The rise of "inward-looking youth", with little interest in venturing outside Japan, has caused consternation among Japanese journalists, policymakers and business leaders in recent years.
Only 4% of all university students study overseas, says the education ministry. Another government survey from 2019 found that just a third of young Japanese want to study abroad, compared with 66% of South Koreans and 51% of Germans. The Japanese are equally lukewarm about working overseas. A survey by Sanno University in 2017 found that 60% of young employees did not want to work in other countries, up from 36% a decade beforehand.
This inward shift marks a departure. From the late 1980s to early 2000s, the number of Japanese seeking degrees overseas soared. A strong yen allowed many to study abroad without scholarships or loans. Japan’s biggest banks shipped out hundreds of their employees each year to business schools in America. “There were dozens of us Japanese in the same classroom at Harvard,” reminisces Hiraga Tomikazu of Osaka Seikei University, who attended Harvard Business School. “We would study together and share our notes, so we could all pass the course.”
Today Chinese and Indian students abroad far outnumber Japanese. That is partly because of Japan’s strong labour market. The unemployment rate hovered below 3% for the three years until the covid-19 pandemic began, when working or studying overseas became impractical anyway. With new graduates easily finding jobs in Japan, there is “little merit” in studying or working abroad, says Yonezawa Akiyoshi of Tohoku University: “In a way, the Japanese labour structure does not discriminate based on academic background.” At any rate remuneration for those with degrees from foreign institutions is little different from that of colleagues who studied at home.
By the same token, experience of working abroad is seldom rewarded. Many firms instead prize “Japaneseness” among their employees, laments Kato Etsuko of the International Christian University in Tokyo. Experience abroad no longer seems to increase the chances of promotion. Employees who rotate around offices in Japan, as opposed to foreign branches, may even get promoted faster.
A crippling fear of the outside world deters some young people from going abroad. Many cite their “English allergy”—a shyness about speaking English or other languages—as a reason for their insularity. Their anxiety is not entirely baseless: the Japanese rank low in the index of proficiency in English compiled by EF, a firm that specialises in language instruction and educational exchanges, behind their neighbours from South Korea.
