Before and after
Half the students who arrived expecting the worst of Japanese people changed their minds
JASSO asks a question most surveys avoid: has your impression of Japanese people changed since you got here, and in which direction. 40.0% say it improved. 8.7% say it got worse. The most interesting number is what happened to the students who arrived doubtful — and there is one reason this whole article should be read carefully, which we get to at the end.
If you are worried about how you will be treated, you are asking a question that almost nothing published in English can answer with evidence. The survey answers it directly. Students pick one of six options describing where their impression of Japanese people started and where it ended up.
Shares of all 7,867 respondents. One answer each, so this totals 100%. Table 4-1.
Collapse the six into three and you get 40.0% improved, 51.3% unchanged, 8.7% got worse. Improvement outnumbers deterioration by more than four to one.
The students who arrived doubtful
The six-way split lets you do something the headline cannot: separate people by what they believed before they came.
795 students — 10.1% of the survey — arrived with a poor impression of Japanese people. One in ten got on the plane already expecting to be treated badly. Here is what happened to them, against the 7,072 who arrived optimistic.
Arrived with a poor impression
Say it improved. 40.0% report no change, and 10.4% say it got worse. Base: 795 students.
Arrived with a good impression
Say it improved further. 52.6% report no change, and 8.5% say it got worse. Base: 7,072 students.
The doubtful group is the one that moved most. Nearly half of them revised upward — a higher rate than among students who already thought well of Japan.
The rate of deterioration barely differs between the two groups — 10.4% against 8.5%. Whatever produces a worse impression appears to happen fairly evenly, regardless of what the student expected.
It does not wear off
A reasonable objection to any of this: perhaps the good impression is a honeymoon. Ask again in four years and see.
The survey does ask. Separately from the impression question, students say whether coming to Japan was, overall, a good decision — and JASSO breaks that down by how long they have been in the country.
Shares within each duration band. One answer each. Table 4-3.
The line is flat. It dips slightly in the second and third year — 92.9% is the lowest point — and then recovers, ending at its highest among students who have been here six years or more.
Whatever else is true, this is not a satisfaction that decays with exposure. If anything the longest-staying students are the most positive, and the hardest stretch is year two.
What they say was worth it
Students who said it was a good decision — 7,400 of them — were asked what specifically was good. The ranking is worth sitting with.
Note the base. This table is a share of the 7,400 who said it was good, not of all 7,867. Up to three answers each. Table 4-4.
Making Japanese friends comes fourth, at 34.0% — and this is the group that is happy. Two-thirds of satisfied students did not name it among the good things.
That is consistent with everything else in this survey. Contact with Japanese students is the largest single complaint students have about their schools, at 20.0%. Where students actually meet Japanese people is the part-time job, not the campus. People come away glad they came, fluent, and with an international outlook — and a minority of them come away with Japanese friends.
Why the 94.1% is the weakest number here
Across everyone, 94.1% say studying in Japan was a good decision and 0.5% — 38 people — say it was not. Before you take any comfort from that, understand what the survey can and cannot reach.
This is a survey of students who are currently enrolled. It is distributed through their institutions. Anyone who found it bad enough to leave — who went home, dropped out, or transferred to another country — is not in the sample and cannot be. The 0.5% is not the failure rate of studying in Japan. It is the share of people still here who say it went badly, which is a different and much easier question.
We do not know how large the missing group is. JASSO does not publish it and we will not estimate it. Treat the direction of these findings as informative and the levels as optimistic.
The impression figures in the first chart are less exposed to this, because they compare each student against their own earlier belief rather than against a threshold. But the same survivorship applies to who is answering at all.
What to take from this
- If you are anxious about how you will be treated, the data is mildly on your side. Improvement outnumbers deterioration by more than four to one, and the doubtful group improved most.
- 8.7% do report a worse impression. That is not nothing, it is not explained by the survey, and anyone who tells you it does not happen is not reading the same table.
- Do not expect the second year to be the easiest. Satisfaction is at its lowest between one and three years in, and recovers after.
- Do not plan on Japanese friendships arriving by default. Only 34.0% of satisfied students name them among the good things, and the survey shows why — the school is not where this happens.
- Discount the 94.1%. The people who would have answered worst are not in the room. Use the comparisons, not the headline.
Sources. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students. Table 4-1 (change in impression of Japanese people, with 2019 and 2021 comparisons), Table 4-2 (overall impression of studying in Japan), Table 4-3 (overall impression by years in Japan), Table 4-4 (what was good, among those who said it was good), Table 4-7 (complaints about the school), Table 4-9 (where students mix with Japanese students). Survey PDF (Japanese). On the denominators — there are three different ones on this page. Tables 4-1, 4-2 and 4-7 are shares of all 7,867 respondents. Table 4-3 is a share within each duration band. Table 4-4 is a share of the 7,400 students who said their experience was good, which is why "learning Japanese" reads 60.5% rather than the 56.9% it would be against the full sample. Mixing these up is the easiest mistake to make with this survey and we have flagged the base on every chart. On our calculation. The 49.6% / 38.9% split by starting impression is ours. Table 4-1's six categories identify each student's prior belief, so we grouped them: 795 arrived with a poor impression (394 + 83 + 318) and 7,072 with a good one (2,752 + 598 + 3,722), and recomputed the outcomes within each group. The two bases sum to 7,867, which is the check we ran. On what the survey does not ask. It does not ask why an impression changed, in either direction. We have not speculated.
Next
Half of you are worried about making friends. That is not the thing that goes wrong
Your Japanese friends will come from your part-time job, not your university
85.2% are satisfied with their school. The exceptions are all outside the classroom
54.4% of you want to work here afterwards. What you ask for is a faster visa change
Your situation is probably not in the survey
This article can only tell you what 7,867 students reported on average. It cannot tell you whether your plan works — your country, your school, your budget, the year you are going. If that is the part you are stuck on, ask us one question and we will answer it from the statistics and the rules.
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