Survey debunks Japanese students stay-at-home myth

Japanese students are just as interested in overseas study as their counterparts in the United Kingdom and the United States – a finding that pours cold water on the popular theory that Japanese students are averse to study abroad.

The findings, released this week by the British Council and published as Japan: Debunking the ‘inward-looking’ myth, surveyed just over 2,000 Japanese students enrolled in private and national universities.

Some 45% of the respondents said they wanted to pursue academic studies in foreign countries and 46% did not.

In a similar survey published as Broadening Horizons 2014: Embedding a culture of overseas study, conducted by the British Council in the UK, 37% of students responded positively to study abroad while 41% replied in the negative. In the US it was 44% and 32% respectively.

But unlike students in the two Western countries, whose primary motivation is to improve their employability through overseas study, the primary motivation for Japanese students was to improve language skills – 79% of respondents – and experience another culture.

The desire to travel overseas was cited by 46% and launching an international career by 35%.

Internationalisation push

The results come against a backdrop of a push towards greater internationalisation of Japan’s higher education, led by the government. A pillar of this campaign is to increase the number of Japanese students studying abroad by offering financial subsidies to support them.

The government is promoting its latest internationalisation strategy – there have been several others in the past – as aimed at changing an inward-looking mentality among young people in Japan and nurturing a global mind-set.

In the past decade a sharp decline in the number of Japanese students studying overseas has partly been attributed to an “inward-looking” attitude, with “young Japanese depicted as unwilling to venture far from the comforts of their home country”, the British Council report noted. It cited “a precipitous slide” from 83,000 Japanese students who studied abroad in 2004 – the country’s high – to 57,501 in 2011.

Yet the responses to the British Council survey indicates there is more to the simplistic official perception.

For example, Japanese respondents who had studied abroad replied positively to a question on how they felt about the future of their country. In contrast, the group who felt most pessimistic about the future were students who aspired to study overseas. Students who did not want to go abroad were unsure of their future.

Destinations

Among Japanese students, the United States and Canada were the most sought-after destinations.

Twice as many females had studied in foreign countries than males, and 22% of respondents studied English when they went abroad.

Most respondents' longest stay was one month – 26% of respondents – but in a question that inquired about their preference, the time span of one year was quoted as the most popular.

Surprisingly only 3% of students cite that a barrier to finding new jobs in Japan is due to taking time off to study overseas, thus debunking another common perception that study abroad can be a setback to careers in Japan.

This important finding was stressed in another response to a question on what students needed to study abroad.

Importantly, changing Japanese companies’ graduate recruiting season, which begins in April and is sometimes cited as a reason why Japanese students do not want to spend a year abroad, was given the lowest marks – just 2% of respondents believed a change in the recruitment season would be an incentive to study abroad.

In answer to the question of whether Japanese companies value university graduates with study abroad experience, 55% of students overall said they did not know. Around one in three said Japanese companies did value that experience, while just 14% said they did not.

While scholarships topped the list as the incentive for overseas study, responses also illustrated that Japanese students viewed an overseas experience as boosting their foreign language skills, soft skills and chances of getting a good job.