provide support in educational field for Indonesia using Yen loans in 1977, Japan has extended 57 Yen loans for human resource development support, amounting in total to approximately 343.8 billion yen until 2003. Since when Prime Minister Mahathir proposed the Look East Policy and indicated a stance of learning from Japan in 1981, a total of more than 10,000 people from Malaysia have come to study in Japan. In addition to the various other systems, Japan has been providing support through Yen loans for overseas students who enter Japanese science and technology universities aiming to become engineers that would play a leading role in the country's development. To reduce overseas study expenses in Japan, Yen loans are distributed to meet training costs for learning Japanese and for preparatory courses in Malaysia and to provide scholarships for subsequent study in Japan.

In Section 2, explanation was given about Japan's contribution to development of economic and social infrastructure, essential to economic and social development in East Asia. However, many contributions are at the same time connected to support for human resource development. The development of the Brantas River Basin in Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya, is one of the representative examples of its success. Japan has conducted mainly through the provision of Yen loans-many programs over a period of more than 30 years, including dam building, river improvement, irrigation development and electric power generation. Japan has contributed to the region's economic development through reducing flood damage in the Brantas river basin, increasing agricultural productivity, and ensuring stable supply of electric power to suburban industrial areas. Japan' ODA has also had a major impact on human resource development in Indonesia through providing cooperation for these programs. When the construction of the Karangkates Dam began in 1962, 115 Indonesian engineers were accepted as members of the construction team.

Brantas river basin development

(Photo: JBIC)

They were involved in the construction for a long period along with the Japanese engineers, learning through On the Job Training (OJT) about aspects such as Japanese construction technology, construction management methods, welfare systems for construction workers, as well as the strength of Japanese engineers' sense of responsibility regarding construction. Subsequently, the Indonesian engineers involved in the construction were called the "Brantas Men," who came to play a pivotal role in the Indonesian construction field in both the public and private sectors. Resettlement and Regional Infrastructure Minister Sunarno (as of July 2004) is one of them.

Human resource development through basic education and its system's development

Japan's support for human resource development focuses on a wide range of cooperation-from the initial cooperation emphasizing technology transfer to the current cooperation in areas such as improving and enhancing basic education and developing professional engineers in order to develop the human resources that would play a leading role in the economic and social development of developing countries. Meanwhile, in recent years, Japan has also placed emphasis on efforts to provide intellectual support such as educational cooperation for poor people and women and children from the perspective of human security and measures to promote the transition to a market economy and to open up to foreign business.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Japan started to put in place a system for supporting the promotion of basic education in individual countries. Policy documents such as the Official Development Assistance Charter (ODA Charter) of 1992, the Fifth Medium-Term Target of ODA and Funds for Development of 1993, and the Medium-Term Policy on Official Development Assistance of 1999 emphasized specifically human resource development, education development, and basic education development. In 1997, the Center for the Study of International Cooperation in Education (CICE) was established in Hiroshima University, and has actively promoted education cooperation for the basic education field.

Based on the above system development and research accomplishments, Japan announced the Basic Education for Growth Initiative (BEGIN) at the Kananaskis Summit of the Group of Eight (G8) in 2002. This initiative has the objectives of promoting economic growth through investment in education.