While in the last decade and a half there have always been fairly large numbers of students in Japan for language study, the shift to large numbers of full-time foreign students in the universities is posing problems and challenges hardly foreseen in the very recent past. These questions are interesting both from a comparative perspective and for the light they shed on the way in which Japanese society is evolving as it faces the end of the century and reconsiders its own place in the wider world. At the moment there are approximately 50,000 foreign students in Japan, many of them in language schools, vocational training institutes, and other nontertiary institutions. By the end of the century the Japanese Ministry of Education predicts that this number will double, and that a much higher proportion will be in the universities. Each of these points is of some interest.
Japan is now, in dollar terms, the world's biggest donor of foreign aid.
It has occurred to the Ministry of Education that an equally good form of aid is the provision of scholarships that bring foreign students to Japan for extended periods of time and provide education to those students of use to them at home that will also tie them to Japan linguistically and emotionally. The greatest expansion in such scholarships has gone to the development of postgraduate education and represents a massive investment. With its enormous economy, Japan, of course, houses a substantial population of foreign diplomats and business people, some of whom also choose to send their children to universities in the country - especially ones that have courses in English, as a few do. With this diversification of sources of funding and opportunities within the universities, the national balance among foreign students is also shifting. These patterns reflect both Japan's geopolitical significance and the diversifying subjects that foreign students study, which now include almost all the fields taken by their Japanese peers.