Japan could soon see the long-expected increase in the number of foreign students attending its universities and specialized schools that the government has been promoting with only limited success. In a marked departure for this country's official development assistance policy, a new program scheduled to begin in fiscal 2001 is to provide low-interest loans directly to students from neighboring countries who come here to study at their own expense. If the program is implemented impartially and does not get bogged down in bureaucratic red tape, it could have the additional benefit of improving Japan's reputation for attaching strings to its ODA programs.

At the height of the bubble, in the early 1980s, the government announced that it wanted to increase the number of foreign students studying here each year to 100,000 by the end of 2000. In those heady days, when Japan's overseas aid programs were expanding exponentially, that goal must have seemed attainable. However, to more down-to-earth observers, both inside and outside the government, it appeared idealistic. As it turned out, of course, the realists were right.

According to the Education Ministry, a total of only 55,755 non-Japanese were studying at universities, graduate schools and vocational schools here at midyear 1999. To be sure, the figure set a record and represented an increase of 8.7 percent over the previous year. This was encouraging since the increase in 1998 was a mere 0.5 percent and the two prior years both registered declines. Still, it was painfully obvious that the total could not possibly double in the short space of one year.