Japan is one of the first countries to experience simultaneously an aging population of boomers along with a declining birth rate. Today, more than 25% of the population is over 65. Japan is at crossroads in time where there are just about twice as many old people as there are young people. Stresses on the labour market resulting from population decline and the shift to a services economy have prompted the Japanese government to pursue an aggressive strategy to reorganise tertiary education. University reform is a policy focus of the Abe government in three areas: innovation, business development, and global human resource skills training. Historically in Japan achievement in these areas has been almost exclusively the domain of industry. Reform policies that seek to promote innovation, development and global skills in the university setting represent a transfer of responsibility from industry to education and thereby a re-envisioning of the function of the university in Japanese society. The purpose of this paper is to explore how education reform policy is translated into practice at an elite Japanese university. The paper finds that the demands on the university to cater to divergent customers are greatly at odds: the university is called upon to prepare students for the domestic workforce, accommodate government aspirations for internationalisation, become a centre for innovation and research excellence, and simultaneously be a positive force in the local community, all the while restructuring organisational operations to accommodate harmonization with elite international networks.
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