Tokyo

Japan is pulling into focus its plans for a graduate university that will conduct all of its research and lectures in English.

The first meeting of an international review committee for the project is set to take place on 26–27 April in Santa Monica, California, where leading US scholars, including David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology, will offer their advice.

The university is to be based on the poor, southern island of Okinawa, and will focus on biosciences and information technology. Supporters of the project hope that it will energize a local economy that has largely depended on a locally unpopular US naval base. But some researchers suggest that the island's remote location will make the facility less attractive to potential recruits.

The plan is being championed by Koji Omi, an influential politician who is minister for both the Okinawa region and for national science and technology policy. He says that a lack of English language skills is holding back Japan's science. “I couldn't believe it, but you can get a PhD in a science from many of Japan's universities without knowing English,” he says.

Omi wants the college to be a world-class facility. “It will be a university at the very highest level internationally,” he says. He hopes to attract 500 research staff and 500 graduate students — more than half of them from foreign countries.

But some researchers are sceptical. “I have serious doubts about whether people will come,” says Shigeru Ohde, a marine chemist at the University of the Ryukyus outside Okinawa's capital, Naha. “Why would they come here to study life sciences or IT? Those fields can be studied anywhere.” Critics also fear that the project will run out of steam should Omi leave office.

The plan is expected to feature in next year's budget, which will be presented by the government in December. Current estimates for construction costs run from ¥20 billion to ¥80 billion (US$150 million to $600 million), plus ¥20 billion annually for operations. The university is likely to be established as a private institution with strong government support, avoiding the red tape involved in setting up a new public university.