Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

1 Introduction

There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and has merely lukewarm defenders in those whowould gain by the new one.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513.

Discussions started at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in late 2002 on a difficult problem: an urgent necessity for review of the curriculum offered by the University established only 2 years before, in 2000. It had become obvious even in such a short period of time that problems had arisen in the implementation of the APU concept of education and research relevance to the Asia-Pacific Region and its developmental needs between its establishment in the middle 1990s and its implementation on a new campus in Beppu (Oita Prefecture, Kyushu) from 2000. To be able to comment more fully on those problems, it is necessary first to set the scene for APU in this introduction. Under the overall concept of contributing to the peace, democratic institutions and stability of the Asia Pacific Region, APU was set up with the following basic goals:

  • Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) will aim for excellence in research and education, financial viability in its operations and relevance to the concerns of the Asia-Pacific Region;

  • APU recognizes that quality teaching, world-class research, ability to innovate, and the competence to share knowledge will be the pillars of success for the university;

  • APU aims to be relevant to the needs of the Region by making these functions problem and practice oriented, holistic, and integrative using multidisciplinary approaches;

  • APU recognizes the need to provide policy-oriented advice based on scholarly work to institutions, communities and decision makers in the region, for regional capacity building and as a professional enrichment opportunity for faculty and staff;

  • APU recognizes the need to expand its services by providing lifelong learning opportunities in the region;

  • APU recognizes that today’s modes of knowledge production and application hinge on meaningful partnerships or networks, multidisciplinary approaches, interaction with practical problems, and innovative modalities; and that

  • APU is a most relevant initiative to promote the ideals and aspirations of the Ritsumeikan Trust as an international education provider.

In seeking to achieve these goals however, APU has had to take very much into account financial and educational parameters set by the Ritsumeikan Education Trust and the Japanese Ministry in control of higher education, the likely impact of recent and partly identified future changes in Japanese and International higher education, the underlying demographics of its major markets for students (Japan, China, Korea are the largest), and the actual educational needs of the Asia-Pacific region it is trying to develop and/or serve. With regard to the first of these parameters, to date the Trust has been immensely supportive of its new creation, but good financial results must follow for this support to be maintained. In order to help with financial viability it was decided in 2002–2003 that APU’s size had to be increased, from 4500 to 6000 students by 2008–2009, rising to 10,000 in say 10 years. The first of the parameters for the ‘New Challenge’ had therefore been set.

Up to 1998, the Japanese Education Ministry’s (Monbushô) view of the tripartite division between national, public (i.e. city or prefecture) and private universities was that National universities should meet the needs of the nation domestically and internationally (e.g. the Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto), City and Prefectural universities should meet the needs of the local community that established them (e.g. Oita University), and Private universities should be mainly responsive to niches that could be identified in the higher education market (e.g. international education as a primary role of a university in Japan; Eades 2001:95; Eades et al. 2005). However, soon after 1998 the pace of reform of the Japanese university system began to accelerate when it was realized that the tri-partite division was not particularly useful for competition in an increasingly international education system in East Asia. The first major new initiative came in 1999 when the Government conditionally approved a plan to turn national and prefectural universities into independent administrative institutions (dokuritsu gyôsei hôjinka) in order to give them more financial and decision-making autonomy (Eades et al. 2005). Despite considerable controversy, both over the intent of the plan and the likely results, this measure was implemented progressively from 2004. While there may still be little consensus about the underlying aims of this reform at time of writing in 2008–2009, or on what will be the precise effects on the national and prefectural universities, these changes meant for the private university market place of some 750 Universities a much greater level of competition in its niche markets than it had hitherto experienced.

Added to this has been the increasing emphasis by the Government on the performance of the University Sector in terms of the quality of their research and development activities. This second initiative dates from 2001 and the result was the Toyama Plan which proposed the establishment of a ‘Center of Excellence (COE) Program for the twenty first Century’ (Shinohara 2002). This proposal actually built on earlier Ministry thinking about reform that had generated a program of designating ‘centers of excellence’ which dated back to the mid-1990s, but the new scheme was coupled with the injection of greater resources. The Toyama Plan had three main planks: the reorganization and consolidation of national universities (ominously described as ‘scrap and build’); the introduction of private sector management methods to public universities; and the establishment of COE’s at institutions that could produce work of international quality. The budget for the program was substantial and in real terms meant that recipient institutions would receive between 100 and 500 million yen per year for 5 years with an interim review of progress after 2 years (in 2004). The money could be used in a number of ways: to fund international exchanges; to fund PhD research and post-doctoral fellowships; to fund research support and training; to support symposia and workshops; and for the provision of new equipment and space for research (Eades et al. 2005). The second major influence on the thinking at APU and in the Ritsumeikan Trust from 2002 was therefore how they could begin to compete with the national and other public universities in this hitherto largely protected government university market for research funds, and how to gain a reasonable proportion of the new research funds to be made available.

In terms of the third major influence, that of changing student demographics, the situation within the Japanese market is indeed grim (see for example, Cooper & Eades 2005), but an institution that could rapidly expand internationally might well offset the accelerating decline in the number of potential Japanese university students (from 2007 less than the number of places available each year) that is leading to an increasing rate of amalgamations and even the closing of universities and campuses in particularly hard hit areas. The establishment of APU as an international university from the outset was therefore seen as the one advantage that might offset all the negative implications of these three factors for the Trust, since it would be a source of new international and domestic research and education strength, attract international students, and thus be of interest to both the diminishing Japanese market and the growing markets in other Asian countries. That this was an advantage that had in truth less substance than originally thought will be discussed below.

The final factor, that of the assumed actual needs of the Asia-Pacific market for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in social science disciplines, including tourism and hospitality, was one that, while being critically important, was heavily dependent on accurate knowledge of these needs, and the availability of effective teaching resources and research facilities at the Beppu Campus of APU. The initially disappointing market reaction to the establishment of the APU Graduate Schools in 2003, and the internal realization that the institution as a whole did not have enough quality resources in its chosen disciplinary areas became another major force in the New Challenge Process that was eventually instituted as a review of curricula, staffing, and research performance in 2005. It is probably true to say that these factors, that in another institution or market might have been the focus of a report on progress toward the implementation of the initial idea for the University, not a complete revamp of its activities, became a dominant force in the new University very early on in the life of the institution.

2 Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University

The falling birth rate in Japan, coupled with the desire of the top Japanese universities to become major international players gave rise to some radical experiments by Japanese institutions in internationalization in the late 1990s. The private Sophia, Waseda, and Ritsumeikan University organizations all recognized that, in order to attract enough students from overseas to offset the expected decline in Japanese students a large part of the curriculum had to be taught in English as well as Japanese (Eades et al. 2005). They also recognized that the bulk of Japan’s potential overseas market for higher education lies in East and Southeast Asia. The Faculty of Comparative Culture at Sophia University has taught in English for many years, while in 1998 Waseda University established a bilingual graduate program in Asia-Pacific Studies focusing on international relations and business management, and a separate small International College in 2004. In April 2000, the Ritsumeikan Trust opened the new Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Kyushu focusing on Asia-Pacific development economics, environment, sociology, and management. Although there are some similarities between these projects, APU is perhaps the most radical given its size, location, and the fact that it was established through collaboration between a Prefectural government and a private university. APU, therefore, provides some interesting insights into the motivations behind, and problems involved in, internationalizing and governing higher education in Japan (Eades et al., 2005).

3 The Asia-Pacific University Project

The project itself was the result of a meeting of minds between the then Governor of Oita Prefecture, Hiramatsu Morihiko, and the Ritsumeikan Trust. Mr. Hiramatsu is well known for his innovative One Village, One Product program which encourages local towns and villages to concentrate their energies on single products for market. This model has been taken up by governments elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific Region, thus providing Oita and its Governor with an Asia-Pacific network of allied governments, communities, and businesses. Oita’s interests therefore meshed with those of the Ritsumeikan Trust, which saw an opportunity to internationalize itself based on penetration of the APU using these networks. The initial curriculum of APU, therefore, focused on the APU, and particularly on management, tourism, information technology, and the environment. Oita Prefecture and Beppu City provided the site and the infrastructure, and the Ritsumeikan Trust provided the buildings, the academic planning, and the brand name.

At the start of this project, the Ritsumeikan Trust had to make a number of strategic decisions in relation to achieving a balance between radical internationalization and appealing to the domestic market. Given that many of the foreign students would be coming from the poorer countries of the region, it was clear that full fee-paying Japanese students would remain extremely important for the financial viability of the venture. APU was set up, using Ritsumeikan models, by a group of senior academics and administrators transferred to Beppu from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Although Monbushô was by the late 1990s worried about the establishment of any new universities given the falling birth and student participation rates, it was willing to consider innovative plans and the APU project clearly showed a way to increase Japan’s presence in the international higher education market in the Asia-Pacific Region. In return, Monbushô reserved the right to monitor the new University’s degree programs for the first 4 years, which paradoxically made it difficult to change or modify the curriculum and the structure of degree programs at APU until after the 2004–2005 academic year. While the new university embodied the latest ministry thinking, with a streamlined administrative structure presided over by an executive President and Vice Presidents who made most of the decisions, rather than those being made by the ‘professors’ meetings’ as in traditional Japanese universities, it was unable from the start to be flexible enough to cope with some of the problems outlined below because of Ministry control.

The other radical innovation offered by the Trust was that the new university was to be completely bilingual; an unheard of situation prior to 2000 in Japan. The intention was to offer most of the courses in both English and Japanese, sometimes by the same teacher. Intensive English and Japanese language subprograms, during the first 2 years of an undergraduate degree program, were designed to create students who could understand lectures in either language by their third and fourth years. The slightly later graduate school of 2003 was designed to operate entirely in English.

The ways in which all this has worked out during the first 10 years of operation have been both interesting and complex. Bilingualism and cultural diversity has come at a price. A number of the international staff did not understand Japanese, and vice versa, so meetings between them required both simultaneous translation and extensive documentation in both languages. Given the diversity in backgrounds of both staff and students it was likely that there would also be discrepant expectations about teaching standards, on the necessity of language learning taking up 20 % of available credits overall and dominating the critical first years of a degree, about the appropriate nature of classes and examinations, and about the amount of work to be expected from students. But there have also been pleasant surprises as the University has grown to its current size of 6,000 students, such as the outstanding quality of the best students, the relatively low dropout rate and the very high ratio of applicants to places. Many of the international students have become fluent in spoken Japanese and are looking for jobs in Japan, while the standard of English among the Japanese students is much higher than in more traditional universities.

At one level, simply getting a project of these dimensions off the ground is in itself a substantial achievement, but in 2002 new challenges were foreseen with the opening of the graduate school in 2003 and the return of issues of long-term financial sustainability and international competitiveness. One of the financial concerns has been a result of the fact that the recruitment of international students has been heavily subsidized with scholarship money from a variety of sources and, in the longer term, the university will either have to attract more foreign students paying their own way or find more permanent sources of scholarship funding. The problem is also compounded by the likelihood that, if as a result of declining scholarship funds the foreign students disappear, the rationale for many Japanese students coming to APU will also disappear. There is too the problem of attracting, and keeping, good quality international staff. Beppu is comparatively isolated, small, and very domestic in orientation despite its reputation as Japan’s hot springs capital, and practical issues, such as the lack of nearby international schools for the children of prospective teaching staff are a problem. Nor was APU ideally placed for the launching of an MBA (Masters in Business Administration) in the new graduate school program due to the lack of locally based large companies to support internship needs.

Finally, the success of the institution will also depend on its research facilities, both in terms of library resources and IT. In relation to the library, APU can draw on the resources of the other Ritsumeikan campuses, offsetting the obvious problems of starting a new library from scratch. Many of the required journals are, of course, available on line in the twenty-first Century. On the other hand, APU is far away from the major libraries of Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto) and Kanto (Tokyo), and the cost implications of a large number of doctoral students for example requiring access to thousands of books and older journals that can only be obtained through interlibrary loan are considerable. Clearly therefore some big decisions were seen to lie ahead in the period 2004–2009, as APU attempted to raise itself to a level where it could compete with the best schools in the Asia-Pacific region, including both North America and Australia, and as Ministry control lessened. However, impetus was given to this attempt by the thought that if it succeeded in this transformation, and if the other leading schools in Japan move in the same direction, the traditional image of Japanese universities in the international market could be totally transformed to the benefit of all.

4 The New Challenge

Priority: To increase student numbers at APU ( to 7,000–10,000 students) so that it might become fully self-funding within 5–10 years.

Strategies:

  • Provide greater diversity of courses with both local and international appeal;

  • Strengthen the take-up of language skills, especially among Japanese students;

  • Develop an integrated set of research directions/Centers to underpin and expand courses offered;

  • Achieve integration between existing Centers and Faculties in APU and with other Ritsumeikan campuses; and

  • Fully develop relationships with international academic organizations and private partners.

Actions:

  • To achieve these priorities a better integrated set of course offerings is required, based on demand so far revealed by survey and anecdotal evidence.

  • This needs to be backed up by fully functioning research centers as both an attractor of higher level students, business relationships, and a source of resources for staff efforts in research; and

  • As a strategic direction though, the proposed new curriculum and research centers were to be limited to those that could support a number of different course structures across a number of discipline areas.

APU achieved growth to 4,500 students in its first 5 years and reached 6,000 in 2008. However, this growth is to some extent unbalanced between management and other disciplines, has not yet reached the required critical mass, and is not yet backed up with significant research centers and higher degree opportunities (although there are encouraging signs in tourism & hospitality, in ICT/knowledge management, and in innovation management. Nevertheless, the APU Campus is well situated to attract Asia-Pacific students and is able to offer all the advantages of geographic proximity to an increasingly wide range of services, attractions and lifestyle choices. It is therefore a logical site for increased investment in tertiary education facilities to service the whole APU.

The new challenge process therefore recognized that to take advantage of existing strengths such as the international nature of the campus (80+ countries represented) there needed to be a new course structure NOT based on the amorphous and highly debatable concept of Asia-Pacific Studies, and that students should be able to study at APU and complete identifiable discipline-based degrees in a range of subjects. It goes without saying that innovative methods were also recognized as being necessary in the provision of the required courses (e-learning, short-courses, etc as well as face-to-face lectures), which will change over time, and that existing and new Faculty resources should be integrated with increased research opportunities. Research opportunities and outputs were finally acknowledged as being critical to teaching and scholarship, with the appointment of a Vice President for Research Affairs in 2005, and with the belated recognition that higher degree students need to be an integral part of research, teaching, and scholarship opportunities.

5 Multidisciplinary Approaches to Become the Norm

The establishment of research and teaching Institutes, active learning programs and a partial curriculum revamp were the chosen implementation avenues for the New Challenge. The impetus for the creation of institutes arose in response to the need to produce both graduates and postgraduates that are technologically and managerially skilled in areas of growing or evolving economic focus in the Asia-Pacific Region.Our ability to best serve these graduates is to ensure that our own research initiatives keep pace with emerging technology and practices so that these can be channeled back into academic programs through curriculum development and the provision of specialist programs. Recognizing the increasing need for multiskilled graduates, who have first-hand experience of the multidisciplinary approaches that are emerging in both science and the arts, key elements of the institute approach area focus on a multidisciplinary approach to research by Faculty and higher degree students, and active learning by all students. The growing complexity of society has required a shift from the traditional view of academic research as being undertaken primarily by an individual researcher in a particular focused field of study. Research and regional capacity building has become increasingly interdependent upon the knowledge from a number of academic disciplines. Researchers are seeking to join with others within their own, or increasingly, within other disciplines in addressing these new complexities.

While this multidisciplinary approach to research is not a new phenomenon, many research outcomes, even from our young University have required formal or informal collaboration with others, either within or without a particular investigator’s discipline. In a growing number of areas, the complexity of research has required more extensive collaboration involving teams of researchers from multiple disciplines working together to expand knowledge. Additionally, it has been important to point out to existing faculty that, in recognition of this growing multidisciplinary need an increasing number of funding bodies have shifted their focus toward the support of multidisciplinary research initiatives (Gwynne 1998).

Changes to the curriculum are also to be organized along Institute lines, although the existing division between Asia-Pacific Studies (Social Science in the main) and Asia-Pacific Management has had to be retained, to the delight of some and the despair of others! It remains to be seen whether the existing silo mentality that this division has generated even in the short life of APU will disappear under the multidisciplinary research and teaching focus mentioned above. More specifically there are now recognizable areas of expertise in the APU academic structure that can be further developed in the future. Some 40 new Faculties have been hired for the 5 Institutes of Language & Culture,Tourism & Hospitality, Health, Environment & Life Sciences, International Strategy, and ICT. The International MBA that APU offers will continue as a separate entity, and additional academic and research clusters in Management of Technology, human resource development, and in Innovation Studies have also been added.

The Institute model is to be supplemented by an active learning program which combines educational continuity with access to specialized courses and ‘off-shore’ experiences for third and fourth year undergraduates. All students will have to spend at least 1 semester in the later years of their degree away from the campus in specialist courses taken elsewhere, or being involved in particular external research projects. This will be achieved by forging closer links with key industry partners and promoting APU’s research expertise through the provision of consultancy services and graduate project work with industry and community partners.

The alternative to building up a reputation through research is to broaden the teaching base and concentrate on vocational rather than academic subjects. From this point of view, the strategy of the Ritsumeikan Trust has been particularly interesting. Although it does not feature in the Shanghai Jiaotong University rankings of excellence for example (Eades et al. 2005), Ritsumeikan University does feature prominently in some Japanese rankings, particularly in rankings of universities by University Presidents in Japan. Its vigorous expansion during the last 10 year has been impressive by any standards, though particularly so given the falloff in the cohorts of high school leavers across the country as a whole. Originally, the Trust operated Ritsumeikan University itself (with 30,000 students, the second largest in Japan), and three high schools. Since the late 1990s, it has opened a second campus of the original university, Biwako-Kusatsu in Shiga Prefecture, the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, another high school at Moriyama near Kusatsu (which it purchased from the Shiga prefectural government), a junior school in Kyoto, and a law school and main administration office on a new separate campus in Kyoto. The original target number of students for APU was 3,200, but this was later raised to 6,000 by 2010 (achieved in 2008), and an impressive collection of new buildings have recently been constructed to house these new students.

As for the balance between the academic-research and vocational-teaching models, the situation of APU was at first broadly vocational, but now seems to be much more ambiguous. In the early days, the management side of the program was clearly vocational in nature, with a mixture of management science and economics. The Asia-Pacific studies side of the program was initially divided into environmental, media, and tourism streams, but many of the courses were actually sociology based, and indeed the sociologists and cultural anthropologists were the largest single disciplinary group of academics on the campus. With the revamping of the curriculum for the purposes of expansion, of the five new institutes that have been established those of ICT and tourism are broadly vocational but the other three less so. With the vocational core removed from the Asia-Pacific Studies program as well, it will be interesting to see if it manages to recruit the mass base of students that the vocational-teaching model requires, given that as a private university APU needs to recruit large numbers of students both to keep going and to help subsidize the intake of foreign students, many of whom, particularly in the graduate school, are on some kind of scholarship or fee reduction.

A further complication in the case of APU is the necessity to teach the undergraduate programs in both English and Japanese, given the bilingual and bicultural philosophy with which it was founded. This also creates an administrative burden, as documents have to be translated for meetings, given that many of the senior bureaucrats are from Ritsumeikan originally and are not necessarily fluent in English, while few of the foreigners speak and read Japanese. Meanwhile, the graduate school is taught entirely in English, and so recruits virtually exclusively from overseas. This creates a vibrant and cosmopolitan group of students—but with little or no recruitment of Japanese students paying full fees, the graduate school is by definition subsidized by the rest of the university. The graduate school, therefore, can be seen as an outpost of academic research in what must increasingly be a vocational-teaching environment.

Other indicators show the effect of the basic vocational-teaching structure of the university: the high student to permanent staff ratio, the increasingly large number of teachers on short, fixed term contracts, the comparatively heavy teaching loads, the large class sizes in some lecture courses, and the use of ICT for a considerable proportion of the content delivery. Most crucial of all, many of the teaching staff, not only in the management courses are from business and administrative rather than academic backgrounds. This has developed because there has been until recently an emphasis by university management on teaching at the expense of research, to the point at which the time available during the academic year for actually doing research is increasingly restricted. The management discourse is of course publicly about international excellence in research, including gaining COE status as soon as possible, but the vocational-teaching logic of the institution as a whole means that a coherent program of research has yet to take off in many areas. One problem for APU, therefore, is that to attract quality foreign students for its English language undergraduate program, as well as for the graduate program, it has to be able to compete in the academic-research market at a very high level, but with a vocational-teaching structure aimed primarily at the Japanese market, this is a very difficult goal to achieve.

6 Conclusion

A complete re-vamp of an existing educational system is a monumental task, made even more problematical in this case by the youth and relative inexperience of the system it is intended to replace. When lack of experience at the institutional level is coupled with the difficulties of implementing an internationalizing strategy in a Japanese University constrained by the Country’s only lukewarm understanding and acceptance of what this actually means, the initial outcome could have been predicted. Conflict over course structures between the various parts of the student body (approximately 50 % are Japanese and 50 % International) occurred. The Japanese students still in the main want the old system of non-specialized education, and the International students remain unhappy that they cannot easily prove that they studied courses of relevance to potential employers. Faculties from the two different basic education traditions of the ‘west’ and Japan are equally as divided about the merits of a disciplinary-based course system. Given this, it is perhaps remarkable that Ritsumeikan APU has come this far in such a short time. Japanese students have up to now appeared to resist learning English and being fully involved with the international students, but are now expressing much greater confidence in this experience. The New Challenge outcomes have been positive in the main; at the very least they have increased understanding of what it means to be an international university and have created an at times fierce defense of APU in the Japanese system by the very people that had to change most.

It should be noted that, in the case of curriculum change and the Japanese students however, there are supportive dynamics in play as well. As Eades (2001) points out, Japanese students are becoming much more aware of their positions as consumers in what is increasingly a buyer’s market. In addition, Japanese companies want graduates with specific internationally realizable skills, and parents see their investment in their children’s education as protection for their own futures in an increasingly aged Japan. Moreover, a new generation of high school graduates is appearing who have spent lengthy periods abroad on school exchange programs. These students have fewer inhibitions about speaking English than their counterparts educated only in Japan, and lower resistance to undergraduate course specialization, and therefore constitute a natural market for the kinds of initiatives embodied in Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University.

Finally, we must not neglect the academics themselves. Here, too, a younger generation is rapidly appearing to take over from the baby-boomers and they are, in many cases, a much more international and cosmopolitan group than their predecessors. Many have been educated abroad, are fluent in English and other foreign languages, and are much more interested in publishing their research internationally. Professional associations and departments with COE money are taking the lead in establishing new journals and publication outlets in English and other languages—online as well as on paper. As universities become increasingly concerned with their research profiles, we may expect the collapse of the age–wage salary structure as the top scholars begin to bargain for salaries commensurate with their value in the global market place. Those that stay in Japan are also likely to put pressure on their institutions to provide a research infrastructure of international standard and this, in turn, will necessitate the professionalising of library and IT support staff. Many observers are sceptical as to whether the transformation of national universities into ‘independent administrative institutions’ will in general lead to any greater autonomy—but what it will certainly do is allow them flexibility in budgetary allocations to support the kinds of changes the Government has outlined.

In the case of the Asia-Pacific as a whole, the internationalizing experiment that is APU is of considerable interest, and its new curriculum and Institute/research structure is already enabling the University to consolidate in this market. This is helped by the fact that smaller institutions that do not deliver quality product to this market are likely to disappear given the downturn in domestic student numbers. The successful implementation of APU’s ‘new challenge’ will in turn provide a wider financial and student base for the University as it moves closer to celebrating its first 10 years of life and beyond.

The fact that the experiment by the Ritsumeikan Trust has been reasonably successful is however indicated by a completely different benchmark; and this provides an interesting postscript to the pressures and factors that brought the University into being in the first place. APU is now seen as the National Government’s preferred source of ‘good practice’ information and research in the areas of internationalization and new curricula. Considerable funds have been made available to the University (of the order of 3 billion Yen) to study the impact of internationalization on Japanese education and to expand the range of curriculum and pastoral support choices open to international students in this country. It is manifestly obvious that, despite the problems experienced along the way in its first 9 years of life APU was indeed a most relevant initiative to promote the ideals and aspirations of the Ritsumeikan Trust and the Government as an international education provider.