The UNESCO series, which international organisations rely on, shows Japanese enrolment abroad peaking at 63,658 in 2004 and sliding to 30,560 by 2015. That is a fall of 52 per cent in eleven years. The rest of the world went the other way. Global numbers climbed from under two million in 1998 to around 6.4 million in 2020. China went from 134,426 to 1,095,780. Spain, Italy, France and Germany all rose, and in 2020 each sent more students overseas than Japan did, despite smaller populations and economies. Fewer than one per cent of Japanese university students were enrolled abroad that year, against 2.2 per cent in China and over 3 per cent in South Korea. Japan hosted seven international students for every Japanese student abroad. In Germany the ratio was 1:3, and in Italy and South Korea roughly 1:1.

Demography accounts for some of this. The population of 18-year-olds fell by 46 per cent between 1992 and 2023, while university enrolment kept growing. A student body that has widened to include more young people from less privileged backgrounds is likely to include fewer who can spend a year overseas.

Tokyo saw the decline. In 2000 an advisory council to the prime minister warned of ‘an age of megacompetition’ in which countries that failed to adapt would ‘grow hollow and impoverished’. The 2013 Japan Revitalization Strategy set a target of doubling outbound students from 60,000 to 120,000 by 2020. A programme called Tobitate! Leap for Tomorrow offered scholarships and publicity, and its money came overwhelmingly from private donations. The ministry’s own spending went on staff salaries, office infrastructure, fundraising and promotion.

When the time came to report progress, the ministry stopped citing the UNESCO-based figures. It turned to a dataset from the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), an agency funded almost entirely by the ministry. The JASSO series rose from 36,302 in 2009 to 115,146 in 2018. Over those years the UNESCO figures fell from 47,957 to 32,071, and the ministry’s own variant of the UNESCO data stayed close to 60,000, nowhere near the doubling it had promised. In 2023 the government set a new goal of 500,000 students a year by 2033, measured on the JASSO count.

JASSO does not tally students enrolled at foreign institutions. It asks Japanese universities to report how many of their students went abroad, and its definition covers ‘activities that allow for cross-cultural experiences or language learning’. The figures are split by length of stay. Trips shorter than one month rose from 16,837 in 2009 to 76,545 in 2018, a 4.5-fold increase that supplies most of the overall growth. Asked how short such a trip could be, a JASSO spokesperson told a journalist that a three-day, two-night visit to a foreign university would qualify.

Universities have every reason to count generously. The Global 30 and Top Global University funding programmes make them compete on numerical targets, outbound mobility among them. Interviews with officials and professors in 2019, all anonymised, show how this works in practice. ‘Ten years ago, universities didn’t know or care if students were going abroad to a university campus for two weeks, but now they have to compete for funding [ … ]. Universities now report students going abroad for two-week travel, even if they do not go to university campuses,’ one professor at a national university said. Pressed on how short a trip could be, the same professor answered, ‘We do not make fake data. But if it is allowed to count, we count it.’ Another professor was more doubtful. ‘I’m not sure whether there is actually an increase, or whether they just started counting short-term exchange. Most people wouldn’t even say that that constitutes a study abroad.’

The budget moved in the opposite direction to the headline figure. The education ministry’s allocation for outbound student exchange peaked at about 452 million yen in 1996 and stood at about 48 million yen in 2003, a cut of nearly 90 per cent. Spending on inbound students, at roughly 54 billion yen, barely changed. In 2003 the ministry stopped publishing the dataset, and officials who confirmed this could not explain why.

The competitive funding programmes meant to replace that support fared no better. One MEXT official described a ministry squeezed from above. ‘We wanted to keep the overall amount the same when combined. But now the Ministry of Finance cut the competitive funding, too. So now everything is decreasing.’ A national university professor reduced the Top Global University budget to arithmetic. ‘It is almost a tradition that every year the TGU budget is cut by around 10 per cent to 20 per cent. You don’t have to be great at maths to understand that after ten years there is almost nothing left.’

Public debt is the obvious explanation, and officials cite it. Yet Meiji leaders treated study abroad as a matter of national security, sending the country’s most capable students to Europe and North America to bring back technology and institutions. Funding for it soon reached almost a sixth of the annual education budget, and by 1893 only 30 of the country’s 130 university professors had never studied overseas. A government that built that apparatus in its first decades of modernisation has the capacity to spend more today than it does.

The reason for the difference lies in what officials now think study abroad is for. The Meiji case rested on importing what Japan lacked. Present-day officials consider Japan finished with that. ‘Our technology is advanced enough,’ one senior Foreign Ministry official said, ‘it’s not like undergraduate students import complex knowledge.’ A MEXT official put it more bluntly. ‘Going abroad is not a necessity, it is a luxury [zeitaku]. So, there is a preference to use tax-payer money for inbound student mobility.’ Inbound students supply labour. In this view outbound students bring the state nothing, and some employers find returnees ‘difficult to use’ (tsukainikui).

None of this appears in public statements, which continue to call study abroad a priority. The Foreign Ministry official explained the gap. ‘When we say it is important, we say it. But in the sense of necessities and emotions, maybe it is a bit different.’

Sociologists use the term decoupling for the adoption of a global norm on paper while practice goes elsewhere, and they usually attribute it to weak states without the means to comply. Japan’s version looks different, because the government has the means and has chosen otherwise. I call this strategic decoupling. Scholars and international bodies took rising student mobility as inevitable, so Japan’s falling figures read as a country lagging behind. The budget lines, the counting rules and the interviews show a government that had decided the fall was not worth the money to reverse.

This post is based on Ben A. Moeller, ‘Outbound Student Mobility in Japan Nose-Dived. Why Does the Government Claim It Went Up?’, Japan Forum 37, no. 2 (2025): 228–53. Read the full article .

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These classes exist because of a gap, not a plan. A lack of public funding, a drive to cut costs, and a shortage of professional teachers created the conditions for volunteers to step in. Their unpaid labour has reinforced a common assumption: that any native speaker can teach their language to foreigners. This is one reason why the professionalism of certified language teachers is so often undervalued, with many qualified teachers working under insecure conditions.

Since the mid-1980s, the number of migrants in Japan has risen steadily, with only a brief dip during the COVID-19 pandemic. Falling birth rates and an ageing population have left many sectors facing severe labour shortages. Foreign workers are expected to fill the gap, but many arrive with little or no Japanese and generally have no opportunity to learn, except through volunteer-run local classes.

To address this, the ‘Act on the Promotion of Japanese Language Education’ was introduced in 2019, establishing clear roles for professional language teachers, coordinators, and volunteers as support staff. In practice, however, this intended division of labour often conflicts with conditions on the ground. Figures from 2021 tell the story plainly: about 50% of Japanese language teachers in local communities are volunteers, around 40% are part-time, and only 10% are full-time.

One common route into language support is through training courses offered by local authorities, which equip volunteers with basic knowledge of Japanese grammar and teaching technique. But research has revealed a tension at the heart of this arrangement: the more enthusiastic non-specialist volunteers are about helping foreign residents learn Japanese, the more foreign residents may become conscious and anxious about their lack of Japanese proficiency.

The difficult working conditions faced by many foreign workers make systematic, grammar-focused learning, the kind that requires preparation and follow-up, hard to sustain. To meet their needs, broad knowledge about teaching methods and teaching expertise are required.

At the same time, not all volunteers primarily want to act as teachers. Interviews reveal a wide range of motivations:

‘I wanted to pursue a meaningful, human-like activity alongside my very demanding and exhausting job.’ / ‘After my retirement, I looked for a meaningful activity I could continue.’ / ‘I like meeting people and have many hobbies. Japanese language support is one of them.’ / ‘I was interested in international exchange before.’ / ‘I looked for an activity to give back to society, somehow the favours and help I had received when my husband died.’ / ‘My daughter had stayed abroad before.’

This brings us to the promise, and the tension, of local Japanese classes. The variety of participants makes them a distinctive kind of space: a third place beyond work and family, a site where people can connect with the wider community, a place to be and belong. But this potential is hard to realise when the focus stays locked on school-like teaching.

There is nothing inherently wrong with language instruction. Many volunteers enjoy teaching, and many migrants expect to be taught. For young labour migrants especially, passing the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test offers tangible advantages for work in Japan and for job searches after returning home. Many seek focused test preparation and expect professional guidance from their ‘teachers’.

The problem is one of framing. When too much emphasis falls on formal instruction, migrants come to be seen primarily as non-native speakers rather than as fellow community members. And volunteers who came hoping to engage with foreign residents and develop new activities may find themselves pushed into a teaching role they never wanted.

For the diversity of local Japanese classes to flourish, migrants need to be recognised as active members of the community. The Basic Surveys on Foreign Residents, carried out annually by the Immigration Services Agency, offer valuable insight here. The 2024 survey found that the longer foreign residents plan to stay in Japan, the greater the proportion who wish to participate in local activities. Some 26.5% of respondents wanted to join club activities with people who share similar hobbies. Another 21.1% were interested in volunteer work such as interpretation and community clean-ups. And 12.0% expressed interest in joining neighbourhood or local community associations.

But when asked about obstacles to social participation, the most common answer was stark: ‘not knowing what activities are available’.

Some communities are already finding creative responses. In Soja City, Okayama Prefecture, the local authority has developed a programme training foreign residents to become ‘Foreign Disaster Prevention Leaders’, enabling them to work alongside local government and provide self-help and mutual aid in emergencies. The initiative is striking because it inverts the usual dynamic: foreign residents are no longer positioned as people who receive help, but as people who give it.

Volunteering in local Japanese-language support is, indeed, a double-edged sword. But the people who should not be criticised are the volunteers themselves. The real problem is structural. In the current arrangement, the potential of both volunteers and migrants remains underused. For this to change, municipalities need to hire and adequately compensate professional Japanese teachers. With that foundation in place, civil actors, both foreign and Japanese, might develop their potential and participate in activities driven by their own interests, fostering connections that move beyond the supporting-and-supported dynamic that currently defines too many of these spaces.

This post is based on Gildenhard, Bettina. 2026. “Volunteering in Local Japanese Classes – Insights into a Microcosm between Personal Initiatives, National Language Policies and the Quest for Professionalism.” Japan Forum, April, 1–25. doi:10.1080/09555803.2026.2656200. Read more

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