Airi Sato, an exchange student studying at a university in Seattle, says the yen-dollar rate has made it difficult for her to buy even tissue paper.

The 19-year-old said she feels guilty about such purchases because her parents in Japan are covering the costs of her dormitory and other living expenses.

“Spending on everyday items is no small matter,” she said.

Whenever she shops for a beverage at a supermarket, she calculates the price per milliliter and chooses a cheap one.

She said that things she took for granted in Japan, such as free handouts of tissues, can add up in the United States. She said a bundle of five or six boxes of tissues can cost up to $8 (1,180 yen).

She is now rationing the tissue sheets from a box she brought from Japan. Her Japanese friend in Seattle is using a half a sheet each time to “double” the use, she said.

Shortly before Sato arrived in the United States in August, the exchange rate was 130 yen per dollar. It recently touched the 150-yen level.

Sato has been checking her smartphone for the dollar-yen rate whenever she has spare time.
She said yen’s decline makes her feel sorry for her parents.

The dormitory fee is about $5,700 per semester, or about 800,000 yen in September. Sato wonders how much it will cost her parents when the next bill comes around in December.

She said she estimated the annual cost of her studying abroad would be about 3 million yen.

“But 3 million yen can no longer cover it,” she said.

A 53-year-old woman in Osaka Prefecture whose oldest son is a freshman in the Foreign Language Studies Department at Kansai University is also worried about weakening yen.

His course requires students to complete a study abroad program. And he is expected to attend a British university from April 2023.

At a Kansai University orientation session for the study abroad program held in October, she was told that annual school fee at the British school would rise to about 2.4 million yen because of the sliding Japanese currency.

The total cost, including dormitory fees and meal expenses, would exceed 4.6 million yen per year.

The mother said she has prepared for the rising costs by buying educational insurance, but it still will not be enough.

Her husband has transferred away from their home, so his living expenses have also strained the family budget.

The mother started working full-time in July to bring much-needed extra cash to the family.

Ryugaku Journal Inc., a Tokyo-based agency for study abroad programs, said the yen’s fall has hit Japanese students in the United States particularly hard.

Average annual tuition for a typical four-year U.S. university promoted by the agency was about 3.2 million yen a year ago. But it now costs an additional 1 million yen.

Yukari Kato, chief editor of the agency’s publication, said she has received many inquiries from people who gave up on studying abroad because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as from people who want to study overseas only for a year if they can finance the costs.

The agency will hold a large study-abroad fair in November for the first time in three years.

The number of people interested in signing up has exceeded expectations, Kato said.

“Interest in studying abroad has not been lost,” she said. “There will be more people who want to go abroad even if they have to change destinations or methods.”

The central government has set a goal to restore the number of Japanese students studying abroad to pre-pandemic levels of about 100,000 by 2027.

The education ministry on Nov. 2 said it has included 400 million yen for measures to support Japanese students studying abroad in the central government’s second supplementary budget for this fiscal year.

EXTRA COSTS FOR LIBRARIES IN JAPAN

The weakened yen has also affected university libraries in Japan.

A representative of International Christian University in Tokyo said its library has struggled to catch up with the soaring costs of online journals, which contain both Japanese and overseas academic papers and research articles.

The library estimates the cost will be up 20 to 30 percent for fiscal 2023.

To cover the higher expenses, the library will cancel its subscriptions to some magazines and newspapers and reduce the number of books purchased.

According to an education ministry survey, buying online journals accounted for about 46 percent of spending on published materials by university libraries in fiscal 2020.

The online journal market has been increasingly dominated by major U.S. and European publishers, and the prices of online journals have risen annually.

The weakened yen was another blow to Japanese universities.

“The increased burden will be tens of millions of yen, a level beyond the scope of assumption,” said a representative of a university in Tokyo.

(This article was written by Chika Yamamoto and Asako Miyasaka, a senior staff writer.)