Nine of the top 10 countries sending students to study at Harvard University, where I attended graduate school, have more students studying at the university now than 10 years ago. The only exception is Japan, where the number of students has declined. A decline in Japanese presence was also pointed out to me when I recently visited Stanford University, where I studied as an undergraduate, and appears to be a widespread phenomenon at American universities. What are the reasons for, and the implications of, such a trend?

One reason is that young Japanese are not interested in going abroad. Even those Japanese who have recently started to work at trading companies or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are less eager to study or work overseas than their peers of 20 or 30 years ago. Many young Japanese scholars believe they can obtain most of the information necessary to do their research through the Internet, and so they see little need to attend international conferences or go abroad for research. Japan has apparently become so safe, secure and comfortable that there is little incentive to go abroad, where one has to speak foreign languages, deal with peoples of other cultures and often engage in difficult negotiations or unfamiliar and competitive situations.

A second reason is that Japanese organizations, including companies, do not have the financial resources they had 20 or 30 years ago to send their employees abroad for extended periods of study.