So far there are some 50 education institutions involved in the TeamUp initiative, which aims to facilitate networking between institutions and create a strategy to boost bilateral mobility.

It is in the process of creating a web-based strategic roadmap through a series of partner discussions, led by US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy.

“We’re really being purposeful about increasing the diversity of the institutions”

“We’re hoping through this web-based roadmap that we’ll be able to reach out to more [institutions], because it’s not just a matter of increasing the number of these partnerships but the quality of the partnership itself,” Paige Cottingham-Streater, executive director of the Japan-US Friendship Commission, told The PIE News.

Practical support on forging partnerships will include a template Memorandum of Understanding for partner institutions to use.

“The Japanese felt the US is more lawyer-driven and so we thought well maybe if there could be one universal or model MoU – as a starting place to be tinkered with as needed,” Cottingham-Streater explained.

The initiative is being led by the United States-Japan Bridging Foundation, a nonprofit offshoot of the Commission that helps to develop study abroad programmes and provides study abroad scholarships.

Both the US Embassy and the Japanese Ministry of Education are supporting the initiative by helping to identify partner institutions.

Unlike Japan’s Top Global Universities project, TeamUp is engaging with a broad range of institutions, including community colleges and smaller institutions.

“We’re really being purposeful about increasing the diversity of the institutions,” Cottingham-Streater explained.

Developing targeted programmes for international students is one key element of TeamUp’s strategy, as well as online and summer programmes that are a manageable first step towards internationalisation.

“[The institutions involved] know about what the students want – maybe they want more language programmes or longer, more specialised programmes,” Masato Otaka, Minister for Public Affairs in the Japanese Embassy in Washington, told The PIE News.

The number of Japanese students travelling overseas, particularly to the US has fallen in recent years, and Japanese universities are taking strides to boost outbound mobility – a trend Otaka described as “alarming”.

However, he is confident that by consulting with industry experts, TeamUp “can make changes that can be more attractive and acceptable to students”.

The roadmap is expected to be published in the coming months.