Konan receives about 50 students from abroad every year and offers a one-year non-degree program at KIEC. The academic year at Konan University has two semesters, the first from September to December, and the second from January to May. The academic program consists of morning classes in Japanese language every day from Monday through Friday, and afternoon classes in Japan Studies, each meeting twice a week for 90 minutes per meeting. The Japan Studies courses are taught in English. The normal course load for all students is Japanese language plus two Japan Studies courses per semester. The grades students earn from these courses are forwarded to, and recognized by, their home universities.
The participants in this program are exchange students from affiliated universities. The University of Illinois heads a Consortium of American Universities and recruits students interested in spending a year in Kobe from across the USA and sends them to Konan. Other universities have bilateral exchange agreement with Konan University and send students to the Year-In-Japan Program.

The Konan-Illinois component of the program has a full-time resident director from one of the Universities in the Illinois Consortium whose specialty is normally in the field of Japan Studies. The director ensures that academic standards are maintained and that a high degree of student care can be offered to all those participating in the program.

I am a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, and my fi eld is linguistics. I came to Japan for the first time in 1976, and I spent two years in Tokyo. I studied at a Japanese language school for American and Canadian graduate students for about 10 months, and after that I did research for my Ph.D. dissertation and worked part-time at a translation company for about a year. I lived in two different small apartments, and like many students at that time, I went to my neighborhood public bath every day. I have visited Japan many times since then, and I spent a year doing research at Rikkyo University in the fall of 1988 and the spring and summer of 1989 - the end of Showa and the beginning of Heisei. Japan has changed a lot in the last 30 years, and I miss things like the Kokutetsu and the Hankyu Braves. I have never lived in the Kansai before, and I am really enjoying Kobe. It is fascinating to watch the YIJ students go through the same kind of experiences that I went through myself so long ago.