Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) is the only foreign-languages university in Japan which is also a national university. It was established with the goal of fostering education and research related to the world’s languages and to the societies and cultures of those languages. Currently, TUFS provides education in 28 languages, covering 14 regions of the world. In this regard, TUFS is unrivaled. In May of 2014, TUFS unveiled a 10-year plan, as its mid-term goal for the third 6-year plan, to, ‘foster in students, through TUFS’ world languages, culture, and society curriculum and research, the global, multilinguistic talent necessary for them to take on global problems in cooperation with people from around the world.’
Listed below are the three key elements of the plan.
- TUFS is educating students with multilinguistic, global talent, through promotion of study abroad, the internationalization of its curriculum, and the globalization of its students.
- TUFS is working to strengthen abilities to communicate information about Japan to the world, by supporting the work of Japanese language and education institutions throughout the world.
- TUFS is working towards expanding cooperative projects with other universities in Japan, and supporting the establishment of an educational environment that informs the global development of universities, for example through drafting the Proclamation of University Creation Centered on the TUFS-Network.
At TUFS, students can study 74 languages, 28 of which they can major in, and another 46 of which they can study as non-major courses. In 2017, a total of 1,547 exchange students, both short-term students and long-term students, attended TUFS as undergraduates. TUFS has partnerships with 203 overseas institutions in 72 countries and regions, with whom TUFS actively engages in exchange with.
Meanwhile, the goal of TUFS’ Inter-University Exchange Project (Russia) is to contribute to invigorating Russian-Japanese economic activity in such fields as trade, finance, tourism, transportation, farm and fisheries, manufacturing, IT, medical translation, news service, cultural exchange, and so forth, through fostering students’ talent in Russian and Japanese business, as well as their language skills (for TUFS students, this means acquiring command of Russian and English, for students from TUFS’ partner universities in Russia this means acquiring command of Japanese and English). Fostering students with such talents in Russian-Japanese business corresponds with the goal of supporting student’s global talent and multilinguistic skills as outlined in the university’s internationalization plan.
Moreover, the activities of the Inter-University Exchange Project (Russia) will also contribute to article 8 of the 8-point Japan-Russia Economic Cooperation Plan, which obliges the two nations to work towards significantly expanding person-to-person exchange on a multilateral basis, in a broad range of fields including university exchange, youth exchange, tourism, sports, and culture.