JAPAN: Foreign Students Keep An Eye On Books And Making Money

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Sep 26 1997 (IPS) - Rohan, not his real name, begins his day at 3 a.m. with a trip to the local newspaper distribution centre to collect papers to be sent out during the day.

After his shift ends at around 7 a.m., Rohan heads home to have breakfast and then goes off to language school, where the 23-year- old Sri Lankan has been studying Japanese for the past year.

He returns home at 4 p.m. and leaves again at 6 p.m., this time to make it to an evening job as a waiter at an Indian restaurant. He gets home just before midnight, bone-tired.

So goes another day in the life of this struggling student, who wonders how long he can carry on with his studies in Japan.

“I have to work hard to be able to pay my bills and this is affecting my academic work badly,” said Rohan.

“When I get back home in the night, it’s about 11 p.m. Where is the time to study?” he asks, waving his hand across the stacks of books that dot his tiny room in the two-bedroom apartment he shares with a friend.

Rohan pays yen about 330 U.S. dollars for the room. Food and other bills, including transport, cost him another 585 dollars. “After paying for tuition, which is another hefty 70,000 yen (585 dollars) monthly, the going is quite tough,” he added.

Still, the tall, lanky student hopes to enter a Japanese university and someday start his own company that will do business with Japan.

Life for foreign students, especially those from Asia, is far from easy in Japan. Many have come across determined to succeed in what they consider the most influential country in Asia, but end up bitterly disappointed.

“If we know Japanese and study the technology and get to know the people, then we have a head start in our careers,” said Rohan.

But this is easier said than done. High costs and limited support from the Japanese government and universities have forced many foreign students to quit, and many more among them frustrated.

“It’s really quite hopeless to carry on the way Rohan does,” said his Nepalese roommate, who asked that he not be named and who has since been overstaying in Japan.

After quitting his studies two years ago, he does odd jobs and collects some 2,500 dollars a month. “I am an illegal alien because I don’t have a student visa. But I just could not go on studying because of financial difficulties,” he explained.

In 1983, the Japanese government came up with an ambitious programme to increase the number of foreign students in the country to 100,000 by the year 2000.

Until 1993 the numbers rose slowly and reached 50,000. But numbers have dipped since then, and experts contend that Japan will not be able to achieve the target it has set.

Statistics showed that there were 52,921 students in 1996. But the biggest drop was recorded in self-supporting students, whose numbers fell to 43,573 in 1996 from a peak of 45,000 in 1995.

The profile of Japan’s foreign students vary from other countries with sizable populations of overseas students — only 15 percent of foreign students in Japan receive scholarships.

Analysts say the difficult environment for overseas students in Japan is a key reason why it is not as popular as other developed countries as an education centre. In contrast, the United States has more than 300,000 foreign students and France, 120,000 of them.

“It is really regrettable that Japan remains not a popular choice for foreign students,” Jun Nishikiawa, who teaches economics at Waseda University, a prestigious private university, wrote in Japanese newspaper recently.

“The primary reason Asian students choose to go elsewhere is that both Japan’s government and its universities have neglected to take effective action to lure foreign students,” he said.

Foreign students’ problems begin with the almost impossible task of getting a visa to Japan, given the country’s measures to screen out potential illegal stayers, say activists who work with overseas students.

Likewise, Japanese immigration restricts the entry of students who want to study the Japanese language because they are not recognized as ‘university students’ — and only university students are eligible for student scholarships and loans.

For many of these language students, working and saving money is the first step toward trying to entering a Japanese university later on.

Another major obstacle is the strict testing by the education ministry for entering Japanese universities. Foreign students have called the approval system complicated and difficult to understand.

To revive more interest in studying in Japan, the government has allowed universities to admit students before taking these tests, but they must sit for them when they arrive.

The education ministry has also promised to scrap the debt guarantor requirement for working students. At present, foreign students have to find a Japanese national who will act as their guarantors when they enter university.

Some students report difficulty finding suitable housing, saying some landlords, reluctant to lease their premises, cite problems with strange customs and food.

“I feel Japanese society is a closed society which is prejudiced against Asian students,” said Xue Zhong, a 26-year-old university student from China. “It was difficult to make friends because Japanese students tend to stick together.”

Xue came to Japan in 1992 to study the Japanese education system, but his stay has been fraught with difficulties and with tough lessons in reality.

He once sought work from the manager of a Japanese-style bar, who told him he had to be paid lower than his Japanese counterparts because he was Chinese.