In 2018 Japan’s education ministry could report that 115,146 Japanese students were studying abroad. In the same year the UNESCO Institute for Statistics counted 32,071. Both figures claimed to measure the same group of people, and over the preceding decade their trend lines ran in opposite directions.
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 .
