Japan offers scholarships, top STEM Programs — So why aren't Indian students going?
Last week, IIT-Bombay announced plans to open an international centre in Japan by 2025 to launch joint PhD programmes, a move aimed at bridging the academic gap between Indian and Japanese institutions.
Land of possibilities
Indian students who studied in the country by chance or by choice are taken aback by the culture, the many opportunities and the Japanese way of life. Japan was the first choice for Shibani Melba, 25, when she pursued under-graduation in International Relations and Peace Studies. 'A combination of factors motivated me to pursue higher education in Japan. At fourteen, I had the opportunity to visit the country through a trip organised by the Japan government after winning a Japanese speech contest. I was deeply drawn to the Japanese way of life—their hospitality, discipline, and respect for others. Since I was already familiar with the language, applying to a Japanese university felt like a natural choice,' Shibani Melba, who graduated from the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, said.
The Japanese Government Scholarship (MEXT) provides substantial financial support to international students, including Indians, which helps alleviate monthly expenses. Additionally, Japan offers advanced STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses that are popular among Indian students.
Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, and Chemical Engineering are a few of the best programmes in the University of Tokyo, the top-ranked institution in the country. In 2011, it came second only to Harvard for the number of alumni in CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies. Kyoto University, the second most ranked in the country, boasts of producing world-beating researchers, including 13 Nobel Prize laureates. Advanced studies in Environmental, Nuclear, Materials Science and Energy Engineering at Kyoto University are well regarded.
'There are two common ways Indians come to Japan for higher education and research,' says an Assistant Professor (Research) at the University of Tohoku. 'One is through the Japanese embassy in India, which offers the MEXT scholarship covering studies from Bachelor's to PhD. The other is through direct guidance from Japanese professors. They often support international collaborations and help students navigate the research landscape here.'
Institutes like the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) are well known among Indian students, especially those keen on research. Many IIT graduates choose these institutes for their postdoctoral studies. Top universities like the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, and Osaka University are globally recognised.
Jai (name changed on request), a postdoctoral fellow in organic chemistry, chose to study in a Japan University 'to adopt their research culture and to learn their way of thinking.' 'Their development in organic chemistry is just enormous,' Jai said. 'They are hardworking, strict in data collections and there would be no manipulations,' he adds.
Students who pursue education in Japan often recommend the country to their peers. Ashwin Rajeev, a former student of IIT Gandhinagar, was selected for a student exchange program between IIT Gandhinagar and Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. 'Having spent a year in Japan and liking the place, I did my masters there. If everything falls in place, I would do my PhD in Japan,' he told The Hindu.
Post COVID, foreign enrollment in Japan is drastically increasing. According to ICEF monitor, a market intelligence resource for the global education industry, Japan hosted more than 336,000 students in 2024, exceeding pre-pandemic numbers, representing a historic high, and reflecting year-over-year growth of 21%.
In 2023, Waseda University, a Tokyo-based private institution, accepted 5,560 international students, while the national institution, the University of Tokyo, accepted 4,658 students from abroad. That year, there were more than a quarter of a million international students in higher education institutions in Japan, as per Statistica.
Here is another advantage: GRE and GMAT scores are not required for undergraduate admissions in Japan. Only the SAT is mandatory for engineering courses, while it is optional for Arts and Science programs.
The language barrier
While nursing care and construction sectors in Japan have seen a growing influx of Indian workers over the past five years, the same trend hasn't translated into education. So why are fewer Indian students choosing the land of blossoms?
The Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) has five levels from N5 (beginner) to N1 (advanced). Achieving at least N3 level can provide advantage during admissions.
From getting a scholarship to landing a part-time job to meet the monthly expenses, mastering Japanese is a necessity. 'After my undergraduation, I needed to be proficient with N1 and N2 levels of Japanese to get a job while I had cleared N3 (a level less) way back when I was in Class 11,' Shibani said.
For students starting from scratch, it may take over two years to reach N3. When P. Krithika, a Chhattisgarh resident, wanted to do Masters in Management, she chose Canada over Japan even though the extreme climatic conditions in the former scared her. 'Learning a whole new language with an unfamiliar script felt impossible,' she said.
However, learning Japanese pays off by opening doors to deeper cultural engagement, financial independence, and valuable career-building experiences. Shibani, who received scholarships from Rotary International and Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), shared how reaching even the N3 level significantly broadened her horizons. 'That said, language skills alone are not enough. Good academic performance and active involvement in extracurricular activities also play a key role in accessing scholarships and work opportunities,' Shibani said.
Secondly, though it is perceived that the cost of living in cities like Tokyo is considerably high, it is actually lower than the U.S. and Europe. 'When people think about the conversion rate (since Japanese Yen is lower than INR), they prefer not to go to Japan, but prefer the West, where the exchange rate is way higher,' Ashwin Rajeev said.
In Tokyo, living expenses, including accommodation and food, can amount to approximately ₹1 lakh per month for students staying outside the campus, while those living in university hostels typically spend around ₹30,000 to 40,000 per month. In smaller cities across Japan, the cost of living is generally 10 to 15 percent lower than in Tokyo, said S Kamalakkannan, deputy representative of Non-Resident Tamil Indians Association (NRTIA) Japan, who has been living in Tokyo for the past ten years.
There is a misconception that the tuition fees in Japan are just unaffordable. In Japan, tuition fees for a four-year course in government-aided universities in Japan cost approximately ₹3 lakh in total for Engineering (about ₹75,000 per year) and around ₹2 lakh in total for Arts and Science courses (about ₹50,000 per year), without any scholarship support. In comparison, private universities charge typically two to three times higher than government institutions, Mr. Kamalakkannan said.
Career concerns, awareness
The Hindu reached out to six consultancies involved in facilitating overseas education. While all of them had extensive information about universities in the U.S. and Europe, none expressed interest or expertise in opportunities in Japan. There are other factors affecting preferences of Indians in Study abroad programs. A 2017 study published in the International Journal of Management in Education identified key factors influencing Indian students' decisions to study abroad. These include scholarships, social media influence, institutional reputation, country image, program structure, and personal aspirations.
Research in the Journal of Teaching in International Business highlighted that quality of education, safety and the reputation of host institutions are significant considerations for Indian students. Despite being one of the safest countries in the world in terms of crime, parents hesitate to send their children to a place they perceive as volatile even if the facts say otherwise. 'Earthquakes and Tsunamis, these are real fears for Indian families,' Maria Charles, who runs a consultancy at Ramanathapuram, said.
A 2021 study found that Indian students often prefer destinations with better understanding of Western education systems and migration opportunities. 'Japan has failed to market itself in India,' Ms. Charles said.
It may be noted that countries like Germany, Canada and the U.K. regularly host education fairs and build institutional partnerships in India. Indian students have limited word-of-mouth support or alumni guidance. 'It's hard to trust what you don't know. Many students can't even gauge the credibility of Japanese universities without rankings or Indian references,' Ms. Charles added.
Japan's fixed curriculum structure gives little room for exploration. 'In the U.S. or Canada, students can mix disciplines, take electives and even change majors. Japan doesn't easily allow that,' A Mahendran, a study abroad consultant, said.
For many, the goal of studying abroad is to build a global career. In Japan, landing a high-paying job post-graduation is tougher than in English-speaking countries. 'Most companies expect fluent Japanese speakers, and even then, career growth can be limited for foreigners. Getting Permanent Residency (PR) in Japan is a long, unclear process,' said Mr. Mahendran. And the hurdles don't stop at employment.
Mr. Kamalakkannan, who has been living in Tokyo for the past ten years, said that there is a lack of awareness about Japanese universities among Indian students. 'There are Japanese universities that offer English medium courses. The Indian embassy in Japan should be aggressive in creating awareness among students through the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) about the many opportunities Japan offers,' Mr. Kamalakkannan said.
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The twisted tale of two men tied together by Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an allegory for today's world
Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Donald Albury died within months of each other. The former lived to the ripe old age of 93, and passed away in January this year [2010]; the latter died in May 2009, at the age of 88. Neither of them were household names in their respective countries, yet they were noticed in obituaries scattered across newspapers. However much newspapers have changed over the last few decades, surrendering their place to television, cable, the Internet, and the mobile phone as sources of news, information, and commentary, the obituary pages have survived the relentless drive that has turned newspapers into merely another vehicle for advancing commercial interests. I was again reminded of Yamaguchi, whose obituary I first encountered in The New York Times, in August when the bells tolled, as they do every August 6 and 9, in remembrance of the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the mid-1960s, as a young boy living in Tokyo, I had no comprehension of what had transpired at Hiroshima. I wasn't even aware that my father had visited Hiroshima, until, a few years later, when I was in my early teens, I chanced upon a book of photographs documenting the effects of the atomic bombing, evidently purchased by him at the museum of the atomic dome in Hiroshima. Though the captions were in Japanese, the pictures furnished a terrifying record of the loss of human lives and the devastation of an entire city. Over the years, being drawn to the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, and, then, in the 1990s, witnessing India's own tragic quest to become a nuclear power, the question of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent has never been far from my mind. Ruminating over these matters a couple of months ago, the obituary of Charles Albury came to my notice. I knew at once that their stories, the stories of Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Donald Albury, had to be told together. There is no other way to tell their stories, even if no one else should think of linking their lives. Yamaguchi and Albury never knew each other; neither was known very much, as I have hinted, to the outside world, even if their names are, or will be, indelibly sketched in history books in unlikely ways. They ought to have known each other, all the more so since Charles Albury was dispatched to kill not Tsutomu Yamaguchi, but the likes of him. We cannot characterize Yamaguchi's killing as a targeted assassination; some will even balk at calling it a killing, considering that Yamaguchi survived the attempt to eliminate him by close to 65 years and, more poignantly, outlived Albury. Indeed, Albury would never have known of Yamaguchi's existence when he was sent on his mission, and I doubt very much that he knew of him at all before he died. If Albury did know of Yamaguchi, he seems never to have betrayed that knowledge or acted upon it in any way. No bookie could have placed bets on Yamaguchi's chances of survival and walked away with a bounty. After hearing Yamaguchi's story, one might be a thorough non-believer and still believe in miracles. And, then, as if Yamaguchi's life doesn't already stand forth as eloquent testimony to the clichéd observation that 'fact is stranger than fiction', one is even more surprised to find the lives of Yamaguchi and Albury linked in the strangest ways. Even the gifts of a supreme artist are likely to be inadequate to describe their association. Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old engineer at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, when, in the summer of 1945, his boss sent him to Hiroshima on a business trip. His work wound up in early August and he was preparing to leave the city on the morning of August 7. But before he could do so, the bomber Enola Gray dropped 'Little Boy' on Hiroshima and flattened the city, killing 80,000 people. Yamaguchi survived the bombing: he was a little less than two miles away from 'ground zero' when the bomb exploded, and he escaped with ruptured eardrums, burns on his upper torso, and in utter incomprehension at what had transpired. High up in the sky, Charles Albury, a First Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, was in the support plane behind Enola Gay: as Colonel Paul Tibbets released the bomb, Albury dropped the instruments designed to measure the magnitude of the blast and the levels of radioactivity. From an altitude of over 30,000 feet, Albury would not have noticed the Japanese engineer. Yamaguchi could not have appeared as anything more than an ant from that immense height; at any rate, it is reasonable to suppose that the training of those charged with an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented, mission – one calculated to kill hundreds of thousands with the release of one bomb, exact an unconditional surrender from the Japanese, and showcase to potential future enemies the establishment of a new world order with the United States at its helm – would have stressed the necessity of shelving aside the slightest sentiment about feeling something for the hated enemy. Albury did, however, have the presence of mind to notice that he was a witness to a spectacular sight: as he told Time magazine a few years ago, he dropped his instruments and 'then this bright light hit us and the top of that mushroom cloud was the most terrifying but also the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in your life. Every color in the rainbow seemed to be coming out of it'. Robert Oppenheimer made a similar observation when the bomb was first tested in New Mexico. A more scholarly man than Albury, with some inclination for such esoterica as the Sanskrit classics, he noted that he was reminded of verses from the Bhagavad Gita when he saw the stupendous explosion – the splendor of which, akin to the 'radiance of a thousand suns' bursting into the sky 'at once,' turned his mind towards Vishnu: 'Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,' says Krishna (the incarnation of Vishnu) to Arjuna. There is, however, no reason to suppose that Yamaguchi, or any of the other victims of the atomic bombings, experienced anything resembling the beauty of a thousand suns or the most dazzling rainbows. Unlike other survivors of the first atomic bombing, Yamaguchi had no reason to stay on in Hiroshima; he didn't have to hunt for survivors among family or friends. So Yamaguchi headed home – to Nagasaki. On the morning of August 9, still nursing his wounds, Yamaguchi nevertheless reported to work. When his boss sought an explanation for his dressings and unseemly appearance, Yamaguchi began to describe the explosion and insisted that a single bomb had wiped out Hiroshima and much of its population. You must be mad and gravely disoriented, said his boss: a single bomb cannot cause such havoc and destruction. At that precise moment, Charles Albury, co-pilot of the mission over Nagasaki, dropped the second atomic bomb, nicknamed 'Fat Man', over the city that had in the nineteenth century been Japan's gateway to the West. Yamaguchi knew at once what was happening. He also thought, as he told an interviewer much later in life, that 'the mushroom cloud had followed' him to Nagasaki. Eighty thousand people would perish from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, half of them instantly. Yamaguchi would become, one might say, thrice born, as he survived the blast. 'I could have died on either of those days,' he told a Japanese newspaper only months before he died in January 2010. 'Everything that follows is a bonus.' A new word, hibakusha, the explosion-affected people, was coined in Japanese to describe the survivors of either atomic bombing; and yet another phrase describes the 'twice-bombed' survivors, known in Japanese as nijyuu hibakusha. Yamaguchi was the only officially acknowledged nijyuu hibakusha, otherwise believed to number around 165. I don't believe that there is a vocabulary in any language that can describe what Yamaguchi might have gone through. Yamaguchi's wife died from kidney and liver cancer in 2008. His daughter describes her mother as having been 'soaked in black rain' from the bomb. Her brother, born in February 1945, was exposed to radiation, and would fall a victim to cancer at the age of 59. Yamaguchi himself struggled with various illnesses but held on to life with tenacity and philosophical composure, displaying an equanimity that might explain the energy he displayed, at the age of over ninety, in finishing 88 drawings of the images of the Buddha, representing the same number of temples – or stations – encountered on a famous religious pilgrimage around Shikoku. Later in life, after his son passed away, Yamaguchi became an ardent critic of the nuclear race, and he denounced the obscenity of the possession of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, his mission accomplished, Charles Albury returned to the U.S. and became a pilot with Eastern Airlines, settling down in Florida. He would say, when questioned, that he felt no remorse: the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had, he argued, saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Japanese and American lives that would have been needlessly sacrificed had the U.S. commenced a land invasion. This argument is keenly contested, and many would argue that it has been discredited; one can even accept that Albury may have had good reasons to believe that his missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were calculated to save lives, though why he should have persisted with this view to the end of his life is another matter. When lives become part of a calculus of cost and effect, nearly every argument becomes permissible. Nor have we asked why a second bomb had to be dropped, when the Japanese high command had been thrown into utter confusion after the destruction of Hiroshima. In 1982, while being interviewed for the Miami Herald, Albury stated that he opposed war, but would drop the bomb again if the U.S. were under attack. We know what such 'opposition' to war means. 'My husband was a hero,' Albury's wife of 65 years told the Miami Herald after his death, adding: 'He saved one million people. . . . He sure did do a lot of praying.' Since Charles Albury felt no reason to be contrite, one wonders why he prayed and, if he prayed, whether he prayed that he might become a better Christian or that the souls of the Japanese might be saved. One of the most troubling signs of our times is the manner in which the loftiest words have become debased: where prayer is a private matter between the worshipper and his or her God, it has now been harnessed as a form of ' spiritual warfare '. Members of the United States Strategic Prayer Network are committed to building a wall of prayer against enemies external and internal. Still, since prayer often retains its earlier characteristics, we should recognize it as a reclusive matter, a form of communication between the worshipper and the Divine, and thus allow Charles Albury the privacy of his religious beliefs and practices. The Americans vanquished the Japanese. So goes the story, and it has many takers. The Chinese gained the respect of the Americans, Henry Kissinger once observed, when they became a declared nuclear power. Whatever cultural capital India may have thought it derives from being the land of the Buddha and Gandhi was evidently not enough when, in its quest for muscularity and military prowess, it exploded a nuclear bomb. We have shown them, a prominent Hindu nationalist leader was heard saying, that ' we are not eunuchs '. The target of this missive was Pakistan, but India's gigantic neighbor to the north also seems to have had its ears to the ground. 'Sad to say,' the author of a recent book on the Chinese communist party has admitted, 'but India's nuclear bomb gained New Delhi respect in Beijing. Certainly, Chinese strategists complained bitterly to me that Beijing did not respect New Delhi until India had the bomb.' It appears difficult to deny Iran its choice, if that is what it is, to embark on a program of nuclear armament when its two most vociferous critics, the United States and Israel, are armed to the teeth. It is all the more difficult, even reprehensible, to do so when it faces the threat of military destruction, and social and cultural annihilation, from the only country that has so far deployed nuclear weapons. However, pondering over the twisted tale of Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Albury, it is all but certain that political choices should not be confused with the will for ethical action and thought. The future of humankind will rest upon our capacity to rise above the base politics of the nation-state system and the idea that life is a zero-sum game. Not only is there no merit in being a superpower, but there is much greater merit in resisting the obscenity of a power unrestrained by wisdom, compassion, and intelligence. I believe one can never be certain who is the vanquisher and who the vanquished. All too often the vanquished have given birth to the vanquisher. There are many possible readings, but when one places the stories of Yamaguchi and Albury in juxtaposition, it is quite transparent who represents the nobler conception of human dignity. The ontology of the vanquished, as the life of Yamaguchi shows, always has room for the vanquisher; the same cannot be said for the vanquisher. In this respect, at least, we might say that the vanquisher is always a lesser person than the vanquished. I would like to believe that Yamaguchi crossed over to the other side with an ample awareness of this fundamental truth. Vinay Lal teaches history and Asian American studies at UCLA.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear bombing must keep being commemorated
Nobody should ever say that it was a good call, but it was the only one a US President was likely to make in 1945. The decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 80 years ago, was the almost-inevitable outcome of Japanese intransigence and of the technical success of the Manhattan Project, which brought into being nuclear weapons. The anniversary is generating a wave of commemorations and renewing the arguments for, and against, the mission of Colonel Paul Tibbets to drop 'Little Boy' from his B-29, named Enola Gay, over Japan on that summer morning. In the 21st century, many brand the bombing a war crime — maybe the worst of all those committed in World War II save the Holocaust. I disagree. Some 20 years ago, I wrote a book about the 1944-45 battle for Japan for which I spent months poring over the Hiroshima controversy. I found writing a chapter about it one of the toughest challenges I have ever faced as a historian because the military, political and moral issues are so complex. No sane person could applaud the dropping of the first bomb, and less still that of the second, which annihilated Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Yet I defend President Harry Truman and those around him who shared responsibility for doing so. Many modern critics assume that the Bombs (we will hereafter capitalize them) represented the worst possible outcome of the war. This is not so. At the rate people were dying in Japan — especially prisoners in Japanese hands — more victims would have perished than the 100,000 (a conservative guesstimate) who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the struggle continued for even a few weeks longer. Moreover, during the earlier months of 1945, conventional bombing of Japanese cities by B-29s had already killed more than 300,000, one-third of these in the March 9 fire-raising assault on Tokyo. There is a myth that commands support among a modest faction of modern historians that in August 1945 the Japanese were ready to quit. This is untrue. The Tokyo leadership, dominated by the military, certainly wanted an out. But they sought terms such as no US government would entertain. They wished to maintain Japanese hegemony over Korea and Manchuria, to be spared from allied occupation and to be granted the right themselves to conduct any war crimes trials. Despite their catastrophic defeats in successive Pacific battles, the Tokyo war party believed Japan still held an important card — the capability to savage an invasion of the mainland, inflicting casualties that the squeamish Americans would find unacceptable. The Japanese looked forward to wreaking carnage among allied troops landing on Japanese beaches. There is another, uglier aspect of the story. This derives from technological determinism — the extent to which the Bomb-dropping commitment was finally made because the weapons existed, that they had been bought and paid for. An especially repugnant conversation took place in July 1945, when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard trekked to the Spartanburg, South Carolina, home of Secretary of State James Byrnes, to argue passionately against using the weapon he had helped to create. Byrnes, disgusted by the impassioned outburst, responded with two remarks that reflect scant credit on him. First, he said that the US Congress 'would have plenty to say if $2 billion proved to have been expended on the Manhattan Project for no practical purpose.' He added that the Bomb could even help to get Stalin's legions out of Szilard's own country. The visitor walked back to Spartanburg station having accomplished nothing. Along with most of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, he had for years been motivated by terror that Hitler might acquire a nuclear device ahead of the allies. They saw their own work as defensive. When Germany collapsed, and with it the threat of a Nazi Bomb, it became abhorrent to consider its use. Their difficulty in making their case was that they were bound by intensive secrecy and could not speak out. Truman had assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, ignorant of the program. When he was briefed that the US would, within weeks, probably possess the most terrible weapon in history, nobody invited him to make any great decision. It was taken for granted that if the Japanese were still fighting when the Bomb program achieved consummation, the US would use its progeny to force Tokyo's surrender. Some people to this day assert that Americans would never have employed the Bomb against Europeans. This is almost certainly untrue. The German generals who claimed that, if Hitler had followed their advice, they could have kept the European war going for months longer, ignored the near certainty that in such circumstances, the first nuclear weapon would have fallen on Berlin. As it was, even after Hiroshima most of the Japanese leadership persisted in resisting surrender. Their obduracy provided an excuse for the far less defensible detonation of the second bomb, 'Fat Man,' on Nagasaki because there was a desire to test its technology. Nonetheless the decisive factor in the belated Japanese surrender, conveyed to the Americans on Aug. 14, was the Russian declaration of war on Japan and invasion of Manchuria. Stalin had known of the American nuclear program through his agents in the West but was devastated by news of Hiroshima because he worried Tokyo would quit immediately, denying him the excuse for belligerency and seizure of the territorial prizes he had been promised. As it was, on Aug. 9, the Red Army launched its assault and secured Stalin's booty. Many of the Western critics who today denounce the Bombs are essentially arguing that the US should have saved the Japanese people from the madness of their own leaders. Yet in the sixth year of a horrific global struggle that had desensitized all its participants in various degrees, this was asking too much. I believe Truman would have a stronger moral case in the eyes of posterity had the US given an explicit public warning to Japan if they kept fighting. In July 1945, the allies did threaten dire consequences but failed to specify what these would be. Moreover, there seems a good argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki have done much to preserve mankind ever since. The mushroom cloud, the ghastly images of the horrors of nuclear warfare, leave no room for doubt that if any nation resorts to such weapons, we are doomed. Even the world's vilest dictators recognize this. It is right that we continue to commemorate the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pivotal and dreadful moments in the history of humankind. But responsibility for them should rest with the Japanese leaders who launched their country into a war of aggression that cost countless lives. We should be thankful that billions of today's people, though familiar with little history, at least know what happened on those August days 80 years ago, and thus recognize that a repetition would augur an end of everything.
