51爆料

Around the time of the book’s publication, international students became politicized. In June 2025, the Trump Administration in the United States announced that it would not allow Harvard University to accept international students, leading several Japanese universities, including the University of Tokyo, to announce their acceptance. In the July 2025 Upper House election, a political party promoting a “Japanese First” stance made strong gains, and many voices were heard claiming that “international students are receiving better treatment through scholarships.” Regrettably, these arguments did not take to another aspect of international students: what they are planning to do in the current situation.
 
People and organizations, including international students and their sending/receiving schools, must be motivated to move across national borders. It is only when the goals of the people moving across borders and the people accepting them match that we can see exchanges going smoothly; however, these goals might change over time.
 
Koryu in Japanese may evoke images of friendship or some type of nonprofit behavior, but there is more to it. The English word for koryu is “exchange,” which presupposes the give-and-take of a variety of resources, including material resources. Politicians and civil servants visiting other countries to discuss some pressing political agenda, businesspeople visiting foreign countries to decide whether to start their FDI, and students studying abroad to gain academic knowledge all fall under the category of “exchange.” However, political scientists often only deal with the exchange of politicians and civil servants, economists and management scholars focus on the exchange of businesspeople, and researchers of education only analyze the exchange of international students and scholars. In other words, different groups of researchers have conducted research on these exchanges with different motivations, and the exchange between the two countries as a whole has rarely been explored. This book attempts to overcome these “academic barriers” and focuses on the people and organizations that have moved across the border between Japan and China to provide a historical account of their relationship since the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1972.
 
There have been various frictions and issues between the Japanese and Chinese governments that directly and subtly affect each other’s image of the other country. If online discussions in other countries represent one aspect of non-contact exchange, this book deals with the history of people and organizations involved in face-to-face collaborations for a certain period of time. The history of exchange between journalists and researchers differs. Naturally, we can find differences in the motivations for exchanges between organizations, such as the Seven Friendship Associations, which focus exclusively on China, and local governments in Japan, which have many partners across the globe.
 
Fortunately, I heard the voices of Japanese readers who already had extensive experience in exchanges with China, telling us that they could learn a lot from our book. I hope that those planning to read this book will not skip the discussions in each chapter.
 

(Written by SONODA Shigeto, Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia / 2025)