The institutionalizing of international education policy as a labor migration pathway: Analyzing four decades of policymaking in Japan

This paper analyzes how Japan’s system of international education policy and student labor migration has been successively institutionalized over the past four-plus decades. Japan started admitting international students in earnest following the launch of the 100,000 International Student Plan of 1983, which has been revised twice since. While the country has managed to hit its numerical targets for international student admittance, the Japanese system has achieved this in the context of admitting primarily privately funded international students, a majority of which need to work to sustain their life in Japan. In 2019, 95% of international students were privately funded, accounting for over 19% of the total foreign workforce. There is also a subset of foreign students who can arguably be classified as labor migrants, in addition to well-documented cases in which student workers have been forced into precarious positions. Utilizing the framework of incremental institutional change from the field of historical institutionalism, I identify three distinct periods of policymaking: displacement (1983–1988), layering (1988–2007), and conversion (2008–2019). Through these subsequent processes of institutionalization, I outline how Japan’s system has developed into a tiered system featuring mostly university-level students with primarily educational aspirations and a subset of non-university level students that come to Japan for the primary purpose of labor. In the concluding section, I analyze recent policy developments and discuss the possibility of Japan entering another period of institutional layering to address the most pressing issues with the current system.