It is difficult to pick one Japanese university that might illustrate the epic scale of last month’s disaster, but the eye lands on Ishinomaki Senshu, in Miyagi Prefecture.
The private institution of about 2,000 students has been transformed into a crisis center housing 200 refugees, 600 volunteers, and the temporary offices of the local city government. Army helicopters depart and land in front of the administration building, the wind from their rotors whipping the flaps of tents pegged to the carpetlike lawns.
About three miles away, the small coastal city of Ishinomaki has been torn from its roots by the March 11 tsunami, which traveled a third of a mile inland and swept away or damaged beyond repair 28,000 houses. More than 5,200 local residents are dead or missing, including six students from the university. Other students and professors are mourning parents, siblings, or other relatives.
Like most institutions in the northeast or in Tokyo, Ishinomaki Senshu University has been forced to postpone the start of its academic year by over a month, till May 20. When classes begin, homeless people sleeping in lecture rooms inside the main teaching building will have to be evacuated, the tents taken down. Then begins the long climb back to normality, amid the fear of electricity cuts as engineers in the neighboring prefecture of Fukushima battle to save a crippled nuclear power plant. At least Ishinomaki Senshu is far enough away—125 miles, well outside the evacuation zone around the plant—that radiation is not a concern.
“We all want to go back to our lives and to study,” laments Ryosuke Matsushita, a master’s student in marine biology at Ishinomaki who has been helping the refugees since shortly after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the devastating tsunami struck. Everybody is playing a part, says Yoshiaki Ozaki, a manager with the university. “It’s the biggest crisis in our memory, so we must all pull together.”
Research Interrupted
Japan’s ministry of education is keen to play down the impact of the disaster. “From our point of view, most universities are functioning normally,” insists Yoshikazu Tagashira, a spokesman for the ministry. But constant aftershocks, the fear of another major earthquake, and the now daily discharge of low-level radioactivity from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, 155 miles from the capital, are taking their toll.
Looming power cuts are another headache: Some institutions, including the National Institute of Infectious Diseases and Tokyo Women’s Medical University, are already asking for exemptions from roving blackouts, arguing that their work is too vital to close down. Others plan to work through the national Golden Week holiday in May and close early for the summer because of the lack of consistent electricity.
Power outages have hurt research projects as science facilities are still assessing the full extent of the damage caused by the massive temblor and tsunami.
Gene samples in the state-run University of Tsukuba’s Gene Research Center have suffered serious damage after a three-day power cut shut down its freezers, which kept samples at minus 80 degrees Celsius. “We have to check the samples one by one, which could take years, so we have no idea yet of the extent of the damage,” says Michiyuki Ono, an associate professor.
Electron-accelerator devices at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, a national research institute that helped win a 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, were badly damaged. Operations at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex in Ibaraki Prefecture have been suspended for at least six months because of power cuts.
Japan is also experiencing an exodus of foreign scholars.
“I’ve been in Japan for 19 years and feel a lot of loyalty, so it’s very hard for me to make the decision, but we’re worried about the food chain, drinking water, fish, vegetables, even rain,” says Tony Black, an American who has quit his job teaching English at Tokyo’s Komazawa University. “We had a baby three months ago, and we’re concerned about safety issues.”
Dozens of international research projects and student-exchange programs have been postponed or canceled. “The delay is mainly due to the fact that it would be impossible to conduct interviews at Japanese companies at this time,” says Caroline Benton, a professor at the Graduate School of Business Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, explaining why a project involving research companies in 13 different countries has been postponed.
Spooked by the radiation crisis, thousands of Japan’s 140,000 foreign students have been evacuated, a potentially crushing blow to a higher-education system already reeling from a decline in its college-age population.
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, home to 2,800 foreign students, mostly from China and South Korea, has fielded about 300 calls from abroad on safety issues since March 11. “The reality is that we will have to make a great effort not to lose some of those students,” says a spokeswoman, Emi Ninomiya.
“All of the Chinese students are gone,” says Xiaoye Wang, a third-year liberal-arts student at the private Waseda University, in Tokyo. “I’m the last one. I don’t think it’s that dangerous. And in any case, the plane tickets are too expensive.”
A Lasting Disaster?
Most experts say the nuclear-contamination threat is overblown. Levels of radiation in Tokyo are little higher than levels in New York or London. If engineers succeed in bringing the Fukushima plant under control, most of the nuclear refugees will return, predicts Nori Morita, dean of the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University, which has about 1,000 foreign students. “I am sure that this ‘crisis’ will have an impact on the recruitment of students from China, Korea, and Taiwan. I am sure that they will come back to us next year or the year after next, and the negative impact will be not permanent.”
Observers are also quick to note that the disaster struck the mainly rural and coastal northeast—responsible for about 7 percent of the country’s entire economic output. The west and south are untouched. Tohoku and Tsukuba Universities are the only two institutions of global note in or near the disaster zone. Greater Tokyo, where more than 40 percent of the economy and a third of Japan’s population is concentrated, escaped largely unscathed. Temple University provided transportation from its Tokyo campus to Hong Kong for students who wanted to leave, but Bruce Stronach, dean of Temple’s Japan operations, says the effect of the disaster shouldn’t be overstated. “When all is said and done, the story could be how little the quake really affected higher education and research in the region,” he says.
Beyond the immediate aftermath and recovery, higher-education experts and other observers are beginning to predict what the long-term fallout will be from Japan’s worst crisis since World War II. Before the Pacific plates shifted with such violent force, this was a country struggling to shake off a deep malaise. Its economy was overtaken by China’s, its population was aging, and its people were saddled with the developed world’s largest public debt. A third of the country’s private colleges face bankruptcy or merger as they struggle with plummeting enrollment. Even its best universities are still considered insular and lagging behind their competitors in other developed nations, with the government’s attempts at internationalizing the higher-education system a sputtering affair, at best.
It seems very likely that the disaster will tighten finances and force a wave of college mergers. “We’re predicting the government will cut subsidies to public universities,” says Motohisa Kaneko, an adviser to the government and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on education issues and a senior researcher at the Center for National University Finance and Management. He predicts that tuition will rise, accelerating competition and curriculum reform. “I think we’ll also see the introduction of more professional, not academic, management.”
Accelerating Change
That’s the sort of creative if painful destruction long called for in Japan, home to dozens of what are disparagingly called “zombie” colleges, which have declining enrollment but are kept alive by government support. “Japan is resourceful when up against a wall,” says Paul Snowden, a former dean of Waseda’s liberal-studies school. “It might well have a positive impact on those institutions that can survive upheavals that are bound to come—and were probably bound to come anyway—but might now be accelerated.”
Japan has a remarkable, perhaps unique, history of enormous destruction and rebirth. Quakes have regularly brought Tokyo to its knees. The Second World War and its aftermath killed about four million Japanese, wiped out a quarter of the nation’s wealth, and led to the confiscation of all its colonial booty. Yet the country engineered probably the most remarkable feat of economic regeneration in history, climbing from a humiliated postwar wreck to the world’s second-largest economy in just three decades.
But for most of the postwar period, Japan has stood aloof from its Asian neighbors, its relations with China and Korea in particular badly wounded by its wartime occupation of those countries.
Longtime Japan watchers say last month’s quake and tsunami could help the nation overcome some of those problems. One possible outcome is a rejuvenated government and a renewed sense of national purpose, after two decades of ennui and drift.
In education, the disaster may accelerate cross-national cooperation such as Campus Asia, an effort to increase the regional mobility of students and scholars between Japan, China, and South Korea, predicts Gerard A. Postiglione, a director of research at the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Education. “It’s happening in other sectors, but higher-education systems across the region have been slow to deepen collaboration. Japan has what the rest of the region and most developing countries need—quality higher education on a large scale.”
Shrinking government budgets and the sense of profound national crisis could generate a new round of innovation at the nation’s companies and universities, say many observers. Prime Minister Naoto Kan set the tone for the future, promising that new research into clean energy such as solar and biomass would lead the nation’s “resurrection.”
“Most research budgets currently depend on the national budget, and large-scale research is based in national universities,” points out Hideki Wada, an education specialist at the International University of Health and Welfare. “Companies will become more willing to sponsor research, especially into alternative energy sources.”
That shift will entail confronting what one analyst calls Japan’s ‘power elite'—the bureaucrats, utilities, and corporations like Hitachi and Toshiba that dominate and supply the nuclear industry.
But some observers are optimistic.
“All the great innovations happen in crisis, It’s not about money, it’s about the personal imperative to do something,” says William Saito, an adviser to Japan’s ministries of education and industry. “In the medium to long term, you’ll see many innovative companies coming out of this because there has never been anything like it. I think given Japan’s history, it can only look up.”
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