Grants and Writing Resources for the University of Tokyo

On September 30, 2026, a first-year master's student in Electrical Engineering and Information Systems received the DICOMO 2026 Outstanding Paper Award, which the Information Processing Society of Japan's DICOMO Symposium gives to papers chosen from more than 200 delivered there. The paper maps force readings from a robot's fingertips into a natural-language latent space so the robot can recognize slipping, touchdown and the weight of what it holds. Six days earlier, a first-year doctoral student in Urban Engineering won an Outstanding Academic Presentation Award at the 45th annual conference of the Japanese Society for Natural Disasters for an analysis of how residents evacuated during the 2025 Ofunato City wildfire.

Writing Help at Komaba

The Center for Academic Writing at Komaba (CAWK) opened in April 2022 under the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. It grew out of the Komaba Writers' Studio, founded in 2008. Trained graduate students serve as teaching assistants and teaching fellows and give one-to-one and peer tutorials on reports and theses. The center works on a peer-support model aimed at independent, self-motivated writers, and most of its users are in the junior years of the College of Arts and Sciences.

A tutorial runs up to 40 minutes, on Zoom or in Building 10, Room 103. English support is limited to the required first-year courses ALESS, ALESA and FLOW. Japanese support reaches further. Master's students in the humanities can book help with research writing and thesis writing, two sessions in a row if they need them, and doctoral students arrange sessions by email first. Speaking practice with tutors in Chinese, Italian, Korean and other languages is open to any current UTokyo student, and students in advanced foreign-language courses can bring compositions, reports and papers to tutorials.

Fellowships for Graduate Students

Self-funded international students in graduate programs apply through their graduate school for The University of Tokyo Fellowship, a research grant of 200,000 yen a month for the standard length of the program. Research students can hold it for up to one year. In academic year 2025 the university chose 44 new recipients, bringing the number of graduate students on the grant to 110, and 952 people had received it by March 2026. The KOGA Shinsuke Scholarship, a donor-funded line within the fellowship, is for citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom.

SPRING GX trains doctoral students to lead green transformation. The Japan Science and Technology Agency has supported it through its SPRING program since autumn 2021, and it counts 1,307 doctoral participants from all of the university's schools. The WINGS programs combine master's and doctoral study in fields that run from humanities and sociology to quantum and semiconductor science. Nineteen had been set up as of October 2024.

Funding for Work Abroad

The Go Global scholarships are sorted by length of stay and purpose. One group pays for overseas activities such as conferences, research projects and student organization work. Another supports students who want a degree from a graduate school overseas. Scholarships that need a UTokyo nomination go through the student's faculty or graduate school office; the rest take applications directly. Regular undergraduates who finish the required parts of Global Leadership Program-I or the trilingual GLP-II qualify for study-abroad scholarships through those programs.

Submitting a Doctoral Dissertation

The October 2023 dissertation handbook of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, written for its programs on Global Society and Environmental Sciences, explains that Japan's revised Degree Regulations require, in principle, that doctoral dissertations from academic year 2013 onward be made public online, and that the university publishes each one with the author's consent. The School of Science's submission notice of May 2026 sets out two routes. Under full publication, the full text goes into the university's academic repository. Under partial publication, the full text goes to the National Diet Library to be read there, and the repository posts an abridged version. Patent concerns can keep a full text closed for a set period.

The same handbook asks for A4 pages with thermal or tape binding. It caps the abstract at 2,000 English words or 4,000 Japanese characters, on no more than four pages, and expects it to be free of typographical and other errors. The library's Doctoral Dissertation Database lists titles, authors and summaries, and dissertations published after 2014 are in the UTokyo Repository.

For a dissertation, abstract or journal paper in English, our editors can check grammar, consistency and format before the PDF is uploaded. See our University of Tokyo dissertation and thesis editing and University of Tokyo essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• ESL Academic Writing: Overcoming Common Grammar Habits
• Writing the Abstract and Title: First Impressions Matter
• From Dissertation to Publication: The Final Scholarly Synthesis