This paper presents the context of international students in Japan through the background of Japanese university internationalization from the 1980s forward. While there has been examination of foreign faculty involvement in globalization of universities in Asia, (McVeigh, 2002; Poole, 2010) the “grass roots” level, the international graduate student experience has been neglected in research on the globalization of Japanese universities. This paper shows that much of the research has focused primarily on the top-down Japanese government policy, quantitative approaches, and isolated report of undergraduate English language education programs from the operational perspective (See Eades et al., 2005; Bradford, 2015; Brown, 2015).
After expanding on internationalization policy, the paper explains the situation of English-medium instruction and English taught programs at Japanese universities which international students at the graduate level come into contact with. Finally, the author lists challenges that international students face during their time in Japan to stress the necessity of qualitative research on international students in Japanese higher education institutions, but critical to the implementation of effective governmental education policy.
