Japanese universities’ challenges in attracting overseas talent and promoting the use of English in scholarship are well-documented. Yet, on an island hundreds of miles south of Tokyo, a small graduate school has achieved a level of internationalisation and research impact almost unmatched in the country.

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), founded by the Japanese government a decade ago, produces a disproportionate amount of high-quality research for its size. It is one of the world’s Top 10 institutions when research quality is normalised by scale, according to Nature Index. It is also highly internationalised, with 84 percent of its Ph D students and 63 percent of faculty from overseas. “When I first stepped on campus, coming from Germany, I thought, ‘This is the most international place I’ve ever visited,’” recalls Peter Gruss, OIST’s president.

Prof. Gruss, who led Germany’s Max Planck Society for 12 years before joining OIST, says the key to his institution’s success is “high-trust funding”. Every professor, even at the assistant level, is given five years financing unlinked to any particular project or department. This freewheeling structure “allows researchers to do something unique”.

“Why would a professor come out here? Because they have cutting-edge, risky ideas, and they are not required to write a research grant essay to finance their work,” he says. Expansion of this funding structure — which is similar to the European Research Council’s — “could be a game-changer for Japan,” Gruss argues. “You want to fund brains, not projects.”

OIST operates very differently from conventional Japanese universities, where funding is given to “mainstream” projects and junior academics work at the behest of senior academics. Gruss cites an assistant professor hired away from the University of Tokyo by OIST as an example. When he asked why she would give up a good job at a legacy institution, she replied that she was not treated much better than a postdoc.

“Young researchers in the Japanese university system cannot do independent research. They are there to support full professors” he says, adding that most Nobel laureates did their most pioneering work before age 40. “There is a dire need to reform Japanese research universities by allowing young people to do the research they want, as early on as possible.”

OIST accepts fewer than 100 doctoral candidates a year, with the largest foreign cohorts coming from India, mainland China, Russia, the UK and Taiwan. All receive full funding for five years.

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