ABSTRACT
Among East Asian non-English-speaking countries, Japan has the most experience in accepting international students and faculty members, dating back to the mid-19th century. However, it has only been in the last three decades that Japan has seriously focused on its ‘brain gain’ efforts, aimed at cementing its status as a leading country in the current knowledge-based economy. At the beginning of the 1980s, the government’s clarification of the national vision for internationalizing higher education resulted in a rapid increase in international students and academics in this country. In this chapter, the authors introduce the results of a large-scale questionnaire-based survey carried out in 2009, specifically targeted at non-Japanese faculty members within Japanese universities. The survey found that non-Japanese faculty members had become more diverse in terms of their academic fields and countries of origin, and that they had played a significant role in internationalizing Japanese universities.
