Portraits of Science City

Tsukuba City is filled with government, corporate and university research institutes as a city of science. With the aim of attracting interest from the science community, it has been developed since the 1960s as a research university town. With a current population of around 220,000, Tsukuba City has 20,000 researchers involved in cutting-edge research, and around a quarter, or 5,000, of these researchers are foreigners.

This program will focus on three of these foreign researchers and their families, to look at the history of Tsukuba City from its founding until today, and where it is heading in the future.
We will examine their workplaces that revolve around research and product development, the state of education in families that have moved here from overseas and how they interact with local residents, how the town has built a new community over the past half-century, and how the city aims to grow in the future.

Unlike major cities in Europe or the U.S., “multinationalism” is far from being the standard in Japan. As a city of science, Tsukuba City has grown into a city of “multinationalism” and “multiculturalism,” and the program will look at how the city is working to create new value from this diversity, through the life styles of the people who live there.