1,498 People Studying Japanese in Ukraine: The Japan Foundation’s FY2024 Survey

Fourteen institutions, 93 teachers, 1,498 learners: those are the results for Ukraine in the Japan Foundation’s “Survey on Japanese-Language Education Abroad,” conducted September to December 2024. Compared with the FY2021 survey’s 17 institutions, 105 teachers, and 2,052 learners, every figure has fallen.

This survey is conducted by the Japan Foundation every three years across institutions teaching Japanese worldwide. The FY2024 results were published on September 3, 2025, with some tabulations corrected in March 2026. What follows draws on that survey report and its tables, the Japan Foundation’s “Country/Region Information” for Ukraine (FY2025), and universities’ own official histories (as of September 2026).

The FY2024 Survey Figures

The survey counts institutions, teachers, and learners by level of education. Ukraine’s breakdown is as follows.

Just over 60% of learners are at higher-education institutions such as universities. According to Table 1-1a, of the 946 in higher education, 801 major in Japanese, 135 study it outside their major, and 10 take part through extracurricular activities. “Other than school education” refers to private language schools and courses open to the public run by universities or public institutions.

Elsewhere in the same survey, of the 14 institutions, 11 are public institutions established by the state or local government and 3 are private. Among higher-education institutions granting a degree in Japanese or Japanese studies, 6 offer a bachelor’s, 6 a master’s, 4 a doctorate, and 1 an associate degree. According to the report, 12 of the 14 institutions (85.7%) offer online classes, a higher share than Eastern Europe as a whole (60.4%).

The Trend Since FY2012

The number of learners peaked at 2,174 in FY2018, and by FY2024 it had fallen by about 30% from that peak.

Different Surveys Count Differently, and at Different Times

Three points need to be kept in mind when reading this table.

• The way teachers are counted changed starting with FY2024. Through FY2021, it was the total number of teachers affiliated with each institution; from FY2024, a teacher who teaches at more than one level is counted once for each level. In both survey years, a teacher who teaches at more than one institution is counted more than once.
• Ukraine’s survey period for FY2021 ran from September 2021 to March 2022, straddling the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
• The figures count only learners at institutions that responded to the survey. The Japan Foundation’s “Country/Region Information” notes that these are a compilation of results from responding institutions. People studying independently or with a private tutor are not included.

Changes Since the Full-Scale Invasion

The FY2024 report states that Russia’s military invasion has led to the temporary closure of Japanese-language institutions and forced staff, including teachers, to evacuate, which is continuing, and that institution numbers, teacher numbers, and learner numbers have all fallen sharply. At the same time, it notes that, against a backdrop of past and expected support from Japan, the number of people newly starting to learn tends to be rising. Conducting the survey itself was difficult; with the cooperation of the Association of Japanese-Language Teachers in Ukraine, staff at the Embassy of Japan in Ukraine directly contacted institutions that could be reached.

The History of Japanese-Language Teaching at Universities

The Japan Foundation’s “Country/Region Information” (FY2025) includes a brief history of Japanese-language education in Ukraine. Alongside universities’ own official histories, it looks like this.

The “Start” Depends on What You Count

On Japanese-language teaching at Kyiv University, the Japan Foundation says it began in the 1940s and was repeatedly interrupted, and dates it becoming a full major to 1996. The university’s own history dates the start of teaching Chinese, Korean, and Japanese under its Oriental studies program to 1995. Going further back, the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (reprinted from the 1988 print edition) states that Japanese language and literature were taught at a university in Kharkiv in the 1920s, and that the All-Ukrainian Association of Orientalists, founded in Kharkiv in 1926, had a Japanese section. The answer to “when did it start” depends on which city and which form of education you are counting.

According to the Japan Foundation, the current centers of higher education are Kyiv National University and Kyiv National Linguistic University, with universities offering Japanese as a full major also found in Lviv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro.

Efforts Supporting Japanese-Language Education

According to the Japan Foundation’s “Country/Region Information” (FY2025), it has dispatched one Japanese-language specialist to the Ukraine-Japan Center. The center’s public Japanese-language courses were suspended once in February 2022, after the full-scale invasion, and resumed in April of that year. It had 242 enrollees in FY2023, said to be mostly in their teens and twenties. As one of the center’s projects, a Ukrainian-language version of the grammar explanations for the Japanese-language textbook “Minna no Nihongo Shokyu” was also produced.

How the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) has been administered in Kyiv, and the number of test-takers, is covered in our article on the JLPT. Places where Ukrainians living in Japan can study Japanese are introduced in our article on where to learn Japanese.