Universities with good Japanese programs.

8 comments

1. What do you mean by Japanese programs?

   Japanese Language? Japanese History/Culture?

2. What country are you in?

   I recommend UMass Amherst if you’re in the US, specifically Massachusetts.

3. Here are the member institutions of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies – Probably the premier organization for Japanese language programs in North America. The best of the best.

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   * BYU
   * Columbia
   * Harvard
   * Princeton
   * Stanford
   * U British Columbia
   * UC Berkeley
   * UCLA
   * U Chicago
   * U Hawaii – Manoa
   * U Michigan
   * U Washington
   * Yale
   * U Illinois Urbana-Champaign
   * Washington University – St. Louis

   ​

   That said – don’t major in Japanese (minor plus another more marketable major is better). If you really insist on majoring in Japanese, let me put in a plug for U Hawaii. No other place in the US will come close to giving you opportunities to learn Japanese in a intense high-quality program while also giving you the opportunity to truly immerse yourself with an endless stream of Japanese tourists. Get a part time job in a restaurant or hotel in Waikiki and you’ll be overloading yourself with opportunities to speak Japanese daily.

4. I have a friend who studied at Ohio State University, and he went on to do translation to English in-house for a major Japanese game developer over at their HQ. I don’t know if he was a standout, though.

5. Defense Language Institute

   Getting in requires a bit of a commitment, though…

6. University of Wisconsin-Madison has a great Japanese program (and honestly great foreign language programs generally). I didn’t study Japanese there, but I went there. I’ve met a couple of Japanese professors since graduating and every time I say I went to UW, their immediate reaction is always “oh they have a fantastic Japanese program!”

7. Can recommend UC Berkeley, with the caveat that I went there ~20 years ago (but several of the same lecturers and professors are still there!).

   The lecturers are all great and encourage/provide pointers to extracurricular activities. The material is challenging enough to get pretty good just from coursework. There’s likely also at least one club on campus for Japanese culture that (when I was there) had a mix of students from Japan and Japanese learners. At the time though it was definitely a social club (not a language exchange club).

   There should also be several opportunities for study-abroad. In addition to university-level programs, at the time I was there, the EALC department sent 1-2 people every year to study at the CJLC at Osaka University. Being a Japanese major was not a requirement (unless they sent me by mistake!)

8. You might consider a more “vocational” major, then minor in Japanese. Or a double major with Japanese.

   Alternatively, you could do more “self-directed” study.

   – Many people on this subreddit study Japanese without formal classes, without textbooks, etc. There are a lot of ways to learn a language outside the university environment. Japanese is a very difficult language, so classes, textbooks, etc. provide structure that a lot of us find useful.

   – My neighbour in Tokyo studied Middlebury (Vermont) Summer intensive program for 2 months; he said it was brutal but fantastic.

   – Study in Tokyo during the summer. If you want US university credits, you need to pay the university/agent toll, which is expensive. If you don’t care about university credits, contact the language schools in Tokyo directly; you likely would need to organize your own housing and logistics but save a lot of money.

   Back to US universities. At some good universities, we saw a shift in focus and resources from Japanese towards other languages. So we would expect the Japanese language departments have fewer instructors, classes, and students than they did say in the 1980s or 1990s.

   Regardless, when you are looking at universities, get a good grasp on the number of Japanese courses available, the number of professors and instructors in the department, etc. You could invent an 8 semester course load and see if classes were actually available to fill up each semester with some interesting classes (noting pre-requisites such as 101 required to take 202 class). Do some research on trends too. You don’t want to enroll in a school that relegated Japanese to a third-tier language.

   Good luck!