Japanese university to set up campus in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR: The first ever overseas branch campus of a Japanese university is highly likely to be set up in Malaysia, Japanese Ambassador to Malaysia Dr Makio Miyagawa disclosed yesterday.

He said as a policy, Japanese universities had never established any overseas branch campuses, but Japan's Ministry of Education recently changed the policy, inspired by a request from Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

“Our Ministry of Education decided to meet the request from Tun Dr Mahathir and has already amended its regulations to allow Japanese universities to seek establishment overseas,” he told Bernama in an interview.

Dr Miyagawa said the ministry had been approaching various universities inside Japan and the response so far had been fairly positive and the most positive was from Tsukuba University.

“There are a couple of others, but Tsukuba University is now standing in a front row. This stateowned university is one of Japan's oldest and it expanded its horizon to cover most of the research areas inside Japan, which has also produced Nobel Prize laureates,” he added.

Dr Miyagawa said one issue that had to be tackled before this could become a reality concerned the university's status as an institution which is run with substantial subsidies by the government.

“The Japanese government has been consistently maintaining the policy for running the state-owned universities with reasonable fees so as to offer as equal opportunities as possible to both rich and poor families to choose the best and brightest for their students.”