NY TIMES
 
TOKYO — The traditional, mild-mannered appearance of Yuko Tanaka, clad in a kimono and geta sandals, belies the unbending determination of the woman who has become the first female president of one of Japan’s oldest and largest universities.
 
With the curious mixture of quiet Japanese elegance and the gravitas that comes with holding the top seat at Hosei University, a 130-year-old institution with about 30,000 students and 1,500 faculty and staff, Professor Tanaka, 62, makes regular appearances on a Sunday morning talk show aired on the Tokyo Broadcasting System, where she is known for her tirades against the right-leaning government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
 
The appointment a year ago of Professor Tanaka, the first woman to be named president of a major Japanese university, could not have come at a more relevant or ripe moment. A long, sleepy era for Japanese universities ended in the 1990s when a demographic shift occurred: A sharp decline in the number of young people put academic institutions in the position of having to compete for new students.
 
Since then, the globalization of higher education has jolted universities, which are struggling to gain a foothold in the international marketplace for students. On top of these changes, the evolving role of women in Japanese politics and society has become a topic of national interest.
 
Hosei University, a private establishment where Professor Tanaka was a student, professor and dean for the last several decades, has been losing ground academically to other large institutions such as Meiji and Rikkyo universities in Tokyo. Meiji and Rikkyo are part of a group of elite private schools vying to join higher-learning’s top ranks, spots that are occupied by universities like Keio and Waseda.
 
Long regarded as staid, very masculine and leftist, Hosei needed a facelift.
 
So, when Professor Tanaka was elected the 19th president of the university in November 2013, she took it as a sign that the institution wanted real change, she said in an interview in her office, dressed, as often, in a kimono. “I took on all and every interview request from the media since my election,” she said.
 
Since the appointment, she has become a fixture in the Japanese press, with her name appearing at least 30 times in newspapers, magazines and on television. (She was already well known because of her regular appearances on the Sunday morning talk show.)
 
One of the main points she has driven home repeatedly in her press interviews is that Hosei is going global.
 
“The number of foreign citizens working in Japanese firms is growing by leaps and bounds,” she said, adding that the corporate world no longer worked like a small village, where a Japanese manager could expect everyone to have the same cultural background and language.
 
“Given how Japanese society and corporations are changing, it will become harder to survive unless you have the experience of going abroad to study and live,” she said.
 
She said the university needed to teach that reality to students. Many young Japanese had not yet internalized that idea, she said, because for generations there had been little exposure to foreign cultures.
 
Her message has been heard loud and clear at the university.
 
“The atmosphere has changed drastically,” since Professor Tanaka took the helm, said Kennosuke Tanaka, an associate professor who teaches international sociology at Hosei’s Tokyo campus. “We are a large school, so individual professors don’t meet with her, but in and through meetings with the deans, she made it clear that she wanted to see the university move further along the globalization line.”
 
Hosei is not alone in its push to become more international. Globalization “has become an extremely important issue for large leading universities,” said Hiroshi Kobayashi, editor of College Management magazine.
 
“They are concerned about giving students a more globally oriented education as well as receiving more international students,” he said, because Japanese employers are badly in need of cross-cultural skills to match their global corporate challenges.
 
For example, when Professor Tanaka took up her position in April, she issued a memo saying she wanted to see all course syllabuses written in English. “She has this top-down style,” said Prof. Kennosuke Tanaka, who is not related to the president.
 
That style is uncommon at Japanese universities, where leaders are expected to govern in a collegial manner. Japanese university presidents are elected by all faculty members, not by a board of trustees, so the faculty as a whole is a powerful lobby, said Mr. Kobayashi, the magazine editor. “A president’s initiatives are often chronically hampered by the faculty,” making it difficult to push through sweeping changes.
 
But changes to the laws governing Japanese universities have strengthened the executive powers of school presidents, Mr. Kobayashi said, adding: “It is going to be of crucial importance what decisions presidents make and how they communicate their messages to the public.”
 
Professor Tanaka grew up in the coastal city of Yokohama and entered Hosei in the early 1970s, when a radical student movement was still raging at the university — even though it was dying down elsewhere. She said she was attracted to Hosei because of Hideo Odagiri, a Marxist-oriented scholar of modern Japanese literature who was a prominent professor at the time. Professor Tanaka herself chose to concentrate on the history and culture of Edo, the late medieval to early modern period in which shoguns ruled Japan.
 
Hosei’s leftist tradition has waned, Professor Tanaka says, but the university has maintained an energetic, socially conscious culture. “There is still a campus culture here that keeps people civic-minded and socially involved,” she said, adding that this same civic awareness was now spilling over into the international domain, pushing students to study overseas and participate in international volunteer activities.
 
Even before Professor Tanaka’s appointment, Hosei was at the center of Japanese education’s efforts to internationalize. The number of Hosei students attending programs overseas grew to 875 this year from 398 in 2004, putting the university at No.4 on a list of Japanese colleges and universities whose students studied abroad, according to a ranking published by Asahi Shimbun Publishing.
 
To meet its international goals, Hosei subsidizes overseas studies. Chinatsu Okayasu, a freshman, said she chose Hosei over other universities in part because of that support. “Hosei offers up to one million yen to those going overseas,” she said, the equivalent of about $8,400. “From the pamphlets I was looking at, other rival schools gave only about ¥250,000.”
 
Professor Tanaka has ambitious goals for the study-abroad program. By 2023, she wants the number of Hosei students going overseas to more than triple to 3,000 and expects 10 percent of Japan’s student body to be made up of international students.
 
But there are detractors who oppose her international push. “There are some faculty members who denounce the move as giving in to ‘English language imperialism,”’ she said. “That is based on a total misunderstanding. We are not doing it just for corporations. The universe of social activism is also expanding and we need to mobilize knowledge of the world to accomplish our goals.”