The Irony of Globalization: The Experience of Japanese Women in British Higher Education

Informal interviews and ethnographic research are used to identify the motivations of Japanese women to study in Britain, and to examine their experience as students as well as peripheral members of the labor force. It is found that Japanese women's motivations to come to Britain to study are encouraged by the forces of globalization, including economic, cultural and intellectual factors. Women are also pushed to study abroad by domestic factors, as although Japan has developed an egalitarian education system for both sexes, women still encounter conservative social norms which constrain their lives and limit their job prospects. Japanese women's experiences of higher education in Britain are mixed. Some women feel that their presence is merely tolerated and that they are not encouraged in their academic endeavours. Others find British higher education gives them the opportunity to develop their critical faculties and to become integrated into the life of the institution. These mixed responses are indicative of the contradictory consequences of globalization in education. Globalization has helped to give new educational opportunities to Japanese women. However, it has also created an international recruitment market in which some higher education institutions view students in financial terms and not as members of a scholarly community. One of the ironies of globalization, therefore, is that the mutual educational advantages of cross cultural contact are undermined by a reductive, narrowly economic view of foreign students as a source of revenue.