Education Japanese students turning to Indian international schools in Tokyo for affordable tuition

Indian-style international schools in Tokyo are attracting a growing number of Japanese students. Families are drawn to their diverse curricula and more affordable tuition than schools with a more Western orientation.



At the Edogawa ward campus of the Global Indian International School (GIIS), fifth-grade students recently discussed a pressing geographical topic. Unlike traditional Japanese schools, GIIS Tokyo, which follows the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum, does not separate subjects like language and mathematics. Instead, lessons are structured around grade-specific themes such as "the time and place we live in" and "ways to express ourselves," integrating numerical exercises with geographical concepts within a single class.

GIIS Tokyo, which opened in 2014, was originally established for the children of Indian professionals working in Japan. With the school's introduction of the IB curriculum in 2017, the number of Japanese applicants grew, and the campuses increased from one to four. Japanese students surpassed Indian students in fiscal 2021 and accounted for 55% of the total, at 780, in fiscal 2024. There is also an Indian curriculum that follows traditional Indian schools, and at that campus, 20% to 30% of the students are Japanese. GIIS Tokyo students start with the Indian curriculum in lower grades and then move on to the IB in the upper grades if they so choose. Entrance exams test English and math skills from preschool, with science included from sixth grade on.

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Entrance exams test English and math skills from preschool, with science included from sixth grade on. The school's registration fee is 40,000 yen ($270), and tuition for elementary school students runs from 1.2 million yen to 1.59 million yen a year. By comparison, the British School in Tokyo charges tuition for seven—to nine-year-olds of 2.73 million yen.

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Mainichi picked up the success story of GIIS, the Indian School in Edogawa Ward's Nishi Kasai area founded in 2006, which has recently expanded to four campuses.

Initially, Indian students were the majority, but in the 2021 school year, the ratio reversed, with Japanese students going on to make up about 55% of overall students in the 2024 school year. Indian students accounted for around 35% of the total, with children from various backgrounds, including Chinese, South Korean and Russian, also attending. The number of campuses within the ward has grown from one to four. Currently, some 1,400 students aged between 3 and 18, equivalent to Japan's kindergarten through high school, attend GIIS.

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At GIIS, all instruction is delivered in English. During a visit by Mainichi Shimbun reporters to a fifth-grade mathematics class, a question displayed on the screen asked students to "Express the decimal 3.948 in words," accompanied by four multiple-choice answers. An Indian teacher encouraged participation, urging, "Tell me which is the correct answer. Come on, I want more hands up!" which prompted an enthusiastic response from the students.

Indian education is recognised for its strong focus on mathematics, with students often demonstrating ease in solving problems such as two-digit multiplication. GIIS similarly places significant emphasis on early education in mathematics and science. Students can study a second language besides English, choosing French, Chinese, Hindi, or Tamil.

I was discussing the issue of mathematical skills with some of my old academic friends (one of who completed his PhD with Stephen Hawking) and, reluctantly, we eventually all agreed that excellent mathematical abilities took people further in life than any other skill as it opened up many more lucrative avenues. So I can see these Indian school's emphasis on mathematics is a popular notion.

I was sitting in a boring staff meeting with that Cosmological friend I mentioned earlier and noticed he had written down my name on a piece of paper and assigned numbers to each letter. He then proceeded to mathematically manipulate those numbers in mind-boggling ways, calculus, metrical tensors…all sorts of things I'd never seen before. After several minutes of writing, he arrived at a single number, leaned in to me and declared in a solemn whisper, "You're a 'three.'"

In another boring staff meeting he was doing his usual mathematical scribbling when I proudly suggested that it was my Hindu ancestors who invented the momentous 'zero'! He instantly retorted, "It's a shame they never did anything with it!"