| Budget Amount *help |
¥5,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥5,900,000)
Fiscal Year 1996: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 1995: ¥5,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥5,000,000)
|
|---|
| Research Abstract |
This study revolves around a wide-ranging questionnaire survey of foreign students in Japan and former foreign students now returned to their home countries. We began by interviewing a small number of foreign students and the Japanese with whom they were in daily contact. Through these interviews we examined what questions would be given in the larger survey project and prepared the questionnaire. We then distributed a total of 16,000 questionnaires to foreign students via more than 100 universities, dormitories, and other organizations. We obtained a total of 4,831 valid responses. We also mailed questionnaires to some 5,200 former foreign students who had been studying in Japan as of either 1975 or 1985, from whom we obtained 1,411 valid responses. We compared these findings with the results of similar surveys conducted in 1975 and 1985 in an attempt to gauge the nature of internationalization in Japanese society over the last two decades, during which time the number of foreign stud
… More
ents coming to this country has rapidly risen.
We found, for example, that foreign students'images of the Japanese and evaluations of their experiences studying in Japan have generally grown worse by comparison with the results of the previous survey. There have been institutional improvements, such as availability of scholarships and procedures for obtaining gurantors. foreign student ability in the Japanese language has improve in general, but many respondents still feel that Japanese society is closed and find it difficult to get along with the Japanese people. Matters related to the Japanese mentality--aspects that are difficult to deal with by revising institutions--such as patterns of human relations and tendency to resist contact with people whose thinking patterns are different from theirs, our survey reveals, are still the biggest obstacles for foreign students in mingling in Japanese society, as they were two decades ago.
The responses of not just foreign students in Japan but of those who formerly studied here are analyzed from various angles to learn how their sentiments toward, and images of, Japanese people have changed (or not changed), and how hey perceive their own countries and national identity, taking into accuount their cultural backgrounds, demographic attributes, Japanese-language ability, period of stay in Japan, and so forth. Our study aims to offer, in a long-term perspective, guidelines for improving systems of student exchange and better ways for deepening mutual understanding among different societies and cultures. Less
|
