On the surface, Japan’s higher education (HE) system looks much like that of any other modern nation: various institutions where young people who have completed a dozen or so years of elementary and secondary education may study for further qualifications that may be useful to them in their careers The current system was, after all, introduced (some would say “imposed”) during the American Occupation 1945–52 As in every other nation, though, there are major and minor details that serve to make Japan’s system “unique”—to use a word that Japanese people love both in English, and in Japanese, as “yunīku”

As someone who has spent the years 1978–2020 at the chalk-face in HE in Japan, I have sometimes consciously, but more frequently unconsciously, lived through innumerable major events for HE While still a young conversation teacher in the late 1960s I witnessed the extremism of the student movements, and was present 30 years later when the last remaining radical sect was finally ejected from one major university On joining Tsukuba University in 1977, I witnessed faculty meetings where some of the faculty remained nostalgic for the old-style universities that had been replaced under the Occupation in 1949; I witnessed petty faculty rivalries between those who had graduated from one university and those from another; I witnessed the hesitancy with which universities approached the new law permitting tenure to non-Japanese citizens At Waseda University between 1983 and 2013, I experienced the second baby boom, with tens of thousands of young people desperate for admission in order to slide into a good career; I experienced the confusion caused by the Ministry suddenly relaxing the rules concerning the apportionment of credits, so that suddenly the Ministry could no longer be blamed for excessively strict regulation, though faculty were unprepared to deal with their new freedom; I experienced, and had the honor of joining in, the long-awaited, at last energetic, moves toward internationalization, which suddenly gained a new, trendy name—globalization. At Kyorin University 2013–2020 I became one of a growing number of non-Japanese university vice-presidents, enjoyed the generosity of government grants to the university for both global and local projects, and participated in the flight from a remote campus to a new one in a more accessible part of suburban Tokyo.