And I doubt that many Japanese see Harvard as an obvious place to go and do a TESOL course for a semester or two anyway.

That’s a good point, lots of Japanese students in the US on exchange programs for the English experience (these are the Japanese students that I have taught). With such low numbers of undergrads cited in that Harvard writeup, they most likely are not including short timers.

However, there really are lots of Japanese in grad schools in all areas.

“Now if only he had Ph.D in Japanese history,he would have known that practice of waterboarding to “terrorists” in Japan had ended some time in the mid ‘40’s.”

You don’t need a PhD to figure that out. Sometimes, I think that a PhD actually keeps some people from figuring that out.

That I’m skeptic.For most of Japanese student goes to the U.S to have “English speaking experience” and not the degree,thus many are undergrads.

Since Dujarric has a French citizenship along with the American one,so he should have brought up French institution like ENA as the comparison,instead of being so “Anglocentric”.Majority of French elites in the bureaucracy/industry/politics are raised in that very”rigid and communitarian atomosphere”of French institution,yet no one call them an insular.
Dujarric also left a comment in one of J-politics English blog on Abe advocated stronger Japan-U.S ties based on “common value”.His tongue-in-cheek comment was something like he can’t think of any common value being shared between LDP and American politics,but allowance of waterboarding.

Now if only he had Ph.D in Japanese history,he would have known that practice of waterboarding to “terrorists” in Japan had ended some time in the mid ‘40’s.

Perhaps we just need more Japanese Harvard alumni on blogsphere to point that out to Dujarric….

But I think that essay really does overestimate how important undergrad study abroad is. After all, America is so important to Korea (and Taiwan) for two major reasons that aren’t (as) relevant to Japan.

First, huge Korean and Taiwanese immigrant communities in America. Incidentally, this is also a reason that you see more of them IN colleges. There were a huge number of Koreans studying undergrad at Rutgers when I was there (I’m sure it’s not changed) and a very large portion of them had lived in New Jersey for high school, or at least the second half of it, either with their entire family or some relative who had previously immigrated to the state. This both gave them time to learn English well enough, and to qualify as an in-state student instead of an international one. These immigrant communities have also had huge amounts of back and forth travel for decades, leading to a significant sub-population among the Korean and Taiwanese elites who are bi-cultural with America. Since there has been virtually no immigration from Japan post-war, this simply hasn’t been relevant.

Second, since Korea and Taiwan are both much, much smaller than Japan, they do not have as full a complement of industries as Japan and are far more dependent on both the export market and the import market for certain kinds of manufactured goods. While Japan has to import raw materials and has quite a lot of export-oriented manufacturing, they aren’t AS dependent on it. This higher level of dependence on international trade arguably leads to a more internationalist outlook among the business and political classes.

And last, it probably is true that you see a lot more Japanese grad students and researchers going to the US than undergrads. Also, most of the Japanese undergrads who go to study in the US go to the west coast, not the east. I wouldn’t be surprised if some major universities actually have more Post-docs from Japan than undergrads.

Temple doesn’t have graduate programs in the humanities—just law, business and education (TESOL), which make sense given the market that they’re operating in. I’m not really sure how an American university could capitalize on serious Japan studies when it’s surrounded by serious Japanese universities (Temple’s Japan campus is literally a block away from the main gate of Keio).

Sure, but aren’t we out of the mindset these days that Japanese worker = salaryman? It seems to me that if we are looking at “Japan” writ large as Dujarric seems to be we should be thinking outside of that particular box anyway.

I’ve heard good things about Temple Tokyo’s grad programs too. Do they have a different Japan studies section? It seems to me that their position in Tokyo could be something they could capitalise on in this area. And they do seem to offer a lot of overseas “commentary” about things in Japan.

(although some of it might be stretching things a little far, methinks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRETEjWjYlY)

It depends on what you want to do with your life. Japan’s salarymen and bureaucrats are, by and large, recruited right out of the major universities in a very formalized process, even at many gaishikei companies. So if you do undergraduate study abroad, you miss out on this entire process and have to approach the Japanese business world as a lateral hire, which is a difficult proposition when you have no work experience. As an academic or an entrepreneur, sure, it probably doesn’t matter. The only thing you miss in that case is the domestic networking provided by going to a big Japanese school (which is not to be underestimated).

A word on Temple: its undergrad program in Tokyo is a joke, combining the sloth of Japanese university with the resources of an underfunded American high school, but its graduate programs here are really, really good—if not prestigious, they at least have an excellent faculty and curriculum. I can’t say much about Dujarric because I don’t know what his “institute” does, other than supporting a couple of researchers and organizing speaking engagements with unknown academics. It doesn’t seem to be a “program” as much as a tiny think tank.

I agree that Dujarric made a major mistake in looking only at undergrad—”serious” Japanese do go to the US for grad school, in large numbers. Jun Okumura is a good example, and he isn’t atypical among the higher strata of business and government society here—just look at the resumes of recent prime ministers. At my own undergrad school, an enormous university in Florida which is definitely not Florida State, there were practically no Japanese in undergrad, but the medical programs had sizable colonies of Japanese students. I would go as far as to say that those Japanese who go to the US for undergrad are generally interested in learning English and partying, not necessarily in that order, which is why almost all of them are in “fun” places like New York or California, not in the Harvard library.

...but I sense there might be a bit of numerical legerdemain going on:

“Yet, there are 39 Koreans studying at Harvard College, compared with only five Japanese (excluding immigrants). Overall, Harvard University has nearly three times as many Koreans as Japanese.”

Harvard College is the “undergraduate section” of Harvard. There are almost eight times as many Korean citizens as Japanese citizens there. So if there are three times as many Koreans as Japanese at Harvard overall, then the proportion of Koreans to Japanese in postgraduate study there is much less than 3:1, particularly if there are fewer graduates than postgrads overall. And postgrad is where it counts, particularly in the States, right?

Anyway, as I said, I don’t want to be to hard on Dujarric. I think his university should take a good look at itself, though. I think it is a little odd that a university with a Japan studies program in Japan doesn’t require that the director of said program has a Ph.D. in Japan studies or a similar field (like history, politics or economics with an emphasis on Japan). At the very least the university should probably require that he write extensively on Japan in fora other than the JT or DY. Most of his books don’t seem to have a Japan focus, which in itself is of course not a bad thing, but strange considering his position.

http://www.tuj.ac.jp/newsite/main/community/icjs_staff.html

“I would not be surprised if there are more Japanese at the College of France, ANU, Oxbridge, University of Bonn, Utrecht University, etc.”

While I said earlier that I don’t like to do these comparisons, I also wonder what the proportion of American students abroad is. I know that in my three years of university teaching that I taught about ten or twelve Japanese and only two Americans at an institution that was foreign to both. At a guess I would say that was reflective of the general proportion enrolled. The Americans also tended to do “semester abroad” programs, whereas the Japanese I met stayed for a whole year or their entire degree. While it was no Harvard, I certainly wouldn’t run around asserting that this meant that Japanese are more “international” than Americans.