Japanese Universities’ Strategic Approach to Internationalization: Accomplishments and Challenges

Internationalization of Higher Education as a Response to Globalization: Japan’s Policy Challenges since the 1980s

“…The project expected these international headquarters to develop effective institutional strategies as model cases for campus-wide internationalization reforms. For this project, 68 universities applied, and 20 were selected (Ota, 2014).…”

Scaffolding excellence: Content-language integration and the development of Japanese ‘global leaders’

“…The Center for Global Education (CGE) mentioned above offers a broad range of services to support both inbound and outbound student mobility (Ota, 2014). These include study abroad and career counselling as well as Japanese language courses for visiting students whose language abilities are not sufficiently advanced to enroll directly in the university's regular courses offered in Japanese.…”

“…Chapple (2014) identifies four main themes underlying Japan's most recent policy efforts to internationalize higher education (increasing foreign students, increasing foreign faculty, sending more Japanese students abroad, and teaching more classes in English), and the latter three are fundamental to the goals and implementation of the Global Leaders Program (the first theme is the subject of other university initiatives). The government of Japan has been calling for universities to adopt a more strategic approach to internationalization, one that is more proactive and institutionally organized than the ad hoc individual faculty initiatives that have been favored in the past (Ota, 2014). Accomplishing this requires greater integration of research and teaching as well as an elevation in the importance of international initiatives so that they underlie all university operations rather than being applied piecemeal and tangentially.…”

“…Accomplishing this requires greater integration of research and teaching as well as an elevation in the importance of international initiatives so that they underlie all university operations rather than being applied piecemeal and tangentially. The 2005 "Strategic Fund for Establishing International Headquarters in Universities" (hereafter, the SIH Project) provided competitive grants to twenty universities to conduct internationalization pilot projects in an effort to develop and assess 'best practices' in nine areas 6 identified by funding agency Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (Ota, 2014). SIH Project results indicate that participating universities were particularly strong in goal-setting, inter-university cooperation, staff development, faculty and student exchange, and establishing overseas offices (Ota, 2014).…”

“…The 2005 "Strategic Fund for Establishing International Headquarters in Universities" (hereafter, the SIH Project) provided competitive grants to twenty universities to conduct internationalization pilot projects in an effort to develop and assess 'best practices' in nine areas 6 identified by funding agency Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (Ota, 2014). SIH Project results indicate that participating universities were particularly strong in goal-setting, inter-university cooperation, staff development, faculty and student exchange, and establishing overseas offices (Ota, 2014). With Ota a faculty member of Hitotsubashi University, one of the recipient institutions of the SIH Project grants, it is not surprising that knowledge of best practices gained from this earlier project were incorporated into GLP implementation.…”