President Drew G. Faust talks with David Tseng and Harvard GSD Dean Mohsen Mostafavi at a banquet celebrating the opening of the Harvard Center Shanghai last Thursday.

University President Drew G. Faust spent eight days of her spring break meeting with top government and education leaders in Japan and China, underscoring the University’s efforts to bolster its international presence.

Spending the bulk of her time in Japan, Faust met with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to discuss the declining number of Japanese students studying at American universities—something Hatoyama, who studied at Stanford, said he wished to address, according to Harvard history professor Andrew D. Gordon ’74, who participated in the meeting.

As the number of Japanese students at Harvard has fallen by one third in recent years—from 151 students in 1999 to 101 last year—Faust urged Japan’s university leaders to encourage their students to study at Harvard.

“It’s part of Harvard’s globalization goal to attract the very best talent from around the world,” said Susan J. Pharr, a professor of Japanese politics and director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, who accompanied Faust on the trip. “Having the president go to Japan is a way to deepen the relationship, and to make sure that Harvard is well known in Japan.”

Faust left Japan for a two-day stint in China, where she celebrated the opening of the Harvard Center Shanghai—Harvard Business School’s first international teaching facility—which will function as a home for the school’s executive education programs in China as well as collaborative work between faculty at Harvard and Chinese universities.

Faust described the center as a hub for “the global enterprise of higher education” and stressed the importance of continued collaboration with universities in Asia during her remarks at the event.

William C. Kirby, chairman of the Harvard China Fund, said he hoped the center would pave the way for more academic partnerships with Chinese univerisities, support undergraduates and faculty research efforts, and bolster Harvard’s presence in China.

“This is not a culmination but a beginning of a new set of efforts in a new century,” Kirby said. “It was really energizing to people who are now seeing the physical incarnation of Harvard’s committment to be an international university.”

China is currently the most popular destination for undergraduates studying abroad, said Kirby, who was instrumental in improving undergraduate access to international programs during his tenure as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In addition to her usual meetings with international alumni, Faust stopped by a girls’ high school in Japan to discuss challenges that continue to face women in the workplace—continuing her tradition of raising women’s issues while visiting schools for girls abroad, which she did most recently on her November trip to South Africa and Botswana.

But Faust also ventured off the beaten path during her downtime.

Faust and her husband, history of science professor Charles E. Rosenberg, visited a rare bookstore in Tokyo, where the two self-professed book lovers spent an hour and a half perusing the store’s eighth-century manuscripts, according to Gordon.

—Staff writer Elias J. Groll can be reached at egroll@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer William N. White can be reached wwhite@fas.harvard.edu.