Four years ago, central government officials and bureaucrats, especially at the Education Ministry, were expressing concern over the decreasing number of students from abroad coming to study at Japanese universities. The decline in students from neighboring Asian countries in particular, the first such drop in decades, was cause for considerable alarm. The trend has been reversed, however, with a record 55,755 foreign students enrolled at Japanese universities, graduate schools and vocational schools in May 1999, a growth of 8.7 percent over the previous year.

While the increase, the first year-on-year rise reported in nine years, is welcomed by many, self-congratulatory celebrating by Japanese officialdom is premature. Overdue government policy changes undoubtedly played a part, such as the one that now allows foreign vocational-school graduates to obtain residence permits and work legally in jobs related to their field of study. So did the overall simplification of immigration procedures. But a new willingness by many Japanese universities to accept students from abroad and improvements in tutoring facilities cannot be minimized, nor can the availability of more generous scholarship assistance that takes better account of this country's notoriously high cost of living.

A few years ago, government officials were blaming the decrease in foreign students on everything from the nation's prolonged economic stagnation to the rapid increase in the establishment of institutions of higher learning elsewhere in Asia. It also needs to be pointed out, however, that official Japanese expectations of rising foreign-student enrollments were artificially inflated by the 1983 pledge of then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone to increase their number to 100,000 by this year. It is now widely agreed that the target was never feasible. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi acknowledged as much in a meeting with a group of Chinese students more than a year ago, although he vowed to try to reach the goal at a later date.