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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The answer that came back most often was a familiar phrase: shōshi kōreika (少子高齢化)— low birth rate, aging population. It topped the list, ahead of economic concerns, pension anxieties, poverty, and even constitutional reform. On its face, this is unsurprising. Japan’s demographic trajectory has been for decades. Fewer babies, more elderly, a shrinking workforce — the math is grim and well known.

But here’s what’s interesting. When you dig into how people talked about shōshi kōreika — what they folded into it, what they connected it to, what frustrations they packed inside those five characters — the phrase starts to look less like a demographic concern and more like a shorthand for a much wider set of anxieties. Anxieties that are, at their core, about .

Gender (in)equality didn’t appear

The survey was open-ended and over 30,000 people throughout Japan participated. But across all responses, phrases directly naming gender inequality barely registered. Terms like?danjo byōdō?(gender equality) or?jendaa gyappu?(gender gap) appeared only a handful of times.

This is, on the face of it, extraordinary. Few countries have thrown more at . The Equal Employment Opportunity Law arrived in 1986. The Basic Act for Gender Equal Society followed in 1999. Womenomics became a headline policy brand under the Abe administration. have been published, targets set, slogans coined. For nearly four decades, “gender equality” has been an explicit item on the national agenda.

And yet, when 30,000 ordinary people were asked what keeps them up at night, almost none of them reached for the phrase. Gender inequality wasn’t rejected. It was simply absent, as though the entire policy vocabulary had failed to take root in everyday conversation.

This absence is telling. Not because Japanese people don’t care about gender — the survey responses make clear that many do — but because the way they express that concern is indirect, bundled into the more socially legible language of demographic crisis.

What people actually said

The word gender (danjo) in Japanese is made up of two words: male/man (dan or otoko) and female/woman (jo or 辞苍’苍补). A keyword search for on’na (woman女) and otoko (man男) across the responses revealed 185 and 96 instances respectively. When those responses were examined closely, three clusters emerged: discrimination, gender inequality, and women’s participation in society. The concerns were real and specific — but they were almost always attached to shōshi kōreika.

A woman in her fifties from the Kanto area wrote that “measures to counter the declining birthrate” were the most pressing issue, then linked this to “pension issues, gender equality, work style reform, the implementation of optional separate surnames for married couples, and economic revitalization.” She concluded that efforts were now “too late” — nothing had been done for thirty years.

A man in his thirties from Kyushu recognized that while Japan advocates for “correction of the gender gap,” women still find it nearly impossible to take maternity leave without consequence, and men face no real solution for the increased burden that falls on them. His conclusion: the employment system itself needs to change.

A woman in her twenties from Kanto was blunter. Her most pressing issue was the “gender gap.” She added: “This country is finished. I don’t want to have children in a country like this.”

Blaming women

Some responses revealed a more troubling logic. A man in his sixties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region wrote: “I believe that the root of the low birthrate and aging population problem lies in women’s advancement in society. As women have become financially independent with jobs, they are marrying later and remaining unmarried, and the birth rate is declining.”

He was not alone. Multiple respondents — men and women — framed women’s entry into the workforce as a direct cause of demographic decline. A woman in her twenties from the Chugoku/Shikoku region said she was “against the movement to encourage women to play an active role in society.” Women working, in this framing, means women not bearing children. The blame lands squarely on women’s shoulders, while the structural conditions that make combining work and family nearly impossible — long hours, absent fathers, inadequate childcare — go unmentioned.

Other respondents pushed back. One young woman from Kanto asked pointedly: “What has the government, which is asking women to have children, done for pregnant women? Does it mean that if you want to work, you don’t want to have children? If you want to have children, do you have to give up your career?” She described a society that demands women contribute to reversing demographic decline while offering them little structural kindness in return.

An idiom of distress

What emerges from these responses is a picture of shōshi kōreika functioning as something more than a demographic descriptor. It operates as what anthropologists call an “idiom of distress” — a culturally resonant shorthand that gives voice to to articulate directly. The phrase captures not just the literal reality of fewer children and an aging population, but a tangle of frustrations about stagnant gender roles, impossible work-life trade-offs, inadequate policy responses, and a social contract that no longer holds.

Japan offers the most generous paid paternity leave in the OECD nations — 52 weeks. Yet in 2021, who took any leave at all took less than a month. Company managers, often described as “Shōwa era type men supported by full-time housewives,” simply cannot comprehend why a working man would step away. The policy exists. The culture hasn’t caught up.

This gap — between policy and practice, between aspiration and reality — is precisely what shōshi kōreika encodes. Gender inequality isn’t absent from public consciousness. It’s hiding in plain sight, folded into the most voiced concern in the country. Until policymakers recognize that the links between demographic crisis and the gender crisis, very little will likely change.

This post is based on Charles D. Crabtree, Paul Christensen, Tom Phuong Le, Charles T. McClean, Lauren McKee, and Cindi SturtzSreetharan, ‘Demographic decline as an idiom of distress: Rethinking gender (In)equality in Japan,’ Japan Forum (2026). Read the full article .

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