Before and after
Half of you are worried about making friends. That is not the thing that goes wrong.
The survey asks two questions a year apart in a student's life: what were you anxious about before coming, and what have you actually found hard since arriving. Put the answers side by side and the ranking almost inverts. The fear that came third turns out to be the problem that dominates everything.
Here is what 7,867 international students said they were anxious about before they came to Japan. Up to three answers each.
Shares of all 7,867 respondents, up to three answers each. This ranking has barely moved across three surveys since 2019.
People are afraid of each other, and of failing. Money is a clear third, and housing is at the very bottom — fewer than one student in ten gave it a thought.
Now here is the same population, asked what they have found difficult since arriving:
Shares of all 7,867 respondents, up to three answers each.
The two lists do not agree with each other
| Concern | Feared it beforehand | Reported it afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Money | 38.3% | 71.4% |
| Customs and daily life | 27.5% | 36.7% |
| Housing | 9.1% | 16.8% |
| Relationships | 49.8% | 17.0% |
| Studies | 49.4% | 11.1% |
Every one of the top three fears fell. Every one of the bottom three concerns rose. The thing ranked first before arrival — relationships, at 49.8% — comes back as 17.0%. The thing ranked third — money, at 38.3% — comes back as 71.4%, ahead of everything else by a factor of two.
Two things this comparison is not
We are putting two separate questions next to each other, and it is worth being exact about what that does and does not license.
The wording is not identical. "Whether I can build good relationships and communicate well" is not the same item as "I do not mix with people at school", and "whether I will face economic difficulty" is not the same as "prices are high". The survey never intended these as a matched pair, and neither the questions nor the answer options line up one-to-one. We have paired them because they are the nearest equivalents, not because they are the same question asked twice.
The people are not followed over time. This is one survey of one group at one moment; the students answering "what did you fear" and "what do you find hard" are the same people, but they are answering about their past and their present in the same sitting. It is not a study that tracked anyone from before departure to after arrival.
What survives both caveats is the size of the movement. A gap of thirty-three points on money and thirty-three points the other way on relationships is far too large to be an artefact of wording. Something real is being described.
Why the fear about people turns out to be misplaced
The survey has an answer to this, in a different chapter. 70.6% of students report having opportunities to mix with Japanese students outside class. Not a majority struggling — a substantial majority succeeding, and doing it at a frequency of several times a week.
Where it happens is the surprising part, and we have written about it separately: not in seminars, not in clubs, not at the events the university organises. The single largest venue is the part-time job. The place students go to solve the money problem is the same place they solve the loneliness problem — which is a tidy irony, given that the money problem is the one nobody saw coming.
The one fear that was correctly sized
Language sits oddly across the two lists. Before arriving, 57.5% of students name Japanese study as what they struggled with in getting here at all — the top answer to that question. After arriving, 36.1% name learning Japanese as a current difficulty, third on that list.
So it is hard before, and still hard after, and students were not wrong about it in either direction. Of the six or seven things on these lists, it is the one that behaves the way you would expect.
And yet
None of this is a story about disappointment. Asked for an overall verdict on studying in Japan, the same 7,867 people answered:
Glad they came
7,400 students. It was 92.7% in 2019 and 95.5% in 2021.
Regret it
38 students out of 7,867. Another 5.5% could not say either way.
A population that overwhelmingly says it was worth doing, and simultaneously reports the cost of living as its dominant difficulty, is not contradicting itself. It is telling you which part is hard, not whether the whole is worth it.
The related question — what students think of Japanese people after living here — moves the same way. 40.0% say their impression improved, against 8.7% who say it got worse. The remaining 51.3% report no change, mostly from an already-positive starting point.
What to do with this before you go
- Move your worry from people to money. The students already there did exactly that, involuntarily, in their first year.
- Take housing seriously in advance. It is the item with the widest gap between how little it is feared (9.1%) and how much it bites (16.8% on finding a place, 15.7% on the rules once you are in).
- Do not over-plan the friendships. 70.6% manage it, and mostly through the job rather than the campus.
- Keep studying the language. It is the only fear on the list that stayed roughly the size people expected.
Sources. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students. Table 2-3 (anxieties before studying abroad; 7,867 respondents, up to three answers, with 2019 and 2021 comparisons), Table 2-4 (difficulties in getting to Japan, including the 57.5% on Japanese study), Table 4-11 (difficulties after arriving), Table 4-1 (impression of Japanese people, before and after), Table 4-2 (overall verdict), and the chapter on contact with Japanese students (70.6%). Survey PDF (Japanese). On reading the percentages: every figure on this page is a share of students, not of answers, and the multiple-answer tables therefore exceed 100%. Table 4-1's components are ours to add: "improved" is 5.0% + 35.0%, "got worse" is 7.6% + 1.1%, "no change" is 47.3% + 4.0%. The before-and-after table is our pairing, not JASSO's. The two questions use different wordings and different answer lists, and the survey does not present them as comparable. We have matched the nearest items and said so; the individual figures are exactly as published.