Masters in Japan for Indian Students: MS, MBA, PhD

12 min read · Published on July 23, 2026 · Updated on July 23, 2026

A master’s in Japan is decided by one email. Not by a portal, not by a common application, and usually not by your GRE score. Before a Japanese graduate school will look at you seriously, a named professor in that department has to agree to supervise you, and at most universities you are the one who has to go and ask.

Everything else on this page follows from that. It explains why so many Indians arrive in Japan as a kenkyusei, a non-degree research student, instead of walking straight into a master’s. It explains why the MEXT scholarship runs on a calendar that has nothing to do with university deadlines. And it is why India still sends very few students to Japan. The official JASSO survey counted 1,685 Indian students in all of Japan as of May 2024, out of 336,708 international students. Nepal alone sent 64,816.

What are the three ways an Indian student gets into a Japanese master’s?

There are three, and they are genuinely different processes rather than three versions of one. You apply straight to a degree, or you enter as a research student and convert, or you win a government scholarship that places you at a university.

Route	What you apply for	Who pays	Who you contact first
Direct entry	The master’s course itself, through the graduate school’s own entrance examination or its special selection for international applicants	You do, unless you win a university scholarship or fee waiver	Usually a professor, then the admissions office
Kenkyusei, then convert	Non-degree research student status first, then the internal entrance exam	You do, and this is the one year you cannot get a fee waiver for	A professor, directly, by email
MEXT embassy scholarship	The scholarship, at the Japanese embassy in India, before any university is involved	The Japanese government, in full	The university’s international student office, and specifically not a professor

Direct entry is real and underused. The University of Tokyo’s School of Science says so in plain words, that “you can apply directly for the Master’s/Doctoral course for international students without first being a ‘kenkyusei’”, and that you may also sit the general entrance examination alongside Japanese applicants. Nobody is forcing you through the research student year.

What is the kenkyusei route, and why do so many Indians enter that way?

A kenkyusei is a research student, someone admitted to a laboratory to work under one professor without being enrolled on any degree. Tohoku University’s own regulations define it as a student who “can conduct research under the guidance of an academic advisor on a special subject rather than obtain a degree”. You earn no credits and no qualification. Kyoto University states flatly that its research students are “not eligible for academic credits or degrees”.

People take it because it solves a timing problem. Japanese graduate entrance examinations are set by each department, held on campus, and often assume you have already spoken to the lab you want to join. Arriving a term early as a research student gets you into that lab, into the reading list, and in front of the professor who will mark your exam. It buys you preparation time, and it costs you a year.

The status is deliberately short. UTokyo’s School of Science enrols research students for six months at a time and caps the total at two years. Its Graduate School of Information Science and Technology runs a one-year term and warns that “entering this program does not guarantee applicant’s entrance into our master’s or doctoral programs”. Tohoku limits enrolment to “one year or less”, extendable on request.

Two costs of this route are almost never mentioned to Indian applicants, and both are written down by the universities themselves.

No fee waiver. UTokyo’s School of Science states that “there are no admission fee and tuition waivers for Graduate International Research Students”. Degree students at the same university can apply for a 50 or 100 percent reduction. Research students cannot apply at all.
No teaching or research assistantship. At Waseda, non-regular students cannot work as a TA or RA without special permission, which is exactly the paid campus work that funds degree students.

Tohoku’s own guidance for foreign research students puts the warning in writing. It tells applicants that “it is very difficult to get a scholarship after coming to Japan, so please make sure the expenses for studying are covered”, and that admission is cancelled if the fees are not paid on time. Treat the research student year as a year you fund yourself, in full, with no realistic top-up.

Before you commit to a kenkyusei year

Confirm in writing that the professor will still be at that university, and taking students, in the intake you plan to sit the exam for.
Ask the department for the last two years of the internal entrance examination papers. Many publish them.
Budget the full year of admission fee and tuition yourself. At the University of Tokyo that is ¥431,400, about 2.5 lakh rupees, before any living costs.
Check whether the same department runs a direct-entry special selection for international applicants, because it may be cheaper and a year faster.

What do you write in the email to a Japanese professor?

You write a short, specific message that shows you have read their work and that names what you want to do in their lab. This is the actual application, and it is where most Indian applicants lose, because a generic request for “an opportunity” is read as spam and ignored.

The universities themselves describe the step in unusually direct language. UTokyo’s Graduate School of Information Science and Technology tells applicants to “contact the professor directly by email and get an informal acceptance from him/her”. Kyoto University requires that you “contact and obtain approval from a prospective advisor” before you submit anything. Science Tokyo goes furthest, saying applications “will not be considered without the consent of a Institute of Science Tokyo faculty member who will act as the applicant’s academic supervisor”.

A workable structure for the first email, in about 200 words.

One line saying who you are, your degree, your university and your year of graduation.
Two or three sentences on one specific paper or project of theirs, and what you would want to extend or test. Name the paper.
One line on what you have actually built or measured yourself, with a number in it.
The ask, stated exactly. Whether you are asking to join as a research student from April or October, or asking for consent to apply directly to the master’s course.
Your funding position, in one sentence. Say if you are self-funded, or if you have passed the MEXT first screening.
Attach a two-page CV, your transcript and a one-page research plan. Nothing else.

Two details will save you a wasted month. Toyohashi University of Technology notes that “only faculty members with the title of ‘Professor’ or ‘Associate Professor’ are eligible to supervise graduate students”, so writing to an assistant professor may achieve nothing however friendly the reply. And consent is not admission. UTokyo’s School of Science is careful to say that the supervisor’s consent “does not guarantee your acceptance”, and that it does not guarantee a letter of provisional acceptance either.

What is in the internal entrance exam that converts a research student into a master’s student?

It is a departmental examination, set and marked by the graduate school you want to join, usually in the summer for April entry. MEXT’s own scholarship guidelines describe the standard shape, saying that “assessment of the applicant’s foreign language competence, grasp of the specialized subject for study, plans for the graduation thesis, interview, etc. are normally included”.

In practice that means four things. A language component, most often English for international applicants. A written paper in your specialisation, at final-year undergraduate level and set by the department. A research plan you have to defend. And an oral examination in front of several faculty members, including the one you have been emailing.

The written paper is the part Indian applicants underestimate. It is written by the same professors who teach the course, drawn from the Japanese undergraduate syllabus in that subject, and it does not care what your CGPA was. This is the single argument for the research student year, because a year in the lab is a year of access to the people who set the paper and to the past papers that show its shape.

The exam is not confined to the research student route. Several departments at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Engineering, including Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Chemical Science and Engineering, require a signed consent form from a prospective supervisor for direct master’s applicants too. So the professor conversation is part of ordinary admission at Japanese universities, not a workaround for a weak application.

How does the MEXT scholarship change which route you take?

It reverses the order of the whole thing, and it reverses who you contact first. MEXT is applied for at the Japanese embassy in India roughly a year and a half before you would start, and the university comes later. The 2027 application guidelines set the calendar out plainly. Applications open at the embassy around mid-April 2026, first screening runs from early May to late July 2026, and you have until 1 September 2026 to request letters of provisional acceptance from universities. Results arrive between January and early March 2027 for an April or October 2027 start.

Now the part that contradicts almost every Indian-facing page on this subject. For the embassy route, MEXT instructs you to “first contact the division of international student affairs at the university (not an academic advisor you wish to be supervised by)”. The self-funded route says email the professor. The MEXT route says do not. Getting this backwards costs you weeks inside a window that closes on a fixed date.

The word “research student” is also being used in two different senses, one paragraph apart, and the confusion is expensive. MEXT’s scholarship is officially called the Research Students scholarship and simply means postgraduate. Inside it, MEXT splits people into regular students, who are enrolled on a master’s or doctorate, and non-regular students, who are the kenkyusei. The stipend differs by which one you are.

MEXT status	Monthly stipend	What it means
Non-regular student, or Japanese preparatory education	¥143,000	You are a kenkyusei and must still pass the internal exam
Regular student, master’s or professional degree	¥144,000	You were placed straight onto the degree
Regular student, doctoral course	¥145,000	Doctoral rate

A regional allowance of ¥2,000 or ¥3,000 a month is added in designated areas, and the guidelines warn the amounts “may be subject to change each fiscal year”. Entrance examination fees, the admission fee and tuition are all waived, and an economy return air ticket is provided.

Three rules inside that document decide real outcomes and are worth reading twice.

You can skip the kenkyusei stage entirely. Applicants who obtain a letter of provisional acceptance for the regular course “will be directly placed in the said regular course without going through the period of the non-regular student”.
A non-regular grantee is on a fixed clock. An April 2027 arrival is funded only until the end of March 2029, and “non-regular students cannot extend the scholarship period as long as they stay in non-regular courses”. The extension is granted only on passing the entrance examination for a degree course.
Fail the exam and you pay for it. Tuition and fees are waived, but the entrance examination fee “will be borne by the grantees if they cannot proceed to the master’s or doctoral course”.

One more constraint that catches people. You may name three universities on the placement form, but you may obtain a maximum of two letters of provisional acceptance, you may approach only two universities at a time, and universities “generally need one month to issue a letter”. Start in May, not August.

Can you finish a master’s in Japan without knowing Japanese?

Yes, in a growing but still limited set of programmes, and the honest number is smaller than the marketing suggests. Filtering the official Study in Japan school search to English as a medium of instruction returns 75 institutions as of July 2026. Japan has 86 national, 89 public and 482 private graduate schools, so English-taught study is a genuine option and a narrow slice of the system at the same time.

The strongest options for engineering in Japan sit inside those 75. Science Tokyo, the merged Tokyo Tech and Tokyo Medical and Dental University, runs its International Graduate Program “entirely in English” across master’s, doctoral and integrated tracks in 18 departments. Kyoto University publishes English-taught master’s programmes in informatics, energy science, civil infrastructure, urban development, agricultural sciences and biostudies, and its economics programme states that “Japanese language skills are not required at the time of admission”.

JASSO’s published guideline for graduate admission is TOEFL iBT 75 to 80 or IELTS 6, which is lower than most Indian applicants expect. A GRE is not a standard requirement at Japanese national universities, unlike in the United States.

Two corrections are worth making here. First, “Global 30” is still quoted on Indian pages as a live scheme, and it is not. It began in 2009 and was replaced in 2014 by the Top Global University Project, which itself, in Osaka University’s own words, “will come to close at the end of March 2024”. The English programmes those schemes built are still running, but the funding behind them has ended. Second, English admission and English life are different things. JLPT N4 or N3 is what makes a part-time job, a rental agreement and an internship possible, and no English-taught degree removes that.

What does a master’s in Japan cost an Indian student?

Less than most people assume, because Japanese national universities charge international and Japanese students exactly the same. Convert at the rate on the day. Around 0.59 rupees to the yen in July 2026, ¥100,000 is about 59,000 rupees.

What	Admission fee	Annual tuition
University of Tokyo, graduate, excluding Law	¥282,000	¥535,800
Institute of Science Tokyo, master’s and doctoral	¥282,000	¥635,400
University of Tokyo, research student	¥84,600	¥346,800 (¥28,900 a month)
Tohoku University, research student	¥84,600	¥29,700 a month
Typical first year, national university	About ¥820,000 including the admission fee
Typical first year, private university	About ¥1,100,000, excluding medicine, dentistry and pharmacy

So a two-year master’s at a Japanese national university costs roughly ¥1.35 million in fees, near enough 8 lakh rupees, before living costs. That is the whole degree, not one year.

One caution about the figure everyone quotes. ¥535,800 is described everywhere as the standard national tuition, and it is drifting. Science Tokyo already charges ¥635,400, and UTokyo has moved its undergraduate fee to ¥642,960. Read the fee page of the specific university rather than the national figure.

For funding that is not MEXT, the main option is the Monbukagakusho Honors Scholarship at ¥48,000 a month, and it has a detail that matters for this page. Research students at graduate level are eligible, provided you hold an undergraduate degree. You need JLPT N2, or 200 in the EJU Japanese section, or CEFR B2 in English, and support from home must average under ¥90,000 a month. You cannot apply directly, only through the institution you are already enrolled at. University tuition reductions, private foundation awards and the other scholarships to study in Japan stack on top of it in different ways.

Is an MBA in Japan worth the fees?

It depends entirely on whether you pick a national or a private school, because the price gap between them is larger than in any other subject. An MBA is the one postgraduate degree in Japan where the national university advantage is dramatic.

School	Type	Published cost
Hitotsubashi ICS, Tokyo	National	¥282,000 matriculation plus ¥642,960 a year. Its own all-in estimate, including housing, books and insurance, is ¥3,304,960 for the one-year MBA and ¥6,097,920 for the two-year
Waseda Business School, International MBA	Private	¥4,176,000 total for the two years, including a ¥300,000 registration fee
Kyoto University i-MBA	National	Taught entirely in English, with a Kyoto and Cornell double degree option

Waseda’s total of ¥4,176,000 is roughly 24.6 lakh rupees for tuition alone, against Hitotsubashi’s ¥642,960 a year. Waseda partly closes the gap with a partial tuition waiver worth 50 percent of one year’s fees and a reserved scholarship of ¥500,000 a year for successful international applicants, both awarded at admission rather than applied for later. Hitotsubashi recommends a number of admitted students for MEXT at ¥147,000 a month, and for the Young Leaders’ Program at ¥242,000 a month with fees waived.

Both schools note their published figures are provisional and revisable, so price the specific intake you are applying to.

Who pays for a PhD in Japan?

Mostly the government and the university, not your supervisor’s grant, and the funded routes are competitive rather than automatic. A Japanese doctorate is a three-year course after a master’s, or four years in medicine, dentistry, veterinary science and parts of pharmacy where the undergraduate degree already ran six years.

MEXT is the cleanest route and pays ¥145,000 a month at doctoral level with fees waived. Beyond it, the national programme is JST SPRING, which universities run under their own names. The University of Tokyo’s version, SPRING GX, opened its autumn 2026 round from 13 to 29 July 2026 with roughly 35 places for international students and 35 for domestic ones, so the intake is small and the deadline is short.

One thing to check before you count on it. There have been reports of a change to how JST SPRING treats living-expense support for international students, and we could not verify the current rule at a primary source. Ask the graduate school directly what an international doctoral student in your intake receives, in writing, before you decline another offer.

Direct doctoral entry without a Japanese master’s is possible. MEXT’s rules recognise an overseas master’s degree, and also recognise two or more years of research at a university or research centre after graduating as equivalent academic competency, at the graduate school’s discretion.

Can an Indian student do MBBS in Japan?

Realistically, no, and you should hear that plainly before you spend money exploring it. Japanese medical degrees are taught, examined and clinically supervised in Japanese, and nothing about the English-taught expansion has touched medicine.

Okayama University’s medical school states the position without softening it, that “to study at the Okayama University Medical School and obtain a medical degree, a high level of Japanese proficiency is required”. Its selection for self-financed international students requires the EJU in Japanese language, mathematics Course 2, biology and one further science, then a separate written examination in mathematics, two sciences and English, then a document screening and an interview. Its full application guidelines are published in Japanese only.

Practising afterwards is a second obstacle. Under Japan’s Medical Practitioners’ Act, someone who “graduated from a medical school in a foreign state, or who has acquired a medical practitioner’s license in a foreign state” may sit the national examination or the preliminary examination only where the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare “has approved as eligible”. MEXT’s own scholarship rules say a student of medicine or dentistry “will not be allowed to engage in clinical training, such as medical care and operative surgery” until that licence is obtained.

What is open is different and often what people actually wanted. Postgraduate research degrees in medical and life sciences, a PhD rather than a clinical qualification, run in English at several Japanese universities and are covered by MEXT at the doctoral rate. A doctorate in medicine requires 18 years of school education and normally runs four years. If your goal is to practise medicine in India, confirm your intended degree against the National Medical Commission’s current eligibility rules before you commit to any country, including this one.

Key takeaways

A named professor’s consent, obtained by email before you apply, is what decides admission to most Japanese master’s programmes, not a portal score.
A kenkyusei is a non-degree research student. You still have to pass the department’s internal entrance examination to become a master’s student, and the status is capped at one to two years.
The kenkyusei year is the one year with no tuition waiver at the University of Tokyo, and non-regular students at Waseda cannot take TA or RA work.
MEXT tells embassy applicants to contact the university’s international student office and specifically not a professor, which is the opposite of the self-funded instruction.
A MEXT letter of provisional acceptance for the regular course places you straight onto the degree with no research student year at all.
Fees at national universities are the same for Indians and Japanese, roughly 8 lakh rupees for a full two-year master’s, and no GRE is normally required.
Medicine is taught, examined and licensed in Japanese, and is not a realistic route for most Indian applicants.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to be a kenkyusei before doing a master’s in Japan?

No. The University of Tokyo states you can apply directly for the master’s or doctoral course for international students without first being a kenkyusei, and you may also sit the general entrance examination. The research student year is a preparation period, useful for lab access and past papers, but it is optional and it costs you a year.

Is a Japanese master’s degree free for Indian students?

No, but national universities charge Indians the same as Japanese students. The University of Tokyo charges ¥282,000 admission and ¥535,800 a year for most graduate courses. A full two-year master’s is therefore around ¥1.35 million in fees, roughly 8 lakh rupees. MEXT scholars pay nothing at all.

How much does MEXT pay a master’s student in Japan?

The 2027 guidelines pay ¥144,000 a month to regular master’s or professional degree students, ¥145,000 to doctoral students and ¥143,000 to non-regular research students, plus ¥2,000 or ¥3,000 monthly in designated regions. Entrance examination, admission and tuition fees are waived and a return economy air ticket is provided.

Can I do an MS in Japan in English without JLPT?

Yes. Seventy-five institutions appear in the official Study in Japan search when filtered to English as a medium of instruction. Science Tokyo runs its International Graduate Program entirely in English, and Kyoto University publishes English-taught master’s degrees in informatics, energy science and engineering. JASSO’s guideline is TOEFL iBT 75 to 80 or IELTS 6.

What should the first email to a Japanese professor say?

Keep it to about 200 words. State your degree and university, name one specific paper of theirs and what you would extend, give one measurable thing you have built, then state what you are asking for and which intake. Say whether you are self-funded or have passed the MEXT first screening. Attach only a CV, transcript and research plan.

Is a PhD in Japan funded for international students?

MEXT pays ¥145,000 a month at doctoral level with all fees waived. University schemes under JST SPRING exist but are small and competitive, with the University of Tokyo’s autumn 2026 round offering roughly 35 international places. Confirm in writing what an international doctoral student in your intake actually receives, because the rules have been changing.

Can Indian students study MBBS in Japan?

Practically no. Japanese medical degrees are taught and examined in Japanese, admission requires the EJU sat in Japanese, and Okayama University states a high level of Japanese proficiency is required to obtain the degree. Practising needs approval from the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare. Postgraduate medical research in English is open, clinical MBBS is not.

When do Japanese master’s intakes start?

April and October, with April the larger intake. For April 2027 entry as a self-funded research student, the University of Tokyo’s School of Science window was 23 October to 13 November 2026. For MEXT 2027, the embassy round opened around mid-April 2026 and letters of provisional acceptance had to be requested by 1 September 2026.

Sources

Related reading. Start with studying in Japan for the full picture, compare institutions on top universities in Japan, plan the funding through the MEXT scholarship, and settle the language question with the JLPT.

Masters, MS, MBA and PhD in Japan for Indian Students