The Nippon Foundation, Dwango to Found an Online University in 2025

The Nippon Foundation and Dwango Co., a major information technology and media company, have agreed to establish a correspondence university in April 2025 that will provide classes entirely online.

I told a press conference on June 1 that we plan to apply to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, possibly this autumn, for approval to establish the institution, tentatively called ZEN University, which will enroll 5,000 students a year.

The Nippon Foundation and Dwango agreed on the partnership to provide affordable, high-quality education and let students complete their studies wherever they want and at their own pace.

It will consist of a single faculty of intelligence, information and society. The school will welcome students from various academic backgrounds, whether arts or sciences.

Tuition will cost 380,000 yen (about $2,600) per year. This is designed to help potential students cope with widening income and regional disparities, an increasingly serious problem for higher education in Japan.

I told the press conference that if a student from rural Japan joins a university in Tokyo and moves up to the capital, it would cost him or her a total of around 3 million yen (about $20,700) per year, including tuition fees and living expenses.

According to the 2022 statistics compiled by the Education Ministry that I citied, the percentage of students who go on to university in Japan stood at around 60% nationally, but there was a wide discrepancy between urban and rural regions－76.8% in Tokyo and around 39% in Akita and Iwate prefectures in northeastern Japan.

Kadokawa Dwango Educational Institute of the Dwango group has operated two online high schools－"N High School” based in Uruma, Okinawa, southernmost Japan, since April 2016 and “S High School” in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, north of Tokyo, since 2021. They use Dwango’s independently developed state-of-the-art interactive education/learning systems and experiential learning services via virtual reality.

As of September 30, 2021, the combined number of students at the two high schools was 20,603, compared to 1,482 when N High School opened, according to Dwango. This has led to growing calls for an online university and prompted me to approach Dwango about the possibility of going into partnership.

Mr. Shinichi Yamanaka, director of Dwango and president of Kadokawa Dwango Educational Institute, said that more rural communities are grappling with a population outflow, with students moving to universities in Tokyo and other big cities and rarely returning after graduation, and expressed his hope that the online university will help reduce this regional disparity.

Mr. Nobuo Kawakami, an advisor to Dwango and director of the institute, said that with eight years’ experience operating the online high schools, “We believe that no one understands the characteristics of online schools better than we do. The online university has the potential to enable students to learn from wherever they are, whenever they want, regardless of their income and region.”

A cornerstone of The Nippon Foundation’s activities for almost 40 years has been the provision of a wide range of scholarships to students around the world: the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) has bestowed fellowships on about 16,000 people at 69 universities in 44 countries; we have helped more than 1,500 fellows from 150 countries to study at the World Maritime University (WMU) in Sweden; and we have enabled 1,600 students with disabilities from some 40 countries to study in the United States, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian nations, to mention just a few of the scholarship programs we have supported.

As we work hand-in-hand with Dwango to prepare for the launch of the online university, we will make extensive use of our worldwide network of universities, their professors and alumni to design the curriculum and explore ways to help students study abroad and do an internship where they want while studying at the university or after graduation.