Monbukagakusho Scholarship Guide: The Basics

Alright, I’ve fooled around long enough. It’s time to start my long ago announced guide on the Monbukagakusho Scholarship.

As I said in the past, I’ll do this based entirely on my experience. For a couple of years I gathered information and devised a strategy for my application on my own. The one thing I would’ve liked was to read about someone who actually lived through the process of earning the scholarship. Now that I’m that person, I’ll try to imagine as the present me reporting to the past me. As you might be thinking, this guide might be highly biased. Well, you’re right, that’s what I intend it to be. If you’re looking for the guidelines to the scholarship go to the website of the Japanese embassy based in your country, or just google for it. In fact, I’ll assume you’ve already read the guidelines (arriving to this blog means that you know about the scholarship and you’re digging through the whole internet to look for more information). With that in mind, lets get down to business.

Tell me what kind of guy you are and I’ll tell you what scholarship you need
As I also said before, it’s ambiguous to talk about a monbukagakusho scholarship. There are actually around six different scholarships that could fall in this name. They have big similarities, the most relevant one being the fact that the are only given to non-Japanese. The differences rely on the profile of the awardee MEXT is looking for. There’s one for undergraduate students, another one for graduates, for teachers, artists and even one for the lovers of the japanese language. When I first learned of how generous the Japanese government was, I was around half-way from finishing my undergraduate studies, so I aimed for the graduate type. If that’s the one you’re interested in, be happy to know that that’s the one I’ll focus on. If you’re a Japanese major, things might look out of place but I’m sure you can take a thing or two from my experience.

A confusing question for starters: who gives the scholarship?
Here’s the answer, plain and simple. You apply for a recommendation, not for the actual scholarship. You submit documents to either the Japanese embassy in your country or one of the universities which are allowed to recommend people to MEXT (I’ll get on this in the next section). The actual application for the scholarship is presented to MEXT by that third party which is endorsing you. So for future reference, when I talk about your application I mean the one that you’ll arrange and send for getting the recommendation. As I wrote in the comment section of another post, getting a recommendation is kind of the same as getting the scholarship. I haven’t heard of someone who has gotten the former but being rejected the latter. I think this would be specially true when you’re being backed by an embassy, but saying otherwise for the university case would be unsupported. In the end though, the one who reserve your air tickets, pays your tuition fees and gives the famous monthly stipend is the Japanese government, specifically MEXT.

Two different ways to apply outside of Japan
For the graduate scholarship, you can either ask the embassy or a host university for the recommendation. I would say your application would vary greatly depending on which of the two you choose. The two institutions look for different things. For example: embassies pay extra attention on how your research will serve your country, while universities want to know a bit more about how your profile as a graduate will accomplish the same. I chose to apply for the host university recommendation, mainly because in my country too many people apply for the embassy recommendation. Like I imagined, I found my choice to be less complicated and quicker in comparison. Also, finding a college that suits you would be a very good sign that you might suit them too. For instance, when I applied for a master’s program in Economic Development my undergraduate minor degree in Economics and development-oriented thesis weighted a lot. Perhaps the embassy would have taken it into account, but it wouldn’t have mattered as much. One thing about the embassy path is that you can have an extra semester entirely dedicated to learning japanese in Japan, naturally it beign entirely sponsored. The universities, on the other hand, offer all the lectures in english, so when you arrive in Japan you immediately start your master’s program.

Once you decide which scholarship you need and which third party will more likely recommend you, the whole process of designing your application strategy can start. Note that there are some procedures you can start working on while you decide, no matter which path you choose. The decision will be most pertinent for the field description, research proposal and the letters of recommendation. In the next part of this guide, I’ll make some remarks of my actual recommendation and how I chose to design it. For now, I hope the basics are cleared out. If you have a question/suggestion on the issues covered in this post, please leave it in a comment. Ganbare!

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