Japan’s 2-year ban on foreign students may have driven talent away, academics say
- Covid-19 restriction has hurt Japan’s competitiveness and caused many students to give up their plans or head elsewhere for their study abroad experience, observers say
- Foreign students contribute to Japan’s soft power as unofficial ambassadors for the country, but ‘that opportunity has been lost for the past two years’
The two-year ban, targeted at all non-Japanese wanting to enter the country, was introduced in the early months of 2020. It denied thousands of foreign students the opportunity to study in Japan, reversing earlier progress in this area.
In 2008, some 120,000 foreign students took up places in Japanese universities and colleges. By 2019, that figure had risen to 300,000. Students are now returning, but Japan still has a total daily cap of 20,000 arrivals, which must also cover businesspeople and tourists.
Kevin Short, a professor of cultural anthropology at the Tokyo University of Information Sciences, said some graduate students who were already partway through their studies were not able to complete them due to the travel restrictions.
“The graduates from my university are primarily in the programming and electronic engineering sectors, so they were immediately very employable in Japan, particularly as they also already speak Japanese,” he said. “But those talented employees have now been lost to Japanese companies because of the travel ban.”
The sciences, technology, engineering, the medical sciences and computing fields have traditionally attracted large numbers of students from other parts of Asia – particularly South Korea and China – and significant academic exchanges, but those opportunities have been lost for more than two years and the relationships will need to be rebuilt, he added.
Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at the Philadelphia-based Temple University, said the bottlenecks for students entering Japan were beginning to ease, but only after pressure had been applied on the government.
“We found that a lot of students just gave up their plans to come here and I also heard from a colleague at Cambridge University that Japanese studies in the UK is just bleeding students,” he said. “Although, in fairness, it’s the same with China as Beijing is also not letting students in.”