Photo/Illutration A building housing a Confucius Institute in Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture (Hideshi Nishimoto)

FUKUYAMA, Hiroshima Prefecture--The Confucius Institute language school attached to Fukuyama University here will be shut down in March due to hardships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and deteriorating relations between Japan and China.

It is one of 15 schools established in Japan under the Confucius Institute program, which promotes Chinese language education and culture abroad. It will also be the third Confucius Institute in Japan to close within the last three years.

The institute’s annual enrollment at its Fukuyama branch of about 200 students plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since only recovered to half that number.

In addition to the growing political tension between Tokyo and Beijing, the school’s location in a small city has likely contributed to the enrollment decline.

“We struggle to fill the classrooms as fewer people want to learn Chinese,” said Ryo Hirayama, who heads the Confucius Institute at Fukuyama University.

The institute in Fukuyama opened in 2008, when the Summer Olympics were held in Beijing.

It has offered community education programs for Chinese language studies, tai chi and calligraphy, featuring instructors from affiliated Shanghai Normal University.

The closure of the Confucius Institute in Fukuyama follows similar shutdowns at Kogakuin University in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward in 2021 and Hyogo Medical University in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, in 2022.

However, in those two cases, the universities cited campus renovation and contract expiration, respectively, as reasons for shutting down their Confucius Institute branches.

Backed by the Chinese government, the first Confucius Institute opened in 2004. Currently, there are 498 Confucius Institutes across 160 countries and regions, according to the Chinese International Education Foundation, which oversees the program.

In recent years, a number of Confucius Institutes in Western countries, including the United States, have closed their doors amid concerns that the schools may serve as a propaganda tool of the Communist Party of China.

“We don’t see any problems with our programs offered in Japan,” said a Confucius Institute official from its Japanese office. “But student enrollments reflect the ups and downs in the bilateral relations.”

As time goes by, fewer Japanese people are learning Chinese. According to the Society for Testing Chinese Proficiency Japan, less than 20,000 people took its Chinese language test in 2023, whereas more than 50,000 people took the test 10 years ago.

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