A university with a ‘future’ perspective

BEPPU CITY, Japan – Located on a mountain top, from one side it opens out to the vast ocean and on the other to the mountains with their tops eternally in the clouds, for any Sri Lankan this may look like a beautiful bled of Peradeniya and Ruhuna universities.

Don’t be mistaken the place I just described to you is far away from home, although it is much like a second home to many of the Sri Lankans living there. It is the Asia Pacific University (APU) which is located in Beppu City, in Oita Japan. The university boasts of a student population with about 5000 in number and half of them are international students.

How would you like to go to a completely foreign university in a foreign country and find it’s head, the President to be a Sri Lankan, a very pleasant, friendly and very approachable CEO at that too.

Not likely one would say and if you are familiar with the local university culture this might sound quite alien to you! But the fact of the matter is this is exactly what you find at APU. Monte Cassim, a Sri Lankan by birth is anyone’s dream vice chancellor. He also fondly remembers his varsity days as a starry eyed idealist who challenged the system to change the world.

The APU is not just any university, it is a university anyone would want to go and literally anyone who has a passion to learn can go. The university has no age barriers; if you are someone below 70 then you are in (provided that you have what they are looking for academic and skills wise). The facilities it offers is ‘out of this world’ to put it as one Sri Lankan student described. The service and assistance any student would get from the administration and the university faculty staff is second to none.

“If you want help from any faculty member you can make an appointment and meet him. But if you are friendly with him you can just walk in any time,” explained Yasir Sheriffdeen, a fourth year Sri Lankan student at APU.

Whether you are aspiring to be a political leader in the future or a leading business figure APU has got the ideal education programme for you. The university has two main colleges, College of Asia Pacific studies for those who want to be in the political field and College of Asia Pacific Management for the aspiring business men and women.

The university also has a unique cross over programme integrating the two colleges for students who wants to specialize in fields such as tourism, health, environment and life sciences, international strategic studies ICT or language and cultural studies. The two graduate schools of APU offer equally diverse areas of studies and research in the areas of Asia Pacific Studies and in Management.

If one is wondering about the job opportunities a graduate of APU would find, the list is endless. One need not go looking for employment as the employer comes to you. That is one more advantage of being an APU student as APU has an ‘on campus recruitment programme’. The university makes students focus on their carrier goals from the beginning of their first year with the university career development programme where a job chart is drawn up for each student getting them closer to their career goals step by step. Almost all of Japan’s leading organizations 250 major organisations – to be exact – come to APU to recruit students.

Sheriffdeen is a perfect example of an APU success story. In his final year he speaks Japanese as if it was his mother tongue and he has been offered a job at one of Japan’s leading companies Fujitsu. Sheriffdeen is glad that he was short of two points in his SAT score to enter an Australian university, “it’s because of that I ended up at APU its like home for me now,” said he said, smiling gently. When asked of his plans, he said, “I would work for a couple of years in Japan and come back to Sri Lanka to look for a job.” With his experience and education background he said he was sure to find a ‘good job’. Life at APU is never dull if it is not “the Sri Lankan week” or “Vietnamese week” or a language week or a speech contest it’s a guest lecture by a leading figure in business or politics. Not many campuses could boast of the type of distinguished guests APU would receive in one year. The university hosts guest lectures from Nobel Prize laureates to many other business and political leaders from different parts of the world.

If you ask any of the Sri Lankan students if they like living in Japan, in a society so different from ours and a language completely alien to both English and Sinhalese (mind you not many locals speak English either) you might be surprised at the answer you get. “It’s like home for me now, of course I miss my family but that’s the only thing if I can have my parents here it would be perfect,” says Nadeeshani S. Abeysekera, another Sri Lankan student.

An APU student can get by fairly comfortably if he or she works a part time job which the campus helps to find. He would be able to earn about 60,000 Yen which would cover all living expenses from food to lodging.

Achini Inoka Dhamasiri, a fourth year student of Management Studies living in an off campus apartment admitted that she found it hard to fit in at the beginning. “Everyone is on time all the time. If the bus is at 10.21 it is at 10.21 not 10.25; so if you get one minute late you miss the bus. But I have got used to the system and it is very easy to live here, everything has a proper system. Not like home where everything is one big chaos,” Dhamasiri explained about life in Japan. “Even the grannies here work faster and harder sometimes; we can’t keep up with them,” she said with a grin.

The Homestay programme offered by the student support centre is another unique feature which helps students ‘settle in’ with the new culture and community. The locals living in the area host many foreign students in their homes helping them in many ways from learning Japanese to finding apartments to looking after them if they fall sick. This is no doubt why Abeysekera and many others feel right at home in Beppu City. Unlike in many other Western countries where an Asian is always subjected to many hardships and sometimes even abuses in Beppu it’s quite the opposite. The community would go out of the way to make students’ lives easer from being foster parents to giving cheaper hair cuts as Cassim himself has seen when he went to get a haircut.

It was the support and cooperation of the people of Beppu and Oita Prefecture that made the APU itself a possibility. The university hopes that it would generate the leaders of the future who would have a better understanding of different cultures and ethnicities. With students from about 75 different countries the university boasts of a cultural diversity and richness like no other. According to Cassim this not only increases the academic performance of both the foreign and local students but also increases their creativity. “In a cultural programme or a performance we would have in campus one would find an African student introducing an Indian performance or a Vietnamese student performing a Sri Lankan dance. The friendships they develop here is something one can’t buy with all the money in the world,” said Cassim.

The sight of an African student and a western student and a Pakistani student all seated together indicates that the university is clearly a success story. APU as its prospectus says is a university established looking toward the future, APU is definitely “a place where the young future leaders from all countries and regions throughout the world will come to study together, and understand each others cultures and ways of life, in pursuit of common goals which are common to all man kind”.

(The Sunday Times was part of a media team from Colombo invited on a familiarization tour of APU in Japan).