This paper replicates models developed by previous research to study the effects of graduate education on new graduates' initial employment in the Japanese labor market. If education is the best investment for an individual's economic success, then graduate degrees are expected to provide an individual with higher-earning job opportunities.…

The study is devoted to identifying the key issues impeding the integration of international faculty at Japanese universities via a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews with 40 international faculty hired in Japanese universities with various backgrounds were conducted. The interview data were analyzed based on a three-stage coding…

Polymathy may be defined as the productive pursuit of multiple endeavors, simultaneously or serially, across a lifetime. As such, polymathic breadth of interest across knowledge domains characterizes Nobel laureates in the sciences, literature, economics, and peace, though interest patterns vary between groups. Economics laureates, like science…

Given the perceived imbalance in resource allocation and the recognized disparities in degree completion rates across academic disciplines in Japan's higher education system, this study explores the perceptions and experiences of graduate students through a comparison between graduate students in Humanities and Social Sciences and those in…

The purpose of this study is to depict how the public goods of internationalizing higher education in Japan, especially inbound international students, are viewed by various stakeholders based on the main findings from semi-structured interviews. The interviewees include key persons from different levels or fields in Japan: officials from MEXT…

Undergraduate research in Japan, called graduation research (GR), is comparable to that in other countries and is defined here as a final-year curricular activity that completes undergraduate study. This article aims to elucidate GR to contribute to the scholarship of undergraduate research from an international perspective. The main findings…

Liberal education has been a target of political discourse in many countries, and Japan is no exception. In Japanese higher education, there are three types of institutions: national public, local public, and private. In June 2015, Japan's minister of education, Hakubun Shimomura, called upon the country's national universities to take…

This paper examines shifts in the knowledge production policy agenda at Japanese research universities -- a transition from discipline-based academic tradition towards interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production -- through a case study of a leading interdisciplinary research institute. We examine this transition through the case of Tohoku…

"New Directions of STEM Research and Learning in the World Ranking Movement: A Comparative Perspective" illustrates new directions of STEM higher education from the perspective of twenty-first century types of learning outcomes and focuses on need for developing an interdisciplinary approach to STEM higher education reform. It provides…

This study investigated, by means of an ethnographic approach, what exactly occurs when Japanese novice writers are socialized into the undergraduate thesis genre and how the processes differ among disciplines. Data were collected from 10 undergraduate students enrolled in various humanities disciplines at two Japanese universities. The study…

Kiyo are journals published by Japanese academic institutions. As a scholarly communication medium, they have inherent problems such as limited accessibility and lack of quality control. Despite these problems, they have evolved to comprise the majority of academic journals published in the humanities and social sciences in Japan because they fit…

The article proposes Stern's (1983) framework for classifying issues related to instruction in order to ascertain the relevance of Universal Grammar (UG) in the ESL/EFL classroom. Discussed in this article, particularly as UG pertains to them, are issues related to: (a) L1 transfer; (b) teaching rules and giving error correction versus presenting…

This is a unique and groundbreaking collection of questions and answers coming from higher education institutions on diverse fields and across a wide spectrum of countries and cultures. It creates routes for further innovation, collaboration amidst the Sciences (both Natural and Social) and the Humanities and the private and the public sectors of…

This eight-lesson unit introduces students to developments in Tokugawa, Japan, from 1630-1867. Students explore art, literature, and other primary sources to compile a picture of the stable, hierarchical society that the Tokugawa rulers sought to establish and maintain; students then draw on these sources to analyze social, economic, and cultural…