A Japan-U.S. panel drawn from government, business and academia called Friday for sustaining a program to invite English and other foreign language instructors to Japan, challenging a Japanese government view, expressed earlier this year, questioning the necessity of the project as part of a review of unnecessary public projects.
The U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange, which is known as CULCON, said in a joint statement issued after its two-day gathering in Washington that investment should be made in education for the Japan-U.S. alliance in the future.
"The investment should range from improving English language education in Japan to stimulating interest in each other's country...sustaining the JET program and fostering public intellectuals through graduate and post-doctoral studies," the statement said. JET stands for the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.
Minoru Makihara, senior corporate adviser and former chairman of Mitsubishi Corp. and chair of the Japan panel, told a news conference that participants noted the importance of fostering Americans familiar with Japan amid growing interest in China among Americans.
The participants also discussed ways to increase the number of Japanese students studying in the United States and the importance of promoting grass-roots exchanges.
Michael Green, former senior director for Asian affairs at the U.S. National Security Council, said, "The story of popular views of Americans and Japanese towards each other is very positive," despite difficulties over the base row in Okinawa.
The bilateral conference was set up in 1961 in a joint statement of former Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. This year marked the 24th biennial meeting.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9G9ESR01&show_article=1
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
King of the Hill: Ritsumeikan Aisa Pacific U. scores high in recruiting foreign students, but can it show the way ahead to Japan's struggling colleges
Nestled near the top of a mountain in southern Japan and shrouded in fog, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University would never win a prize for accessibility.
Yet this 10-year-old private college boasts something its rivals in Japan have struggled to achieve: a genuine international campus. Nearly half of its 6,200 students are non-Japanese, the highest ratio of any university in the country. In addition, the institution is on the way to achieving its goal of recruiting half the faculty from abroad. Currently, 44 percent of the professors and academics are from outside the island nation.
"I was amazed when I arrived here first," says the institution's president, Shun Korenaga, who took up his position in January. "Such a campus is quite unique."
Founded by the Kyoto-based Ritsumeikan University to be an international institution, Asia Pacific is officially bilingual—English and Japanese—and has students from nearly 100 countries, mostly from East Asia.
Chinese and Koreans alone account for well over half of the student body. The university has managed to skirt an unspoken rule at many Japanese colleges—that local students would perceive such a large foreign enrollment as a drop in academic quality, and stop coming.
"We don't have that problem," says Mr. Korenaga. "The quality of Chinese and Korean students is very high."
Japan took nearly two decades to achieve a government target of 100,000 foreign students and now wants to triple that figure, amid a declining population and plummeting local student enrollment. Nearly half of the country's private colleges are falling below government-set student quotas.
College administrators have been studying Asia Pacific's success for clues to boost their own non-Japanese enrollment. The answers don't come cheap, or easy.
Asia Pacific has built what it calls the largest student dormitory in Japan, a 1,300-bed facility that responds to a perennial problem here: the scarcity of reliable, inexpensive accommodation that will accept foreigners.
According to Mr. Korenaga, the university has also introduced a scholarship system that waives 30 to 100 percent of the college's almost $14,000 annual tuition for roughly 70 percent of its students. The waiver is paid for by a $43-million endowment from a coalition of 200 companies, created when the university was set up.
Ritsumeikan's network of offices around the region also helps it to recruit students directly from high schools in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and elsewhere. And Asia Pacific's location, which is closer to China and the Korean peninsula than to Tokyo, probably helps, too.
The campus works hard at integrating different nationalities, putting 600 Japanese and foreign freshmen together at its large dorm and hosting one of Japan's biggest annual job fairs in a bid to keep more foreign graduates in the country. It also makes the most of its striking location, overlooking the resort city here.
"I like it here because it's quiet and pretty compared to Shanghai," says Pinkie Wang, a Chinese student studying for a master's degree in international relations. "We can also meet people from other countries, study other cultures, and we can learn English and Japanese, so we graduate with three languages."
Some European students are less enthusiastic.
"There's a reason they put us on the top of a mountain—to force us to interact," quips Pierre Mattisson, a third-year undergraduate exchange student from Sweden.
He says students should think hard about the out-of-the-way location before coming. "I like it, but I chose it because it is just for four months. That allows me to sample Japan, outside Tokyo. If it was four years I wouldn't have chosen it."
Despite its efforts, Asia Pacific still doesn't have what its president calls a regional "brand image" like the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea, or the University of Tokyo, though it does have a growing reputation in Asia for the caliber of its teaching. Nor does it have a strong research presence, which is essential for a quality university, Mr. Korenaga admits.
The Ministry of Education, which provides about 13 percent of the university's budget, "wants to divide universities into research and teaching institutions, but I don't agree with that policy," he says.
The institution must also come to grips with a slow, long-term decline in applications from domestic students, the president says. "In Japan, students prefer to go to public universities, to study cheaply, and to study close to home. We break all three rules."
In addition, he says, the gap in abilities among Japanese students is very wide. "Some students want to study at a truly international college, but not everyone. And to survive we will sometimes accept rather low-level students."
Asia Pacific's lessons in internationalization for Japan, if there are any, have become more pressing in recent years. Japanese students are increasingly opting to stay at home; undergraduate enrollment by Japanese citizens in U.S. universities has plunged 52 percent since 2000.
In the same decade, U.S. enrollment of students from China is up 164 percent, and from India, 190 percent. South Korea, with less than half of Japan's population, sends two and a half times as many students to U.S. colleges.
Against such figures, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's pledge to make Japan a leader in the putative community of East Asian nations looks hollow, writes Glen S. Fukushima, chief executive of Airbus Japan, in a recent article in The Japan Times. "Reversing this trend of insularity should be a high priority if the Hatoyama government wishes Japan to play the positive and constructive global role it has the potential to do."
Mr. Korenaga shares that concern. "Japan is swaying between independence and alliances, becoming more closed and introverted." Still, he remains positive that, like the college he runs, the nation will embrace a global outlook and diversity. "We have to select the more internationalized trend," he says. "We don't have a choice."
http://chronicle.com/article/King-of-the-Hill-Ritsumeikan/65739/
Yet this 10-year-old private college boasts something its rivals in Japan have struggled to achieve: a genuine international campus. Nearly half of its 6,200 students are non-Japanese, the highest ratio of any university in the country. In addition, the institution is on the way to achieving its goal of recruiting half the faculty from abroad. Currently, 44 percent of the professors and academics are from outside the island nation.
"I was amazed when I arrived here first," says the institution's president, Shun Korenaga, who took up his position in January. "Such a campus is quite unique."
Founded by the Kyoto-based Ritsumeikan University to be an international institution, Asia Pacific is officially bilingual—English and Japanese—and has students from nearly 100 countries, mostly from East Asia.
Chinese and Koreans alone account for well over half of the student body. The university has managed to skirt an unspoken rule at many Japanese colleges—that local students would perceive such a large foreign enrollment as a drop in academic quality, and stop coming.
"We don't have that problem," says Mr. Korenaga. "The quality of Chinese and Korean students is very high."
Japan took nearly two decades to achieve a government target of 100,000 foreign students and now wants to triple that figure, amid a declining population and plummeting local student enrollment. Nearly half of the country's private colleges are falling below government-set student quotas.
College administrators have been studying Asia Pacific's success for clues to boost their own non-Japanese enrollment. The answers don't come cheap, or easy.
Asia Pacific has built what it calls the largest student dormitory in Japan, a 1,300-bed facility that responds to a perennial problem here: the scarcity of reliable, inexpensive accommodation that will accept foreigners.
According to Mr. Korenaga, the university has also introduced a scholarship system that waives 30 to 100 percent of the college's almost $14,000 annual tuition for roughly 70 percent of its students. The waiver is paid for by a $43-million endowment from a coalition of 200 companies, created when the university was set up.
Ritsumeikan's network of offices around the region also helps it to recruit students directly from high schools in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and elsewhere. And Asia Pacific's location, which is closer to China and the Korean peninsula than to Tokyo, probably helps, too.
The campus works hard at integrating different nationalities, putting 600 Japanese and foreign freshmen together at its large dorm and hosting one of Japan's biggest annual job fairs in a bid to keep more foreign graduates in the country. It also makes the most of its striking location, overlooking the resort city here.
"I like it here because it's quiet and pretty compared to Shanghai," says Pinkie Wang, a Chinese student studying for a master's degree in international relations. "We can also meet people from other countries, study other cultures, and we can learn English and Japanese, so we graduate with three languages."
Some European students are less enthusiastic.
"There's a reason they put us on the top of a mountain—to force us to interact," quips Pierre Mattisson, a third-year undergraduate exchange student from Sweden.
He says students should think hard about the out-of-the-way location before coming. "I like it, but I chose it because it is just for four months. That allows me to sample Japan, outside Tokyo. If it was four years I wouldn't have chosen it."
Despite its efforts, Asia Pacific still doesn't have what its president calls a regional "brand image" like the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea, or the University of Tokyo, though it does have a growing reputation in Asia for the caliber of its teaching. Nor does it have a strong research presence, which is essential for a quality university, Mr. Korenaga admits.
The Ministry of Education, which provides about 13 percent of the university's budget, "wants to divide universities into research and teaching institutions, but I don't agree with that policy," he says.
The institution must also come to grips with a slow, long-term decline in applications from domestic students, the president says. "In Japan, students prefer to go to public universities, to study cheaply, and to study close to home. We break all three rules."
In addition, he says, the gap in abilities among Japanese students is very wide. "Some students want to study at a truly international college, but not everyone. And to survive we will sometimes accept rather low-level students."
Asia Pacific's lessons in internationalization for Japan, if there are any, have become more pressing in recent years. Japanese students are increasingly opting to stay at home; undergraduate enrollment by Japanese citizens in U.S. universities has plunged 52 percent since 2000.
In the same decade, U.S. enrollment of students from China is up 164 percent, and from India, 190 percent. South Korea, with less than half of Japan's population, sends two and a half times as many students to U.S. colleges.
Against such figures, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's pledge to make Japan a leader in the putative community of East Asian nations looks hollow, writes Glen S. Fukushima, chief executive of Airbus Japan, in a recent article in The Japan Times. "Reversing this trend of insularity should be a high priority if the Hatoyama government wishes Japan to play the positive and constructive global role it has the potential to do."
Mr. Korenaga shares that concern. "Japan is swaying between independence and alliances, becoming more closed and introverted." Still, he remains positive that, like the college he runs, the nation will embrace a global outlook and diversity. "We have to select the more internationalized trend," he says. "We don't have a choice."
http://chronicle.com/article/King-of-the-Hill-Ritsumeikan/65739/
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