@bebio I've read for long hours on the Internet about MEXT scholarship, and I didn't find any more informative and clear post as yours. Thank you very very much!

@yudantaiteki Thank you for the additional info.

I finally returned, so I can respond to some doubts that were posted above.

yudanteiki, I also thank you for writing your experience, and I also agree with all the aspects you mentioned.

"vinculative" might be incorrect English, but with this I mean that the results of the English exam have a direct, unavoidable bearing on the final result of your application.
The result of my Japanese exam, whether I had zero or 100%, would not have a direct influence on my final application result. At best, if two candidates have exactly the same scores in everything, but one has a better result in the Japanese exam, it might potentially be used to weed out the other one, but as far as I have heard from people that work in the embassy but were not directly involved in the selection process, this rarely happens.

But, if you are applying at the embassy for a major in Japanese language, or some field where Japanese proficiency is required, the results of the Japanese exam matter greatly, perhaps as much or more than the English exam.


As for what happens after you arrive in Japan: it is a lottery, and best explained by giving real cases that involved friends of mine who are also MEXT recipients. But in 99% of the cases, you will have to do entrance exams at the university you applied for.

one friend went to Hiroshima University; 8 months before his trip to Japan, he had already been notified by the professor/supervisor that he applied to that he would only be accepted by him as a master student if he undertook the entrance exams immediately after he arrived at Hiroshima, without undergoing the research student period. The exams took place about three weeks after he had arrived at Japan, andhad to be written in Japanese. I think it was 4 or 5 exams, but I don't remember well. Apparently, the reason why he was asked to do the entrance exam immediately was because the professor was going to retire in 2 or 3 years, and would not be able to supervise him fully if he had taken the extra year as a research student.
So, 8 months before the trip, the teacher gave my friend a list of all the Japanese undergraduate books that were necessary for his exam, and the guy, helped by his Japanese gf, studied like crazy. He almost had a breakdown, but he passed the exams, and from there it was mostly smooth sailing. He is now in Fukuoka after completing the master.

Another friend went to Tokyo University, to the education department: entrance exams must be done in Japanese, but only two foreign students can be admitted to the department each semester for the doctor course. Her Japanese was still not strong enough, and her research was in kind of a rut during the research student period. She asked for an extension of the research student period (6 months) and also an extra 6 months of scholarship. She had to ask for a recommendation letter from her Japanese supervisor, who agreed, although somewhat reluctantly. After 1 year and a half, she did the entrance exams and interview in Japanese, and passed.

Another friend applied for Architecture at Tokyo University. According to him, he easily spent two years as a research student, because apparently his teacher liked his previous work and was also interested in his current one. Probably, his teacher just told him to write his own recommendation letter in Japanese, and send it to him to check for errors. This also happened to me once (to extend my scholarship for the doctor course). At architecture, you can choose to do the exams in Japanese or English. There are 4 types of exams you can choose, 3 of them are a summary of the subjects you should have studied at undergraduate school in Japan, and the final one is to make a full architectural project in 4 hours. You only need to choose one of them. Every foreigner always chooses the 4-hour project, because as difficult as it is, it is no match for having to memorize 4 years of undergraduate japanese classes. The interview can also be done in English, and there are at least 10 classes conducted in English each semester. The architecture department also allows students to enter in April or October, which is a huge difference from other faculties at Tokyo University. If you choose to enroll in April, strangely you need to do the interview and exam 6 months before, and sometimes (depends on the department or whether you are in the master course instead of being a research student) a presentation of your work one month before April.

As you can see, the research student period is extremely elastic, depending on the goodwill (or not) of your teacher/supervisor. The dates for doing exams are completely different from faculty to faculty inside the same university, and from university to university. I cannot give any date, you have to confirm the correct dates by yourselves with the secretary of your chosen university.

When you first arrive at university, it is insane, but you might be asked (as I as) to fill a ton of paperwork by hand, which is exactly the same things you had to fill in the embassy application (you need to deliver the same forms at the university in 3 copies, all written by hand!!!!). YOU MUST bring copies of all your embassy application documents to Japan, because it will make your life easier, especially your educational background. You will need to fill those documents again when you apply for the master exam, and for the doctor course. NEVER lose them.
3 months before the end of your research period, you need to deliver the paperwork to apply for the master course exams. It is a pain in the ass, but be horribly meticulous when filling them and double-check EVERYTHING with a japanese friend.
You need to fill paperwork to extend your scholarship one year (or maybe 14 months) before it expires. MAKE SURE you do not miss the deadlines. When writing your expenses, MAKE SURE you come up with reasonable excuses and expenses to say that you are using up all the money given by the scholarship. This was recommended to me by the secretary, who said that if I don't do that, the government might diminish the scholarship for everyone.

There is an additional problem for people in countries where the Licentiate degree is given. Japanese people have no idea what a licentiate (licenciatura) degree is. Make sure that when translating the contents of your diploma into English, it is CLEARLY written that you have a Licentiate degree (add a explanatory note in Japanese saying what it is), or that you have a Bachelor. If not, you will get into serious trouble (I did).

I guess that covers everything. Good Luck to everyone!

Thanks again for more input, extremely informative.

Out of curiosity. Of all the MEXT research applicants that moved onto Masters/Ph.Ds, what is the general take away for them. Do they feel the experience is positive or fairly negative. I only ask because the sentiment about Japanese academic culture tends to lean more to the negative restrictive side (although people seem to at least get their degrees in the end).

Did most continue on to academic positions or does the experience open doors in industry in Japan?

@bebio Thanks again man!

vix86 Wrote:I only ask because the sentiment about Japanese academic culture tends to lean more to the negative restrictive side (although people seem to at least get their degrees in the end).

This is indeed worrying to be honest.

vix86 Wrote:Did most continue on to academic positions or does the experience open doors in industry in Japan?

Adding "or they couldn't find a job in Japan and had to return home?", and that's (destiny of graduates) what I've been trying to find out, any input is truly appreciated. Of course it depends on the specialty and research subjects, but there must be some general answer.

hmmm... tough question. Once again, I have to fall back on my acquaintances and friend's experiences, but how to summarize?

well, for example I am in engineering (but studying architecture history). This department is quite friendly for english-speaking foreign students, and we have quite a lot of them here. There is a special Master course conducted completely in English, for example, and many courses in English as well. Most of the architecture teachers can muster up some basic English, allowing them to be somewhat understood. So, it's easy to find foreign students here, and they are given good conditions for studying at Tokyo University. But most of the people who come here for the master and doctor are working on projects for competitions in the labs of architects such as kengo kuma or manabu chiba. They frequently complain that although the professors are good enough, they are treated as slaves, working even worse than most salarymen. In my building, I regularly see people sleeping in chairs or sleeping bags on the floor. It's really, really hard. And many of them do some internships on architecture labs here in tokyo, but once they realize that the salary is s**t, few of them end up staying in Japan once their degrees are achieved.

In other fields of engineering, like material research, mobile phone software programming or satellite remote sensing, things seem to be somewhat better in terms of options. I went to a few classes in this section of the building and at least 3 of the teachers or assistant teachers were foreign (one indian, one british, and someone from vietnam). Work is hard there, but once you graduate, and if your work is good there are definitely more employment options available, and potentially a better salary.

As far as I know, medicine and related fields such as pharmacology is the hardest of all. I have a chinese friend there, the poor guy looks as skinny as a starving refugee from ethiopia. But he regularly gets good opportunities to show his work abroad in conferences, so I think there might be some decent career options for him once he graduates. There was a saudi arabia guy who gave up after 3 months in medicine, he was treated like crap, he couldn't even get a leave to do paperwork at the city hall without being scolded mercilessly by his supervisor. It was horrible, what they did to him. Another girl at law faculty was discriminated and mocked by the japanese teacher for being foreign, who was convinced before meeting her that she would not be able to keep up, although her Japanese is top-notch.

In the end, Chinese and other Asians tend to stick around after their degrees more than Westerners. This is not just because they live closer to Japan but also because many Japanese companies are installing themselves in these countries and there's always some demand for Asian staff in sales, promotion, product development and testing. These people sometimes are sent back to their countries to work for japanese companies.

If you subscribe to the monthly mail from the International Center here at my university, they always have job (full and part-time) offers, for which you need to apply one year before you graduate. They also organize job seminars and job-recruiting conventions.
But after a few months, you start to notice some trends. Most of the jobs are from sony or other engineering companies, recruiting people from the engineering or chemistry fields for product development (salary is usually good). Most of the staff that they recruit outside of these areas are for sales and promotion (pressure is high and salary might not be that great, but never met anyone who was working on this, so I'm not sure). To make things worse, 90% of these offers demand proficiency in business Japanese, which I think is even higher than JLPT1 if I am not mistaken. You absolutely need to master Japanese art a high level if you want to get the best paying jobs. There are exceptions of course, and there are foreigners getting great salaries without having to know any Japanese, but they are the minority, and not the rule.
Outside of this, almost all of the job postings are for teaching english, or doing technical manual translations in part-time, and the salary can sometimes be good, but more often than not it is slightly below average. I honestly don't know what kind of job people in the faculty of letters can get. There are few foreigners there, as well as in the education faculty, and there things seem to be a lot more biased in favor of Japanese people.

In my lab, I sometimes get general mails from the mailing list with some job offers as assistant teacher or researcher, but always far away from tokyo (kyoto, nara, and smaller cities). And you need to have once again Japanese proficiency almost as good as a native, and they often require your research background to be about japanese cultural properties, which is something that few westerners manage to master well because they are at a disadvantage compared to Japanese students.

In summary, the panorama is not that bright. If you get into a relationship with a Japanese person, and things go well (I can assure you that for various reasons, most of the time they do not go well), you have more chances of staying in Japan, at least that's been the case with some of my western friends who got married to Japanese people, because these spouses, if they work in a similar field as you, they often open up paths for some good job opportunity, and their families will support your stay.

If that's not the case, then very few remain after getting their degrees. They might enjoy some commodities and pricks of living in Tokyo, but they invariably get burned out. It is hard to make (and more importantly, keep) good Japanese friends here, because everyone is busy and you need to plan meetings far in advance. I made some good friends here, but in the last 6 months of finishing my dissertation my social life was completely eradicated (save for my chinese gf, of course), and I still need another month of busy activities and paperwork before I can start to rebuild my social network again.

I can tell you this, in the three years I've been here, you see a LOT of people come and go. It's hard to make friends in this way. You have to keep a really positive attitude in order to focus on the good aspects of Japan and not get too bothered in the bad ones. As far as I am concerned, I would like to remain here, but in terms of building a family, working as an assistant teacher or researcher in Japan does not pay enough to support a family (if you are a doctor, you can expect at best 290 000 yen per month at a public university, which is below the average salary of a salaryman). So I am forced to consider job opportunities in other countries as well.

So basically, if you want to work as a researcher there is some openness, but it is still very hard to get a position in universities nevertheless. You must publish as much papers as possible in Japanese journals (in japanese language) and present in conferences before you obtain your degree in order to improve you chances of getting a job in JApanese universities (and even then it's tough).

PS. regarding the scholarship, when you apply to renew it there is a formula by which they calculate whether you can qualify for the extension. You need to attend classes in master and doctor courses to obtain credits (often 30 for master and 20 for doctor, but depending on the faculty the numbers vary wildly). Besides that, you will get a grade for each course you take. There is "excellent", "good", "passable", and "failed", which are converted into numbers by the formula. If the final result of your formula is a number below 2.90, you cannot qualify for the scholarship extension. This means that you need to get "excellent" in almost every class. You can only afford maybe 3 or 4 "good" grades before your formula results start to get screwed up. So you absolutely cannot be lazy if you want to extend your scholarship. This does not apply for the research student period, where you do not have to take classes.

Wow, you paint a pretty bleak picture, but I honestly can't say I'm surprised by this. I love Japan, want to pursue a masters in Comp Sci. but probably want to move into industry. And if the case is like you say; that means it'll be hard. Basically, stuck hoping that western IT companies pick you up and those will be fairly competitive spots to begin with. Guess I got a bit of considering to do now.

Thanks for the straight forward (harsh) input on reality. Replies like yours are what I have been looking for for months now.

EDIT: One other thing to toss in for other people reading. 290,000 a month is WORSE than what some ALTs make.

if this makes you feel any better, a truly determined person will be able to overcome all of these obstacles. I have given you these bad examples, and they do happen a lot, but my personal case is actually quite good. I have a kind and supportive supervisor, I am free to work on the hours I want or to organize my schedule according to my needs, I get quite a bit of slack and at least half of my lab members treat me with kindness and respect, even though I cannot say we have become more than friendly acquaintances. I do know some other people who are in a similarly good situation as me.

What I want to convey is, finding a good job in Japan will be no easy ride, it's not a walk in the park. You really need to be committed to this. But if you are determined it is certainly doable. You will get some problems in the way, and some failures, but it is certainly not impossible. If this is your dream, be brave, work hard, try to avoid the most common pitfalls and in the end everything should work out fine. Getting a good japanese gf (with a good personality and who is willing to support you) helps, of course!

Hey guys I'm new here.

I have a question regarding the MEXT scholarship for research students. I currently have 2 master's degrees from my home university (one in Japanese studies and one in economics) here in Europe. My goal is to get a phd in Japanese history in Japan, by getting the MEXT research student scholarship and then enter a phd program.

My question is, is it possible to first do 1-2 years of study as a research student, and then immediately enter the phd program, thus skipping the master's degree? Reason is I already have master's degrees and I would like to use the years as a research student to take master's courses to prepare for the phd program exam. If I understand this correctly, a master degree is a pre-phd program, followed by a 3 year full fledged phd program.

Is it possible to skip this master's (pre-phd) program and immediately go to the proper phd program as a research student?

Thank you

I honestly have no idea about what entering as a "research student" is like, since I entered as a regular Master's student, but for me I had a Masters from the UK already, but it wasn't research based, so I couldn't go straight onto the PhD program in Japan (whereas I could have in the UK). I think you'd need to provide evidence of previous research in the field you want to study for it to be a possibility.

You do research in the 2 year Masters degree, so I'm not sure what the benefits of spending those 2 years as a research student instead are...

azertyl Wrote:My question is, is it possible to first do 1-2 years of study as a research student, and then immediately enter the phd program, thus skipping the master's degree?

Masters and Phds are separate things in Japan where as they tend to be combined things in other countries (usually).

If you got the MEXT, you would probably be urged to go the Ph.D route assuming you have the grounds/base for it already (with 2 masters you should). You would probably spend the first year studying for the entrance exam at the university while taking any classes needed for the Ph.D. Then you would test and enter as a real student and finish up in a year or two. Last year wouldn't be covered but your advisor can probably provide you with aid or the school will, hopefully.

vix86 Wrote:Then you would test and enter as a real student and finish up in a year or two. Last year wouldn't be covered but your advisor can probably provide you with aid or the school will, hopefully.

You mean the last year of MEXT scholarship for PhD students is not paid, in living expenses and uni registration fee??

EDIT: As far as I remember, they initially give you 2 years as a research student and if you can get into a Master's or Phd degree they'll cover the expenses until you finish.

I have heard something similar (maybe from yudan a few pages back) but looking at the consulate page for my area, it says a Maximum of 2 years.

It's definitely not maximum 2 years because I know people who have been on the scholarship for longer than that. I think 2 years is the maximum you can have without actually joining a Japanese university as a degree-seeking student (although if you go in September you only get 1.5 years). So I can't renew my scholarship because I want to go back to OSU and finish my PhD there -- they won't let me renew just to stay here as a research student.

Once you become a student, I'm not absolutely certain of the details, but a friend of mine says she has to finish her PhD in 3 years because that's all the scholarship will cover. She did research (maybe just 1 year?) plus MA, though.

(2) 渡日後、大学院修士課程、博士課程及び専門職学位課程に在籍する場合は、渡日時期にかかわらず、それぞれの正規の課程を修了するのに必要な期間（標準修業年限）とする。（日本語予備教育が必要な者は６か月間の日本語予備教育期間を加算する。）

http://www.ny.us.emb-japan.go.jp/en/h/re...panese.pdf

Despite that, from what I understand it doesn't literally mean that you can just keep the scholarship going for as long as it takes you to finish a PhD -- there's some time limit (if my friend is right, 3 years) and if you don't finish your PhD within that time you have to find some other source of money.

Thanks for the replies!

For my master in Japanese studies, I had to write a dissertation about Japanese medieval history which involved reading and researching the original texts from that period both Japanese and Portugese. I got alot of help from my professor because there was no way to properly learn 漢文 or 候文 on such a short notice so I could read all the texts myself without help.

But all the works I consultated for that thesis were Japanese books and articles from other researchers, reading them and commenting on the views and making my own interpretation of the historical documents, and also doing fieldwork in Japan. I hope that that counts enough as having done a research-related master. I was the best in my class for the thesis, hope it's enough.

Reason I want to do a research student period first is to properly learn how to read these medieval japanese documents myself, without help from someone else. Then during the 2-3 year phd program I would like to focus on my research project, which is about 京都　during the 織豊時代. I don't really need a master in between, as I can just take the master courses as a research student and since I already have 2 masters from my home country.

Bit of coincedence that this article just came up on Japan Times.

Got to say that reading this has really depressed me. Want to get my masters probably in Japan so I can move onto a career in Japan in IT, but crap do they make it sound like a shitty experience.

Make Japanese universities more or less like sumo world

As a Masters student here none of those things have ever crossed my mind...

vix86 Wrote:Bit of coincedence that this article just came up on Japan Times.

Got to say that reading this has really depressed me. Want to get my masters probably in Japan so I can move onto a career in Japan in IT, but crap do they make it sound like a shitty experience.

Make Japanese universities more or less like sumo world

Wow these tow are frightening:

Quote:The theme of the master's or doctorate dissertation is chosen by the instructor

I didn't find it surprising.

Quote:Many Japanese corporations shy away from hiring those with Ph.D. degrees, because doctorate holders are thought to lack advanced knowledge in a wide variety of areas and to be too specialized in the isolated fields taught by their masters — just as the sumo wrestlers are taught by their stablemasters.

@dizmox So you didn't get stuck under an instructor following his/her vision? What about others you see?

I've been told repeatedly that if your advisor has spent time outside of Japan in foreign institutions, then there stands a good chance that he will be more like Western institutes. The problem is I suspect that the majority of professors don't fall into this category.

It also may depend on the field. Even in the US, if you are doing a science PhD it's very common for your dissertation topic to be something your advisor is working on. It's really only humanities where you're expected to just come up with your own thing completely from scratch.

undead_saif Wrote:@dizmox So you didn't get stuck under an instructor following his/her vision? What about others you see?

Not at all... though this is maths, a more solitary field. Everyone is doing their own thing like anywhere else AFAIK.

These things aren't worth worrying about at Masters level anyway, there's no helping that you're still very much a student..

I've notice that many engineering research labs in Japanese universities are named after the professor heading it (by looking into universities' research labs and groups in the field of robotics on their websites) , for example

which isn't assuring.

Anyone going to apply this year for the japanese studies scholarship?

Its my intention as with every year, to make an attempt for the research student one. I've realized after much searching that there really are not any other decent alternatives. There is JASSO but that won't solve all funding issues, and I've talked to numerous banks but none will give student loans for Japanese universities (even high ranked ones like Waseda). So MEXT really is the only way.

Just have to write a convincing research plan and sound like I know what I'm talking about....