Students are increasingly eyeing Japan as a country to pursue overseas study in, new figures show.
The latest data released by the Japan Overseas Study Services Organisation reveal that the number of international students studying in the country topped 200,000 for the first time.
Overseas student numbers in Japan increased by 13.3 per cent in 2015, taking the total number of foreign students in the country to 208,379. Almost a quarter of these students are choosing the country to study the Japanese language.
Undergraduate courses accounted for the greatest number of all tertiary level students (67,472), followed by graduate schools with 41,398, and vocational programmes with 38,654.
Waseda University hosted the largest cohort of foreign students, 4,603, followed by the University of Tokyo which received 2,990 and the Japan University of Economics, with 2,835 students.
The growth in international students brings Japan closer to Prime Minister Abe’s Global 30 goal of attracting 300,000 international students to the country annually by 2020.
Article by David Fuller