What the travel ban means for foreign students

The Twitter thread below is a sad example of the impact the pandemic and the travel restrictions had on those students who were accepted for scholarships in Japan. The PhD candidate below had a fellowship with the Japan Foundation and waited two years to enter the country. The Japan Foundation does not allow employment during the fellowship, so she had means of income. The recent omicron restrictions resulted in a new travel ban for international students. Having been put off for so long, she finally threw in the towel.

Currently, there are thousands of students in limbo, just like her.

An interesting opinion piece by Kent E. Calder, director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at SAIS, on the "broken dialogue" with Japan. He maintains that Japan will lose out by banning foreign students. He cites the example of his most promising undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University who after having been admitted to Tokyo University in 2019 was admitted in the fall of 2019 to the University of Tokyo to begin her studies there in April 2020. She could not go on time, of course, due to the pandemic, and successfully applied twice in succeeding admission cycles over the following two years, without being able to enter Japan. Recently, however, after the latest disappointing response from the immigration authorities in Tokyo, she gave up studying in Japan and decided to attend Yonsei University in South Korea instead. South Korea, with more liberal student admission policies than Japan, admitted 68,000 foreign students in 2020, several times Japan's level, while keeping COVID-19 under strict control.

Roughly three million people around the world are currently studying Japanese. Close to 30,000 of them typically came to Japan annually to improve their language fluency, to travel about the country, or to pursue extended technical study. Yet, during the first half of 2021, only 7,000 new foreign students entered Japan, down almost 89 percent from 2019. As many as 25,000 international students have reportedly been denied entry over the past two years, with their futures in limbo, due to COVID-19 border measures. Japan is currently the only G-7 nation not issuing student visas for foreign students, with a partial exception for government scholarships.

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