe, an official with Minato Ward's industry and regional promotion department, expressed concerns that the absence of a specialized entity could "send the wrong message that this ward is not committed to international affairs."

Her department will have jurisdiction over the new office.

Watanabe noted that foreign residents "contribute roughly 20 percent of (the ward's) tax income," another reason to make the ward more accommodating to the international community.

The ward says it hopes the new office will "enhance the ward's cosmopolitan image and better serve the needs of non-Japanese residents." The new office will comprise four staff, including counselors, and be headed by a section chief-level official appointed from the public to serve a three- to five-year term.

One of the first measures of the office will be a survey to determine the needs of non-Japanese residents, Watanabe said.

Currently, 15 of the 23 administrative wards in Tokyo have posts or offices that specialize in international or multicultural affairs.

Other wards have incorporated international-related tasks, such as coordinating international exchanges and administrative services for foreign residents, into existing departments.

Toshima Ward, whose 15,935 foreign residents account for about 6 percent of the population, eliminated its culture and international affairs section about eight years ago. Toshima ranks fifth among the 23 wards in terms of the ratio of foreign residents.

The ward now relegates tasks, from informing residents about garbage collection to cultural exchanges with foreign cities, to relevant departments.

To assist the work, the ward has designated 10 ward officials with a command of English, Chinese and other languages to serve as "supporters," along with 29 volunteers.

Masato Nogami, an official at the ward's culture and tourism office, which is in charge of sister-city exchanges, acknowledged that the move was part of a larger drive to streamline the bureaucracy.

But "we would also like to consider non-Japanese not as a particular group requiring special treatment but rather as ordinary citizens," he said.

Many groups commissioned by municipalities to handle such affairs are also biting the bullet.
"We are faced with a strong head wind with cutbacks in financial and human resources," said Mariko Oku, of the Association for Nakano International Communications in Nakano Ward, during a recent panel discussion in Tokyo on the future of international organizations.

The association currently operates on subsidies of about 30 million yen a year, less than half the 70 million yen when it started operations in 1989, Oku said.

Chieko Aogaki, a senior official at the metropolitan government's Tokyo International Communication Committee, said many municipalities "were working hard to provide services to foreign residents, while facing mounting challenges to curb costs and streamline."

"How each municipality engages in international affairs naturally differs with the circumstance facing that municipality," Aogaki said. "What really matters is what the municipality is capable of doing, rather than what kind of arrangement it sets up."(IHT/Asahi: February 29,2008)

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200802290074.html