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Visualizing International Students in Japan

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In 2008, the Japanese government launched the “300,000 International Students Plan” (留学生30万人計画):

International students in Japan have been increasing in number since the Nakasone administration launched an internationalization campaign in 1983 to attract 100,000 students by the early twenty-first century. While international students were expected to return to their home countries after graduation under this plan, the government’s objectives later shifted, culminating in its 300,000 International Students Plan in 2008. Beside the quantitative goal to attract 300,000 international students by the year 2020, this new plan actively promotes the hiring of international students in the Japanese labor market after their graduation.

This number has already been met, if we include students at Japanese language schools as shown below1.

Line graph of international students from 2011 to 2019

If we look at each type of school, we can see that the number of students at colleges has been increasing steadily. However, the number of students at Japanese language schools and vocational schools increasing at an even faster rate2.

Line graph of international students from 2011 to 2019 by type

Source: PDF from JASSO

The following graph shows where the most international students in Japan are from:

International students in Japan are mostly from other countries in Asia

Source: Ministry of Justice

Compared to other OECD countries, Japan has a high percentage of international students who are from Asian countries (Graph).

There has also been a significant growth in the student population from many of the foreign countries in the above graph:

Grid of growth in international students by country

Source: JASSO

During this period, there has been an increase of 69,000 students from Vietnam, and an increase of 24,000 students from Nepal:

The amount of growth in the number of students in Japan between 2011 and 2019 varies by country

Source: JASSO

The increase in Vietnamese and Nepali students is a result of many factors:

In the following scatter plot, the x-axis shows the number of people from a certain country in Japan, and the y-axis shows the number of students from that country:

Scatter plot of total population and student population by country

Source: Ministry of Justice

We can see that not only is there a large number of people from China, Vietnam, and Nepal in general, they also have a relatively large student population within Japan:

On the other hand, there are many people who are a citizen of South Korea, the Philippines, or Brazil, but there is a lower proportion of students from those countries.

The following is zoomed into the rectangle from the scatter plot above3:

Scatter plot of total population and student population by country zoomed in

Source: Ministry of Justice

This graph still mainly shows Asian countries—mostly from South East Asia and South Asia.

The following is zoomed into the above plot4:

Scatter plot of total population and student population by country zoomed in more

Source: Ministry of Justice

Uzbekistan stands out with their large number of students relative to the total population in Japan.

Close to half of the people from Uzbekistan (1683 out of 3686) in Japan are students.

Nationalities in Japan with the largest student proportion

Source: Ministry of Justice

Compared to other nationalities with a high proportion of students, there is a large number of people from Uzbekistan.

This doesn’t mean that people from Uzbekistan make up a large percentage of the population, but it will be interesting to see how this changes.

Bar graph of nationalities with the largest population in Japan

Source: Ministry of Justice

Software Used

R: ggplot2, hrbrthemes

Footnotes

1: There may have been major changes due to COVID-19, but the JASSO data used only included up to 2019.

2: Translations used:

3: The Korea in this plot = Chōsen-seki

4: The region data in the original data set had countries in Central Asia as Europe, which seems to be consistent with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs page. However, it seems more common to classify Central Asia as Asia, so the regions for these countries were manually changed.