Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I just finished my MS doing ML research at tokyo tech (and also went to georgia tech!!), and I don't think I would honestly recommend it to someone unless they know they primarily want to live in Japan. I think it can be worth it, I feel like I changed quite a lot as a result of my 2 years there. The author's criticisms are valid but probably understated. I happened to work for a fairly wealthy lab that could pay me a salary, but this is not the norm for masters students, and even some PhD students don't get paid anything. Many, if not most graduate students I knew were working one or more part time jobs to make ends meet. I'm sure that the author's nice tech job and well-located home contributed to their enjoyment -- a lot of people have to live in Yokohama or west tokyo with > 1-2hrs of commute.
In my case, I had worked in Japan for a year at a domestic megacorp (which is how I met my prof), had attended a few conferences, was very fluent in Japanese, and knew with certainty that the enjoyment of living in Japan would make up for any objective drawbacks.
My main issue with grad school is that except for an exceedingly small number of labs that regularly aim for top conferences, the process feels very un-serious. I think the standards are low; very few professors care a lot about doing really good work; the classes are unnecessary, low quality (nobody cared about teaching much, in my dept), mostly surface level; and there's not much of a bar for student research. I'd argue that domestic conference work is not only less prestigious an the author says, but it's also in most cases worse and less interesting, which is the bigger problem. This might be exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of undergrads begin research in their last year and continue into the MS program by default so there are generally a lot of less motivated students. I still had a few exceptionally smart colleagues, but I never collaborated with them (in fact, our lab has hardly ever published a paper with >2 authors). I generally felt that their hard work was misplaced.
About a year into my MS, after pushing a bit of slop at international conferences, I more or less gave up on working on my project and got a remote job based in the US. Like the article says, it is exceptionally convenient that you can work for 28 hours a week on a student visa, since 28 hours of a US tech job is more than enough to support a nice lifestyle for 1 in tokyo. I might genuinely have dropped out and moved back home if it wasn't for it. DO get the auth at immigration time, it's much more annoying later.
In any case, I really enjoyed it in hindsight. As a final note, Science Tokyo is very simple to enter for international students -- the only requirement is that you find a professor willing to take you in. There are many structures in place for international students and I'd say it's fairly nice and comfortable.
PS: Maybe someone will enjoy reading my blog post about life at Science Tokyo/Japan: https://esrh.me/posts/2025-11-15-year-recap
by esrh - I have a post graduate degree from a Japanese university. I thought the undergraduate program in my home country was far more academically rigorous. Most of my fellow students here seemed to be trying to just avoid having a hole in their CV while they waited to re-take licensing exams or find a job. I did get a lot out of the experience.. and I there is a lot of learning that can happen in that situation too, but I don't think anyones once noticed that I have this qualification.by totetsu
- I did my PhD at Titech (Suzukakedai).
The 3-year limit is not a hard limit. It is common to have an extension. It may also depend on the department. Most foreign students drop after 3 years due to a lack of funding.
Compared to the research culture in the UK/US, I think Japan is much better. Yes, you may be forced to overwork and sleep at the lab, but the guidance and supervision are good.
The only thing I hated was that COVID hit right before the graduation ceremony. All we had was an online ceremony.
by kimurakaera - > I recently completed my PhD in Computer Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology (now the Institute of Science Tokyo)
They never knew why their collegiate apparel business was so successful...
by musicale - I did a machine learning PhD while working in a smaller town in India. (not from US, but came from a research position at a lab at AAU in Denmark, my native place)
It's fun to read the piece, I worried about many of the same topics, but with completely different reasoning (e.g. I dislike megacities, crazy work culture, and I'm likely not google/stanford/top-tier material).
But in general I think going abroad for anything, not only a PhD, is a good exercise.
by gumbojuice - Excellent article. I have worked for twenty years at another university in Tokyo and taught and supervised many non-Japanese graduate students, but I still learned things from the author's perspective.
One small pushback: The author writes, "the Japanese PhD system pushes you to graduate in three years." This applies in some programs and some fields, but is by no means universal. In the graduate program where I used to teach (I am now emeritus and no longer supervising students), the steps leading up to the Ph.D. and the expectations for the thesis made it practically impossible for students to finish in three years, especially if they continued to work part-time. This created particular challenges for foreign students on MEXT scholarships who had to work out other ways to support themselves and renew their visas while they continued to write their theses.
by tkgally - I am the author of this. Happy to discuss!
One thing to note is that, after I submitted the final draft of this article, the Japanese government ended the MEXT university track or is at least planning to. There was a memo, but the status is not clear.
Anyway, I had a great time doing my PhD this way, and generally I recommend that people work before a PhD and try to work during it (if you are in CS). It gives you a lot of freedom and, at least for me, it is very helpful to have more than one pipeline of work at a time so that when one slows down (as it inevitably does in research), you can draw on the other.
by mcyc