Cut-Rate Education

Of the 72,000 students enrolled in Japan's 45 universities, slightly more than 1,000 are Chinese; about 300 are from other foreign countries. Last week New York's Japan Institute proclaimed the growing importance of Nippon as a world educational centre. The 300-odd non-Chinese foreign students, of whom ten are Americans and 126 are Siamese, were delving for the most part into such conventional fields as Oriental history and literature, science, medicine and civil engineering, but there were exceptions. Britain's Trevor P. Legett, for instance, had jujitsued himself into a ''scholarship for advanced practice, "is now rated capable of licking six ordinary adversaries simultaneously.

One reason Japan is attractive to foreign scholars: its inexpensiveness. Crowed the institute: "Favored by special steam ship rates and lower-cost accommodation, students can complete two to five years of graduate work in Tokyo at a fraction of the cost of such schooling in England or the United States." Tuition at the Government-financed Imperial Universities, whose entrance examinations are too steep for most foreign scholars, is dirt cheap: the equivalent of 27 U. S. dollars. Other universities are more expensive. What the Institute neglected to mention is that living by U. S. standards costs approximately $1,800 a year, half that amount if the student forsakes his Occidental mode of life for native.

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