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The Japanese university faces a serious crisis. The percentage of eighteen-year-olds going on to tertiary education has plateaued, and alternative sources of domestic students have been largely exhausted. Moreover, large numbers of tertiary institutions have been newly established over the past two decades, just as the eighteen-year-old cohort has collapsed. Today, the recruitment of large numbers of fee-paying foreign students seems to offer the only alternative to wide-scale downsizing in the Japanese higher education system. The recent Japanese government initiative, the Global 30 Project, aims to help Japanese universities to do just this. However, as demonstrated by global evaluations of universities across the world, the quality of the education provided by the Japanese university does not enjoy a high reputation. Unless standards and quality can be improved, Japan's ability to recruit sufficient numbers of fee-paying foreign students in order to keep large numbers of tertiary institutions afloat has to be questioned.