Getting a scholarship for grad studies in Japan

Yesterday, perfectly timed on Christmas day, I received an e-mail confirmation that I had received the JSPS DC1 scholarship fellowship (Note: I much later found out JSPS is a fellowship and not a scholarship! This means I pay taxes on it, and tuition isn’t automatically waived as it would be for the MEXT scholarship -__- and the miscommunications continue in the land of the rising sun) for pursuing my PhD in Japan, this lab. やった！ I had gone through a lengthy and painstaking application process, finishing the paper application last April, then going through a second ‘Interview’ screening, and finally 7 months later getting a confirmation that I wouldn’t need to worry about doing this again.
Finding a scholarship turned out to be very difficult, with information in English generally scarce and outdated, so after the frustrating ordeal of the paper application was over, I vowed that if I got it I would document the process, my opinions and suggestions, in the hope that it might help others who find themselves in a similar situation. This is that story.

I will split this into 3 parts: Scholarships in Japan: general suggestions (this post), JSPS fellowship: paper application and JSPS fellowship: final interview.

Scholarships in Japan, an Overview

TL;DR

• Start early. Most Japanese scholarships start in April, are not flexible, and often you need to apply a full year in advance.
• Get help from a Japanese friend. A lot of scholarships will have information only in Japanese, or only scant/outdated information in English
• TRUST NO-ONE. I’ve found that when someone didn’t know something, I was often often told “No” instead of a straight-forward “I don’t know, you’ll have to check yourself.”. So check application information and eligibility independently.

The story

Let’s start with the basic situation of doing a PhD in Japan. Unlike Switzerland and much of Europe you do not get a salary as a grad student, and it is expected that most students will be independently financed (by their families). So getting a scholarship is something of a priority if you plan to do a PhD here.
Your best bet at this point is to get a MEXT scholarship by Embassy Recommendation (check your local embassy), which means applying in your home-country well in advance and under many circumstances without meeting your professor and labmates, which I actually recommend against in general and especially in Japan (I might blog about this in another post). There are other scholarships, but in many cases you not know whether or not you will receive it until after you’ve committed to the PhD, simply due to timing. You have been warned.

One of the major difficulties has been getting information. Tohoku University has a website listing scholarships as they get announced, however these announcements are often posted with very short notice and are definitely not complete. A major problem is that often this information isn’t available in English, the programs seem to change, and the administration was often unwilling to see anything outside the official information they received and posted: on multiple occasions I was told that a scholarship I inquired about did not exist or that I was ineligible to apply for it (including the JSPS scholarship that I actually got). Sadly, I missed a deadline on the MEXT scholarship by University Recommendation due to this (the administration only knew about the ‘Embassy Recommendation’ and ‘Domestic Selection’, and claimed the documents I was requesting didn’t exist, until it was too late). After this I was rather upset, developed trust issues, and independently checked all information. This is really difficult to do on your own if you don’t read Japanese quite well, so try to get help. But even then, be cynical and double-check things yourself. I was helped out by a lab member who was applying to the DC2 track of the JSPS scholarship (a 2-year scholarship, for students who have already started their phd), and at first he simply replied that I couldn’t apply to the JSPS. Indeed, I couldn’t apply to DC2 because you had to already have started your PhD… and he completely missed the fact that I could apply to the full 3-year scholarship with the DC1 track, which follows the exact same application procedure and was explained on the same web-page.
This initially almost seemed cruelly intentional but I eventually came to understand that this is simply due to a very different cultural mentality. Just as many staff-members were unable to conceive the notion of taking the initiative to check for information about scholarships and application information which they hadn’t been directly given by their higher-ups for redistribution. This is actually not out of laziness or malice, they (I’m just making general statements here, fully aware that these are just generalizations, and not always accurate) really just aren’t used to being flexible or taking initiative, and it requires a strenuous amount of mental-bending for them to do it. But this is a topic for another post; the take-home message is, when someone is helping you, take the time and ask them to show you and explain to you everything in detail, even if it is tedious and time-consuming. Don’t accept everything at face value, because often it simply won’t be the full picture. And it’s your responsibility to make sure you understand when it is and when you need to dig a little deeper.

That pretty much sums up my general advice. JSPS is actually the only scholarship I applied to (I planned on applying to MEXT but to my consternation I missed the deadline, see above), so most of my advice will focus on that application in the next couple of posts. JSPS does seem to be among the best scholarships fellowships available in Japan, both in terms of financing but also I’ve come under the impression that JSPS recipients get more “cred” from their peers and professors. It is also somewhat competitive, with 22% acceptance rate this year. Of these, about 17% received the fellowship after the first step, and the rest had to do a final interview, at which point the chances were much higher (I went through this step as well).