International Students’ Traffic and International Academic Exchange: Between Japan and Korea

The aims of this article are to draw current situations of international students’ traffic and international academic exchange under Japanese higher education institutes internationalized. Firstly, three powers vectors involve Japanese higher education institutes in policy contexts of internationalization, which are issues on acquiring human resources accustomed to global socio-economy; ones on guaranteeing quality of undergraduate course; ones on global collaboration between industry, academia and government. The situation of Japanese higher education institutes are severely confronted competitive principles in global socio-economy and rankings in “individualization”, proposed by the former Minister of Education, Culture, Sport, Science & Technology TOHYAMA Atsuko. Secondly, Japan has much fewer students who want to study abroad than Korea or China. Japanese students tend to prefer the Western countries to Asian countries. Therefore, international students’ traffic focusing on Asian countries is still a start-up phase. An achievement of the strategy of accepting 300,000 international students, proposed by the former Prime Minister FUKUDA Yasuo, is a difficult task for Japanese government under current circumstances. Tertiary, international academic exchange between higher education institutes is much increasing Japan-Asian countries relationship than Japan-the Western countries. Traffic of students, faculty and staffs under exchange agreements has tendencies as follow. Students exchange illustrates two flows; one is from Japan to the Western countries and another is from Asian countries to Japan. Japanese faculty makes mutual relationship with Asian scholars or colleagues, especially in Korea and China, through research collaborations (this annual academic collaborative conference, too). Staffs of Japanese higher education institutes fly around the world to acquire superior students from various countries and run management and administration training programs for Asian higher education institutes staff. I think that the research of this article should be sophisticated with utilizing Korea’s or China’s related data, and we should receive the fruits of the “Campus Asia” project toward realizing the East Asia Community.