U.S. Failing to Close Its Education Gap With Japan

What is causing America’s competitive decline and its incorrigible trade deficit with Japan? That haunting question has been studied to death by the experts, but one little-known statistic suggests that study itself--or the lack of it--may be to blame.

Behind the $50-billion U.S.-Japan trade gap is a bilateral “education gap” now hovering at a ratio of about 24 to 1. That is, while about 24,000 Japanese went to study in the United States in 1988, only 964 American students decided that they had something to learn on these high-tech islands.

This lopsided exchange cuts across crucial fields of advanced science and technology research, where Japanese government agencies have tried in vain to entice larger numbers of Americans into their laboratories.

Japan’s brightest, meanwhile, continue to flock to the United States for study, years after this economic superstate outgrew its singular need to copy and absorb knowledge from the West while offering little in return.

Now, the student is ready to become a teacher as well, but the United States does not seem to have the capacity--or interest--to knuckle down and study.

The problem is potentially so critical that the U.S. National Research Council warned in a report last year that “resentment over the perceived imbalance in the flow of scientists and researchers . . . threatens to spill over into political and economic areas.”

“There is a special urgency associated with the question of access” to Japanese universities and research labs, the council said, “because of the very real prospect that frictions and restrictions could result if it is not effectively addressed soon enough.”

Belatedly, some educators on the American side of the Pacific are awakening to the need to train people for the challenges of tapping Japan’s intellectual resources.

This fall, for example, Stanford University opened an ambitious, $6.3-million facility in the city of Kyoto designed to train engineering majors in the ways of Japan, besides offering a more conventional program for humanities undergraduates.

Stanford’s Center for Technology and Innovation joins a corporate internship program sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other sporadic efforts in a new strategy to get tomorrow’s mainstream scientists and engineers hooked on Japan while they are young.

“We’re concerned about the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome” that makes American laboratories and think tanks “insular,” said Thomas Heller, director of Stanford’s overseas programs.

“A major part of this center is to have students appreciate the fact that there are going to be multiple science centers in the world, and that technology transfer among them is going to be increasingly important,” Heller said. “The program, if it works well, will introduce to Japan a set of students who are headed for first-rate careers.”

So goes the theory. But other barriers remain, foremost among which is a myopic attitude on the part of American industry on the importance of the Japan experience. Traditionally, U.S. companies have been reluctant to recruit from the scarce supply of people proficient in Japanese.

“The United States needs to open its eyes,” said Michael J. Mintz, director of Dow Chemical’s research and development office in Tokyo.

“American industry today rarely rewards someone for having spent a year in Japan or (having) developed some facility in the language,” Mintz said. “As long as that fundamental problem exists, there’ll be a perception that there are barriers to Japanese technical information. But the only barriers are the ones we’ve installed.”

Wall Street has been one notable exception to this rule, offering lucrative salaries to Japan specialists from academia willing to try their hand at securities analysis in Tokyo’s booming financial markets. But other fields have a terrible record, including journalism.

A highly praised program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to train Japanese-speaking Americans as Tokyo correspondents was canceled last year because of alleged administrative bungling on the part of the university. The U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, a federal agency, cut off funding and is looking for a new school to replace Columbia. So far, there are no takers.

The American media have not shown much interest in the program either. Of the 16 reporters graduated from the Columbia program since 1982, as many as seven are now employed by Reuters, the British wire service, having failed to land jobs at U.S. news organizations.

Stories abound of Americans being trained in Japan, then joining Japanese firms--and contributing to Japan’s side of the trade balance--because no U.S. company would hire them.

“We support a range of training programs in Japan, and I’d say 50% to 70% of the people are snapped up by anything but American firms,” said an official at a U.S. government-funded foundation.

“I don’t think Americans have really caught on,” he said. “You give an American company the choice between hiring someone with an MBA or someone with a solid Japan background, and they’ll hire the MBA on a heartbeat.”

The lack of financial incentive appears to be one major reason why Japanese language study in U.S. schools trails far behind European languages, despite a recent surge in popularity. University enrollment in Japanese courses, according to the Modern Language Assn., rose sharply during the 1980s. By 1987, the latest year for which statistics are available, there were 23,454 students of Japanese in the universities. But that still pales by comparison to the hundreds of thousands of students who take French or Spanish.

Mintz, the Dow Chemical executive, is outraged that Japanese does not even fulfill foreign language requirements for most American doctoral programs in the sciences.

Not surprisingly, the Tokyo government, in answering U.S. trade complaints about Japan’s “closed” economic structure, has criticized America’s educational system--its weakness in language study in general and its aversion for the Japanese tongue in particular. (English is a required subject in Japanese secondary schools, and English reading skills are needed to pass rigorous university entrance exams.)

Although Japanese courses are increasing at a “tremendous rate” at the high school level in the United States, the quality of instruction is low, said Eleanor H. Jorden, a linguist and authority on teaching Japanese at Johns Hopkins University’s National Foreign Language Center in Washington.

“There’s a terrible shortage of trained teachers,” Jorden said. “We have what I call the ‘wife of the wrestling coach syndrome.’ ”

Even two years of Japanese at the university level is inadequate, with few exceptions, to prepare anyone for serious study or work in Japan, Jorden and other Japan hands agree. True literacy in the language, normally written with about 2,000 Chinese characters, requires intensive study over many years.

“A lot of people in the States are thinking about learning Japanese and coming here to strike it rich, but they’re in for a surprise,” said Billy Hornung, 20, a Yale University junior enrolled in Stanford’s Kyoto program, which accommodates undergraduates from a consortium of U.S. colleges.

Hornung got started early. He first came to Japan as a high school student from Austin, Tex., in an exchange program and lived with a family in Osaka.

“I absolutely fell in love with Japan,” he said. “We lived near a sushi bar, so that didn’t hurt.”

After coming back one summer to work in a fish market, Hornung decided to major in East Asian studies at Yale and try to master the Japanese language.

“Too many people come here for a year or two and learn a little Japanese from a girlfriend,” he said, referring to the stream of free-lance English teachers who have included the likes of Jay McInerny, the young New York novelist. “They go back as experts, knowing nothing.”

America’s poor language skills and shortsighted employers are not entirely to blame for the U.S.-Japan knowledge gap. Japan’s university system is rigid, arcane and difficult to penetrate--quite the opposite of the U.S. system, which attracted 365,000 foreign students last year.

“Higher education is one exception to the rule that we’re doing poorly in international markets,” Stanford President Donald Kennedy said.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone once proposed having 100,000 foreign students in Japan by the end of the century, a vision that seems less extraordinary as the deadline approaches. In 1988, there was a total of 25,643 foreigners studying here, nearly five times the number of 10 years earlier. The vast majority were from Asia; American students increased by less than twofold, from 584 to 964, in the decade.

Once inside, however, many foreign students and researchers find that maddening rules can stifle creativity. The lack of transparency in the system makes it hard to know exactly what is going on. Japan is not an open society like the United States, which means that it is also difficult for a foreign student to feel accepted emotionally. An extensive survey by Keio University psychologist Sumiko Iwao, a former Fulbright student at Yale, found that the longer foreign students stay in Japan, the less they like it.

Moreover, Japanese universities do not share the same reputation for excellence in teaching and research that makes American schools international magnets. That is especially true in basic research, the National Research Council study noted.

“If Japan’s university research system is not upgraded,” it said, “the result could be to exacerbate resentments over what some perceive to be a ‘closed’ research system, in which the best work is carried out in industry labs that are much less accessible to foreigners.”

At the beginning of 1988, Tokyo pledged $4.8 million to fund American researchers in positions at Japanese universities and government laboratories, offering grants through the U.S. National Science Foundation. But, so far, the response has been lukewarm.