UNITED NATIONS : Top Refugee Post Goes to Japanese : A professor will head the U.N. agency. This is seen as a reward--and a test of the nation’s commitment.

Japan’s efforts over the last decade to open its shores to Indochinese refugees have hardly been something to boast about, particularly for a country that has vowed to assume the burdens of global leadership.

When the industrialized nations of the West were inundated with hundreds of thousands of “boat people” in the late 1970s, Japanese officials announced that they would take a mere 500 for permanent resettlement on these crowded, “racially homogenous” islands.

Attitudes about opening Japanese society to fellow Asians have changed little since then, although the Tokyo government has responded generously to calls for money for refugees--outside Japan. Only the United States contributes more money toward refugee relief.

Now, with the world’s total refugee population swelling to an estimated 15 million, Japan will have a rare chance to practice leadership in this vexing area of international affairs.

The United Nations last week appointed Sadako Ogata, dean of the faculty of foreign studies at Tokyo’s Sophia University, as head of its Office of High Commissioner for Refugees. Ogata, 63, becomes the first woman to lead the commission and only the second Japanese to head a major U.N. agency.

Although she has been characterized by some observers as a strategic fund-raiser for the financially troubled U.N. arm, Ogata sees her appointment as recognition that Japan has made real progress in improving its spotty record on refugee relief.

“The changes taking place in Japan over the past 10 years must have been noted for the secretary general to appoint a Japanese to this position,” said Ogata, a human rights expert who served with Japan’s U.N. mission from 1976 to 1979.

Indeed, Japan’s refugee resettlement quota was expanded gradually to 10,000 from 500 in 1978, although only 7,000 of those slots have been filled.

The quota remains one of the smallest for any industrialized nation. But Japan’s $73.8-million contribution to the U.N. refugee agency in 1989 was more than double that of the former West Germany, according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

Ogata told reporters in a recent news conference that she favors a more “open and pluralistic” society that would draw many more refugees, as well as a greater commitment by the Japanese government to backing the activities of the U.N. agency.

The appointment of the scholarly Ogata to the three-year term raises some unresolved philosophical questions.

Ogata, for example, said she is against involuntary repatriation, a measure urged by many developing countries burdened by overflowing refugee camps but opposed by the United States on humanitarian grounds.

Yet Japan has adopted a tough stance on repatriation as part of its campaign to crack down on a recent influx of economic migrants, whose ranks include hundreds of people from China’s Fujian province. They sought asylum last year, posing as political refugees from Vietnam. Japan has deported more than 1,500 of them to China since September of last year.

But Ogata said that “even economic refugees” should be protected from involuntary repatriation. “You have to take into consideration what they’d be going back to.”

Ogata received a Ph. D. in political science from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in international relations at Georgetown University.