As athletes arrive for the Tokyo Olympics, foreign students at Japan’s universities are left stranded
- The plight of foreign residents barred from the country is under the spotlight as 11,000 sportspeople from around the world converge on the capital
- A professor based in Japan says the situation does not bode well for universities that have been trying to attract overseas students
Buenos Aires is 12 hours behind Tokyo, meaning she has to burn the midnight oil to engage in online discussions with classmates – and by 7am, when her other child, a three-year-old, is awake, it is time to get through the rest of the day “like a zombie”, she says.
It was not supposed to be like this. Bertone, 40, had planned to be in the Japanese capital for her two-year degree, but strict pandemic-related border control measures that have kept foreign residents out of the country put paid to that plan.
Similarly, Shani Weiss from Tel Aviv resigned from her job and moved out of her flat in March last year, expecting she would soon be moving to Tokyo to pursue her master’s in global studies at Sophia University.
A year on, Weiss, 29, is still living with her parents, while her programme began earlier this year in an online-only capacity. She considers herself lucky to have received unemployment benefits; her peers in a similar situation have suffered consequences such as scrambling for a place to live without knowing when they would be able to move to Japan, and having no source of income.