A native speaker and teacher of a language other than English explores how HE in Japan treats such languages, reaching the conclusion that they are generally ignored and deserve greater attention.

Introduction

At the time of writing (2020), there are in Japan seven universities called gaikokugo daigaku, which literally means “foreign language university.” As their name implies, their focus is on teaching foreign languages, although their conventional English titles are “University of Foreign Studies,” and indeed they do have programs that are not completely focused on language and/or literature. The same three characters for “gai-koku-go” are used also in Chinese and Korean in the names of similar universities. In colloquial Japanese, the abbreviated term “gaidai” is common. Of course, many universities that do not specialize specifically in language study and do not qualify to be called gaidai have their own faculties or departments called gaikokugo gakubu or gaikokugo gakka, etc. For many, however, English occupies by far the largest share of the curriculum—or even the whole. Additionally, there are, as a walk through any large city center will show, any number of colleges or schools large and small with “Gaikokugo” in their title; most offer English only, at many levels, or Japanese, often for young people from overseas who need Japanese skills in order to enter a university in Japan.

While five of the current gaidai are private institutions, one of the remaining two, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (“Tokyo Gaidai”—TUFS), is the only national gaidai, since Osaka Gaidai was absorbed into Osaka University in 2007. TUFS began as a university under the new postwar regulations in 1949, but has distant roots back in 1811, when the Shogunate ordered the setting up of a center in Nagasaki where other languages than Dutch (English, French and Russian) were to be studied. After Perry’s arrival in 1853, the Bansho Shirabesho (literally, “place for investigating barbarian writings”) was established in Edo in 1856, which led to an expansion of language studies in Edo/Tokyo. Thus in 1873, the year that TUFS commemorates as its foundation year, its forerunner as a national institute of HE for languages was established.