After a sharp decline during the pandemic, the number of foreign students in Japan experienced a recovery in 2023, though it remains below prepandemic levels, a public survey found.

The increase came after the government started to gradually lift its COVID-19 travel restrictions in 2022.

The survey results, released by the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO) on Friday, show a 20.8% increase in the number of foreign students — 279,274 — as of May 2023 compared with a year earlier. Over the same period, the number of foreign students enrolled in Japanese-language schools nearly doubled to an all-time high of 90,719.

JASSO is a quasi-autonomous agency responsible for scholarships and student loans.

In contrast, the number of foreign students enrolled in higher education institutions, which grew from 181,741 in 2022 to 188,555 in 2023, experienced a much slower increase. The latest figure represents just a little over 80% of the prepandemic level.

The number of foreign students enrolled in bachelor’s and associate degree programs even dropped by 2.4% compared with 2022.

In terms of origins, students from China continued to make up the largest proportion, at 115,493. But the number of students from Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the United States surpassed the figure in 2019, a year before the COVID-19 pandemic crippled transnational travel.

JASSO also investigated the number of Japanese students studying overseas — mostly those on exchange programs — using data from universities in Japan. Based on the latest data, which covers 2022, the number of Japanese students studying abroad increased fivefold from a year earlier to 58,162, though this is still less than half of 2019's figure.

The top destinations of Japanese students studying abroad in 2022 included the United States, Canada, Australia, South Korea and the United Kingdom, according to the survey.