The following excerpts are taken from The Yomiuri Shimbun's Educational Renaissance series. This is the first of a three-part sub-series focusing on opportunities for foreign students in Japan.

KUALA LUMPUR--It was the beginning of June and Malaysian student Mohd Hanif bin Abdul Jalil was watching carefully as the liquid in a test tube changed color at Universiti Industri Selangor, an institution run by the Selangor state government on the outskirts of the Malaysian capital. The 19-year-old student then wrote the kanji "shiro" (white) on a chart in his notebook.

The chart also included other kanji characters, such as "sekikasshoku" (reddish brown) and "midori" (green). The course was conducted entirely in Japanese by a lecturer from Japan.

Mohd Hanif has been participating in the Japan Associate Degree Program (JAD), under which Malaysian students are taught by Japanese faculty members for three years in their country while living in a dormitory. After that, they transfer to universities in Japan as juniors to earn degrees in either electrical engineering or mechanical engineering.

"I'd like to work for Toyota [Motor Corp.] as an engineer," said the student, who is in the second year of his JAD project.

Now he can write Japanese well enough to match the level of university students in Japan, thanks to his efforts in the first year of the program, during which half of the courses--held from 7:50 a.m. to 5 p.m.--are allocated to intensive Japanese-language lessons. In these classes, students have to follow their instructors, who intentionally scrawl notes on the board for students and speak relatively quickly for nonnative speakers.

In the first year, the participants also take general academic subjects, such as chemistry, mathematics and physics, while in the latter two years they take more specialized courses, such as electronic circuit theory and fluid engineering, based on the curriculums of Japanese universities.

This year, about 90 new students participated in the program, chosen from about 2,000 applicants based on their scores in the Malaysian national unified exams and interviews with Japanese professors.

"Because the students are highly motivated, they won't lose their concentration, even if we cover a lot of ground in our courses," said Prof. Toshio Mizuno of Shibaura Institute of Technology, who has been in the country since last year.

The pretraining program for Malaysians to help them study at Japanese universities started in 1993, and initially required the participants to take Japanese and other courses for two years in Malaysia before moving to a Japanese university as freshmen.

The current format of spending three years in Malaysia and two years in Japan has been in place since 2005, enabling the participants to shoulder less of the burden of paying to study in Japan, while also building sufficient Japanese-language skills to prepare them for life in Japan. In addition, they can get information about Japanese universities beforehand.

Through the program, about 600 students have studied in Japan over the past decade, but this academic year was the first time that students utilizing the new format transferred to universities in Japan. Seventy-five students went to 15 institutions.

The 15 are members of the Japanese University Consortium for Transnational-education (JUCTe), which was established in March 2006. The members consist of 12 private institutes, including Waseda and Keio universities, and three national ones, including Saitama University. However, only two of its members--Shibaura Institute of Technology and Takushoku University--have been responsible for dispatching the 10 faculty members, including three professors, to Malaysia.

More and more universities in Japan have been setting up their own overseas offices to recruit exceptional students, partly because they have been facing more and more competition from their counterparts overseas.

On the other hand, the JAD project has consistently been run by the Malaysian government as a project financed by yen loans, which the Japanese government extends to developing countries at low interest rates over a long term to help them develop their own infrastructure.

The Malaysian government offers scholarships to the program's participating students and provides money for the salaries and living expenses of the faculty members.

The project is set to expire in March 2014. Unless a similar framework can be secured by that time, the program's participating students will have to pay for tuition from the time they study in Malaysia, while the Japanese participating universities would also have to shoulder the cost of dispatching faculty members.

"Considering the current economic climate in other Asian countries, it'll be difficult for us to impose high tuition costs [on students]," said Masahiro Hamano of nonprofit organization Asia Seed, which handles secretariat duties for JUCTe. "On the other hand, it's also difficult for us to attract participating institutions to collect membership fees."

By taking advantage of the knowledge that has been developed in Malaysia, JUCTe has been considering expanding similar programs to other countries. However, there will be a price to pay for any universities that want to attract more foreign students.

Bid to boost foreign students in Japan

In 1983, when there were just 10,428 foreign students in Japan, then Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone presented a plan to raise the number of such students to 100,000--a target that was eventually reached in 2003. For the past few years, however, the number has remained at about 120,000, with 118,498 in 2007.

In his policy speech in January, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda unveiled a plan to raise the number to 300,000, "to take advantage of the dynamism of the world as the driving force to boost Japan." So far, the following measures have been proposed to reach the target:

-- The government should designate 30 universities to focus on supporting foreign students.

-- About half of foreign students should be able to find employment in Japan after completing their studies, as opposed to the current level of just 30 percent.

-- More and more bases should be set up overseas to offer information on studying in Japan, which should be also used by Japanese universities in screening their prospective students.

As of May 2007, China formed the largest nationality group among foreign students in Japan, accounting for about 60 percent, or 71,277 individuals. They were followed by South Koreans, with 17,274 students, while there were 4,686 Taiwanese and 2,582 Vietnamese.

Malaysia ranked fifth with 2,146 students, followed by Thailand with 2,090 and the United States with 1,805.

Source: yomiuri.co.jp