A total of approximately 3,000 Japanese people annually take the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT, a primary test commonly used in European and North American MBA admissions). These are people who plan to attend an MBA program outside of Japan, and half their number is around 1,500 people. When one also considers people who pay their own way, that leaves a total of approximately 1,000 people who are sponsored (dispatched by their company) to go abroad every year. The aim of this type of company dispatch system is to attempt a breakthrough from ordinary company behavior in industries where the tendency is for people to engage in identical ideas and expressions. Sometimes the dispatch is one aspect of a company’s internal training program. For this training, business schools are often selected with students that are broadly diverse, as such schools are highly evaluated given company needs. These practices have been followed since the 1980s, chiefly by market-listed corporations.

A closer inspection of such programs shows that some of the employees who returned home with an MBA adopted company management methods that had not been previously found at Japanese companies, namely, enterprise value management based upon maximizing short-term profits. They had become personnel who no longer endorsed the traditional characteristics of Japanese companies, which tend to be focused on “a long-term perspective with family-style management.” Thus, rather than developing the kind of leaders the company sought, these programs produced MBA holders who were viewed as people who were “difficult to handle and deal with.” In the 1990s, as the economic bubble of the 1980s decade burst, companies began to overhaul their MBA overseas-study dispatch systems.

As the 2000s began, business schools began to appear in Japan. There was a gradual establishment of educational methods and curriculum based on case methods, for example. Many of the instructors were people who had been dispatched to Western business schools as future candidates for key company positions, but who had eventually quit their firms to start consulting companies. As these consultants took their place at academic podiums, companies began to become aware of the value of a domestic MBA. Today, as many Japanese business schools offer night and weekend classes that allow MBA students to continue working at their companies, the same MBA dispatch system is used to send students to MBA programs both within Japan and abroad.