Last fall, I was selected as president of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University by a committee open to public applications and nominations — perhaps the first such recruitment among Japan's private universities.
There are three reasons I decided to take the job. First, APU is like a "Young United Nations." Of some 6,000 students at the university, most of them are undergraduates and 51.4 percent are from 89 countries and regions outside Japan. No other educational environment in Japan is blessed with such diversity. Incidentally, about half the university's teachers are foreign nationals.
Second, the university offers classes in both Japanese and English, which I think is uncommon in Japan and rare worldwide. After international students join the university, they acquire at minimum an intermediate level of Japanese by graduation. APU students will become familiar with at least two languages, and many will graduate speaking three or more.
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