Computer Education at Japan's Universities
What do computer science and engineering students learn at Japan's top
universities? This month, Computing Japan takes a look at the computer
education infrastructure at Keio and Waseda. In a future issue, we'll take
a look at what skills these students actually acquire, and how corporate
recruiters evaluate Japanese university computer science graduates.
by Steven Myers
It is well known that competition for entrance into
Japan's top universities is fierce. Students begin preparing early, even
before kindergarten in some cases, and the typical Japanese junior-high or
high school student spends long hours attending cram s chools (juku) and
studying for entrance examinations. Success (or failure) on these
examinations can have a profound effect on the course of a student's
future life. Getting into one of the handful of "right" universities is
commonly an express ticket to a high-paying, fast-track career. Failure to
get into one of the nation's top schools, on the other hand, can mean
resigning oneself to entering a second- or third-tier company even before
the first job offer.
The Japanese education system has many strengths, but many
weaknesses as well. Prominent among the minuses of the Japanese system is
the reality that primary and secondary school students concentrate their
studies on areas that will be covered in the university entrance exams.
Topics and subjects not on the exams things like computer proficiency get
little attention.
Which means that the average Japanese teen enters university with
only rudimentary computer skills. They may know about the hardware aspects
of computers and some theory, but most know little about how to
effectively use computers. And programming knowledge if they have
retained any is limited to antiquated spaghetti-code BASIC.
This means that computer science and engineering students come to
university ready to learn as opposed to intent on expanding upon what they
already know. It is what these students are taught in their four years of
college that will prepare them for the corporate and academic jobs that
they will assume upon graduating.
As a first look into the state of the computer skills possessed by the
science and engineering graduates of Japanese universities, Computing Japan
visited the campuses of some universitie s in the Tokyo area, including
two of the most prestigious and famous: Waseda and Keio. We toured the
facilities and spoke with key members of the computer science faculty.
Here, then, are some of the comments and impressions of these schools
based upon those visits.
Waseda University Located in the Shinjuku's Okubo district, Waseda's
School of Science and Engineering is home to the university's Department
of Computer Science and the Center for Informatics. It is here that much
of Waseda's computer science research is conducted, including a project
that aims to internationalize both UNIX and the X-Window system by
developing a workstation environment that supports multiple languages
simultaneously with a minimum of overhead.
Waseda strives to keep its academic research untainted by
commercial interests and free of corporate bias. According to Yutaka
Kataoka, researcher in charge of this internationalization project, the
school has a deliberate policy of distancing itself as much as possible
from the corporate sector. Although many Waseda graduates go on to become
important executives and managers of big-name Japanese computer makers and
stay in close contact with the school's professors, there are remarkably
few joint projects between Waseda and Japanese corporations.
The basic computer science curriculum at Waseda is similar to that
of an American university. Students are required to take courses in data
structures, algorithmic languages, networks, computer architecture, and
operating systems, among others. Waseda offers one of the widest
selections of elective computer science courses among Japanese
universities. Although many of the programming exercises are done in
Pascal, a language little used by professional programmers today, students
also receive a substantial amount of C programming experience in the UNIX
environment.
Before beginning their senior year, all Waseda computer science
students must choose a particular "lab" to belong to. This is where, under
the guidance of the professor in charge of that lab, they study advanced
topics and learn how to do basic research.
Students also must fulfill a series of graduation requirements that
include such tasks as translating foreign research papers into Japanese
and attending various academic conferences, as well as writing a
graduation thesis (a general requirement for almo st all students in
Japanese universities). This last can be a particularly important exercise
with far-reaching effects. According to Kataoka, a poor thesis can
eventually come back to haunt a student. Many large Japanese corporations
will refer to these papers years later, when trying to decide among equal
candidates for a promotion.
The expansive computing facilities at Waseda are spread out across
several floors of numerous buildings, connected by a labyrinth of
corridors that can be a real challenge to navigate. There are room upon
room of Sun workstations, Fujitsu PCs, Macs, and all kinds of experimental
systems; these, in general, are accessible by students around the clock.
Kataoka explains that it is Waseda's policy to encourage a wide
breadth of study, including subjects that are outside the computer science
core curriculum. Students who are interested in non-computer topics,
whether scientific or liberal arts-related, are strongly urged to take
classes in these topics. Many students thus find themselves splitting time
between the School of Science and Engineering and Waseda's main campus. It
is a paramount philosophical policy at Waseda, says Kataoka, "not to
restrict the students in any way from exploring other fields."
Keio University/Shonan Fujisawa Campus Established in April 1990, Keio
University's Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) consists of two rather
distinctive schools. The College of Environmental Information (Kankyo
Joho Gakubu) offers the bulk of the school's computer science courses,
while the Colleg e of Policy Man_agement (Sogo Seisaku Gakubu) focuses on
economic and political studies. The College of Environmental Information
is further divided into three specialty areas: Knowledge Information,
Human Environment, and Media Environment.
Students who opt for the Knowledge Information track take many
classes that fall into the realm of Artificial Intelligence. These include
classes on natural language processing, knowledge engineering, and pattern
recognition. The Human Environment track is geared more toward the social
and natural sciences; students study such topics as flow design theory
and image analysis.
And for students whose main interest is computer science and the arts,
the Media Environment track offers classes in computer music, computer
graphics, and other such media-focused topics. Of course, all students
are given the opportunity to study traditional computer science areas,
such as operating systems and software engineering.
SFC professor Osamu Nakamura says that the campus was established
in order to discover and explore new problems those that are not addressed
in the more conventional curriculums. One of the stated goals of the
program is to train students to take a multidisciplinary approach to
solving the complex problems that are expected to arise in the 21st
century. "Crossover" research and collaborations between researchers of
different fields are strongly promoted, and students are encouraged "to
find and solve pr oblems on their own, integrating various kinds of
information into new systems of knowledge."
The size and scope of the computer facilities at Keio's SFC are
enormous. State-of-the-art UNIX workstations are installed seemingly
everywhere on campus, and the school's Media Center offers all students
unlimited 24-hour access to a wide variety of computer and video devices.
Professor Nakamura emphasizes that SFC takes a very "hands-on" approach to
teaching technology, with all students encouraged to spend as much time as
possible exploring new and different ways to use the equipment. The
classrooms a t SFC incorporate the latest technology as well, with
sophisticated audio-visual presentation systems installed in most of the
lecture halls.
Unlike Waseda, Keio's SFC has strong ties with the corporations
and government offices of Japan regarding collaborative projects. The SFC
catalog devotes several pages to comments from the executives of such
firms as Toshiba, Sony, Fujitsu, IBM Japan, Omron, and others extolling
the virtues of cooperation between their companies and SFC. Reports of
these joint projects including a recent team-up with NTT to construct a
high-speed network linking Keio's five campuses are seen frequently in the
Japanese press. Also, the committee responsible for the Groupware Solution
'95 convention held in February at the Makuhari Messe (see "Event Report"
on page 56 of the April issue of Computing Japan) was chaired and
co-chaired by top faculty members from Keio's College of Environmental
Information.
University of Tokyo
In terms of computer-related developments, Waseda and
Keio are probably the most frequently mentioned universities in Japan and
after visiting the campuses of these schools, it is easy to see why. The
facilities, faculty, and students at these universiti es are clearly
world-class.
No discussion of Japanese universities would be complete, however,
without mentioning the University of Tokyo still considered by many to be
Japan's most elite university. Professor Masanori Fushimi, well-known
internationally for his work in the field of numerical analysis and
simulation, explains that while the electrical engineering and numerical
math/statistics departments of Tokyo University have a strong computer
science component, there is no single department at the university devoted
exclusively to computer science.
To study software development in depth, a Todai student must wait
until graduate school. In fact, about 65% of University of Tokyo
engineering graduates last year chose to enter graduate school rather than
seek a job. (The percentage of engineering and c omputer science students
continuing on to graduate school is high for all of the prestigious
universities.) In general, after graduate school these students go on to
eventually occupy prominent research positions in business, government,
and academia.
Other universities Obviously, the vast majority of Japanese computer and
IT (information technology) professionals are not graduates of the few
so-called "brand-name" universities. To try to get a balanced view of the
overall situation, therefore, Computing Japan also contacted a number of
other schools and asked if they would take time to answer some questions
or show us around their departments. Most of the "second-tier" schools
politely declined, however, or merely sent a brief faxed or e-mail course
description that explained very little.
One professor replied quite honestly that he would like to show us
the computer science department, but that there wasn't anything to show.
Computer science education in his university, he said, was limited to a
few classes in Pascal programming. This pattern of giving scant attention
to software and programming appears to be common at many Japanese
institutions, even when education on the hardware side (usually as part of
the electrical engineering department) seems to be quite strong.
One exception to this pattern was at the Kawagoe campus of Toyo
University, where we talked with Professor Yoshitaka Shibata. Professor
Shibata, who did his doctoral work at UCLA, heads a very impressive lab at
the university. He explains that while the Toyo curriculum contains a
large number of software-oriented courses and is structured more like a
traditional US-style computer science program, this is unusual. Most
Japanese universities show a decided bias toward the hardware side in
their course offe rings and research projects.
One problem found at many universities, says Professor Shibata, is
the large gap between the few professors who are enthusiastic and active
in their departments, and the many who are not. Not much is required of
most university professors in Japan; few b other to write research papers
or teach more than the minimum number of classes. For better or worse, the
"publish or perish" mania of US academia has not taken root in Japan.
Aside from the emphasis on hardware over software design, there
are two other frequently-mentioned differences of Japanese computer
science curriculums compared with those in the US. One is the
individual-oriented graduation thesis required of Japanese students. (In
place of this, many US universities now require a group "senior project"
where students work together in teams to devise and implement their own
system over the course of a year.) The other is the much lower attrition
rate among students. (Once admitted to a university, it is extremely rare
for a student to drop out or flunk; if the student puts out a minimal
amount of effort and occasionally shows up for class, graduation is almost
assured.) When asked whether it is true that "Japanese universities are
difficult to enter but easy to graduate from," most professors we talked
with conceded that in general the statement is true. They noted, though,
that the amount of effort required depends heavily upon the school.
Foreign exchange at the university level
Almost all of the professors we interviewed expressed a desire to
increase the amount of exchange between their universities and those
overseas. In terms of actually doing something about that desire, though,
it is American schools that are taking the initiative.
A number of Japan-related programs have been established at US
universities in recent years. At the University of Arizona, for example,
Rick Schlichting has established a mailing list version of the Usenet
newsgroup comp.research.japan. This provides information about computer
science research papers published in Japan and gives trip reports of
visits to Japanese universities and companies. The University of
Washington, meanwhile, has instituted a "Technical Japanese Program" that
allows graduate students to take courses in technical Japanese in
addition to their science or engineering courses. There has also been a
recent increase in foreign-study programs that enable US students to
spend six months or a year studying in Japan.
As international interest in the Japanese computing industry
grows, it seems safe to say that more and more engineers and scientists
will wish to examine Japanese technical education and research in more
detail.
