Like thousands of foreigners, Tony Black recently made the agonizing decision to leave Japan, wife and baby child in tow. Unlike many, he has no concrete plans to return.
"I've been in Japan for 19 years and feel a lot of loyalty, so it's very hard for me to make the decision, but we're worried about the food chain, drinking water, fish, vegetables, even rain," says the American, who has quit his job teaching English at Tokyo's Komazawa University.
As the dust settles from Japan's worst disaster since World War II, administrators are still trying to grasp the impact on the country's universities. Roughly five percent of 353,000 full-time professors in this country are non-Japanese; 140,000 foreign students were studying here before the Pacific plates shifted on March 11. Most agree that a government target to more than double that figure to 300,000 by the end of the decade has now slipped further away — if it was ever viable in the first place.