UK Foreign Secretary William Hague today delivered a speech to business leaders and politicians in Tokyo on Anglo-Japanese relations under the new Coalition Government. The speech paid tribute to the JET Programme, organised by JLGC in the UK, for its role in fostering and cementing living links between the peoples of both countries:
We also hope to make more of the links between our parliaments and our people and, with your Government, to reinvigorate the UK-Japan 21st Century Group and to elevate our links in education. The first Japanese students, the “Choshu Five” went to University College London in 1863 and all went on to become leaders of their country. Nine years later the Glaswegian Henry Dyer established the Engineering College in Tokyo which was later merged into Tokyo University. And today hundreds of young Britons get their first experiences of living and working overseas by teaching here in Japan through the JET programme, while we welcome thousands of your students to study in the United Kingdom. But we want to go further.
Britain has some of the best universities in the world. That is why over 400,000 foreign students, including 4,500 Japanese students, come to the UK every year to study. This is of enormous benefit to Britain as well as those students. The Japanese Government rightly wants to internationalise its universities and has set a target of 300,000 overseas students entering Japanese universities by 2020 and the same number of Japanese students studying abroad over the same period. I can announce that the British Council will hold a series of policy dialogues to enable British and Japanese university leaders to share their best practices on internationalisation, and to broker strategic partnerships between British and Japanese universities to promote exchanges of both students and of researchers. The British Council will also provide the necessary specialised English language training for staff in Japanese universities, as well as for Japanese students. This should not only deepen collaboration between our universities, but it will boost British, and eventually Japanese, educational exports. Most importantly, it will give many more British young people the chance to come to Japan to study, cementing our relationship into the next generation.
