Education: Cut-Rate Education

Of the 72,000 students enrolled in Japan's 45 universities, slightly more than 1,000 are Chinese; about 300 are from other foreign countries. Last week New York's Japan Institute proclaimed the growing importance of Nippon as a world educational centre. The 300-odd non-Chinese foreign students, of whom ten are Americans and 126 are Siamese, were delving for the most part into such conventional fields as Oriental history and literature, science, medicine and civil engineering, but there were exceptions. Britain's Trevor P. Legett, for instance, had jujitsued himself into a ''scholarship for advanced practice, "is now rated capable of licking six ordinary adversaries...