To begin with
This isn't simply where the school happens to stand.
You can study Japanese in a great many places in this country. Why choose Fukui in particular? This page is our attempt at an honest answer.
Big cities have their own advantages. But if the goal is to learn to stand on your own feet inside Japanese society, being close to that society is a real advantage. Here, local companies, schools, the city government and residents are all within easy reach, and contact with them can happen as an extension of ordinary daily life.
So we build time spent with Japanese people and the local community into the ordinary week, rather than saving it for special events.
01 A place that takes learning seriously
Education runs deep here.
FactChildren in Fukui Prefecture have ranked near the top nationally for many years in MEXT's National Assessment of Academic Ability and in the Japan Sports Agency's National Survey of Physical Fitness.
The national University of Fukui is in Fukui City, and our campus sits nearby, in the city's education district.
Those are published survey results and a matter of address. Why it turned out this way is not something we will assert. What we can say is that living here, the sense that studying is simply part of ordinary life is real.
Sources: MEXT National Assessment of Academic Ability; Japan Sports Agency National Survey of Physical Fitness
The questionIn a place where learning is simply normal, how far could you get?
At FLAWe run joint classes with schools in the prefecture and invite local people in to teach. Sitting alongside people from a place where study is taken seriously is itself part of the material.
02 Making things
A small town's craft, worn around the world.
FactThe town of Sabae in Fukui has long produced the large majority of Japan's eyeglass frames.
Frames for globally known brands pass through the hands of craftspeople here — in a town of well under 100,000 people. It is a strange and rather wonderful thought.
Textiles, chemicals, machinery, washi paper, lacquerware. Fukui is full of companies that are not large but are needed somewhere in the world. And every one of those workshops is close enough for students to visit.
FLA students go and see them: they meet the people making things, ask questions, and bring what they learned back to present. Not "Japanese companies are impressive", but why they came to be that way.
The questionWhy did something the world wants come out of this particular town?
At FLAStudents visit the workshops, ask the people who work there, and bring what they learned back to present. In some joint classes the material is a company's own real problem.
03 History and people
The questions this region has lived with.
This is not a tourist guide. Each of these appears because it opens a question worth sitting with — and because a story about the past sometimes turns out to be about the person reading it.
Hashimoto Sanai
A samurai of the Fukui domain in the 1850s. At fifteen he wrote Keihatsuroku, setting down how he intended to change himself. He was executed at twenty-six, having spent his life thinking about his country's future. What could I write at fifteen?
Yuri Kimimasa and Sakamoto Ryoma
Sakamoto Ryoma came to Fukui to talk with the local retainer Yuri Kimimasa about how a new Japan should fund itself. Yuri later helped draft the Charter Oath of 1868. Someone in a provincial town helped design a country.
Emperor Keitai
Said to have been raised in Echizen, the old name for this region; his statue stands on Mount Asuwa in Fukui City. Someone left a place far from the centre — and became the centre.
Eiheiji
The head temple of Soto Zen, founded here by Dogen in 1244. Monks still train there today, up in the mountains. Why would doing ordinary daily things carefully count as training?
The Lake Suigetsu varves
At the bottom of a lake in Fukui, seventy thousand years of sediment settled in perfect annual layers. They are now used as one of the world's reference scales for dating the past. A global standard, found in a very quiet place.
A region of company founders
Fukui is reported to rank among Japan's highest prefectures for company presidents per head of population (Teikoku Databank). Why have so many founders come from this one region?
At FLAEvery person and place listed here can be, and has been, an inquiry topic: visiting the site, reading the sources, setting it beside your own country's history, and presenting it in Japanese. Now and then a story about the past turns out to be about you.
Rather than simply supplying the answer, we make room for you to think it through first.
04 Daily life
A place where you can afford to try.
FactFukui Prefecture has repeatedly been ranked first overall in the Japan Research Institute's happiness ranking of all 47 prefectures.
What a ranking like that means depends on how it is measured, so we won't over-read it. What we can say from living here is simpler: daily life is steady.
Living costs are lower than in the big cities. But we will not tell you to come here because it is cheap. Cost matters, of course, but it is not in itself a reason to choose a school.
What we hold ourselves to is making sure a student can afford to take a risk: housing, procedures, health, emergencies. Knowing there is something to fall back on is what makes it possible to put your hand up in the first place, and building that is our responsibility, not the region's.
Source: Japan Research Institute, Happiness Ranking of All 47 Prefectures. Photo: Yokokan Garden (Photo: Fukui City — this photograph uses material provided by Fukui City)
The questionSomewhere it is safe to fail — what would you try?
At FLAWith housing and daily-life support taking care of the ground beneath you, we deliberately create chances to attempt something slightly beyond you: planning, presenting, working in the community.
Ask us anything about Fukui.
The city, living costs, transport, the weather — answered by people who actually live here.