A long overdue primer on applying for a Monbusho. Hopefully just in time for this year’s application deadline.
What is a Monbusho scholarship?
Monbushō, short for Monbukagakushō (文部科学省), is the Japanese name of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. It is also the metonymic name of the grad school scholarship distributed by said ministry to international students. In practice, unspecified mentions of “monbushō” will nearly always refer to the scholarship1“MEXT” is the favoured English abbreviation when talking about the ministry.
In a nutshell, the main qualities of Monbushō scholarships are:
- You get to study and live in Japan for up to 3-4 years (5-6, if you apply for a Master).
- You have a free-meal ticket to practically any faculty in any university in Japan: both prestigious national ones (Todai, Kyodai…) or expensive private ones (Keio, Waseda…).
- In addition to your (potentially costly) tuition fees, the grant includes a stipend for living expenses2constantly decreasing over the years, but still pretty decent for a scholarship.
- Beside a few conditions (being a foreigner and having a bachelor degree, mostly) and a lengthy application process, these scholarship come with very few strings attached: you are free to study anything you’d like, wherever you’d like (and can leave a lot of the decisions to after the application gets approved).
For more technical details, Google, Wikipedia and your nearest Japanese embassy are your friends.