Malaysia to have first ever overseas branch campus of Japanese varsity

The first ever overseas branch campus of a Japanese university is highly likely to be set up in Malaysia, Japanese Ambassador to Malaysia Makio Miyagawa disclosed today.

He said as a policy, Japanese universities had never established any overseas branch campuses, but Japan's Ministry of Education recently changed the policy, inspired by a request from Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

"Our Ministry of Education decided to meet the request from Tun Dr Mahathir and has already amended its regulations to allow Japanese universities to seek establishment overseas," he told Bernama in an interview.

Miyagawa said the ministry had been approaching various universities in Japan and the response so far had been fairly positive and the most positive was from Tsukuba University.

"There are a couple of others, but Tsukuba University is now standing in a front row. This state-owned university is one of Japan's oldest and it expanded its horizon to cover most of the research areas inside Japan, which has also produced Nobel Prize laureates," he added.

Read more here - Malaysia Kini