Comparison sites quote one number for ISI. Usually it is around a million yen, with no indication of which campus that belongs to or what it buys.
The real figure is five separate charges, and the gap between ISI’s cheapest and most expensive campus is wider than most people expect. Here is the published table for the 2027 and 2028 academic years, long-term courses, first year only.
| Item | Shinjuku Main | Shinjuku Prime | Ikebukuro / Takadanobaba / Osaka / Kyoto | Nagano | Career campuses |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Application fee | 40,000 | 40,000 | 40,000 | 40,000 | 40,000 |
| Enrolment fee | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| Tuition | 750,000 | 750,000 | 720,000 | 640,000 | 760,000 |
| Materials | 55,000 | 55,000 | 55,000 | 55,000 | 55,000 |
| Facility fee | 120,000 | 170,000 | 100,000 | 70,000 | 100,000 |
| First-year total | 1,065,000 | 1,115,000 | 1,015,000 | 905,000 | 1,055,000 |
All amounts in Japanese yen.
The campus gap is not where you would look for it
Nagano’s first-year total is 905,000 yen. Shinjuku Prime is 1,115,000 yen.
Tuition explains part of that, but not most of it. Nagano’s tuition is 640,000 yen against Shinjuku Prime’s 750,000 yen — a difference of well under half the gap.
The rest sits in a line item almost nobody compares: the facility fee. It ranges from 70,000 yen at Nagano to 170,000 yen at Shinjuku Prime. Same school, same course type, more than double the charge.
If you are weighing two ISI campuses against each other, that is the row to read first.
The facility fee is not only facilities
ISI states that the facility fee includes student insurance.
This matters when you compare ISI against another school. If the other school quotes a lower facility fee but charges insurance separately, the two numbers are not describing the same thing. Put insurance in the same column for both before you decide which is cheaper.
One charge comes due before you are accepted
The 40,000 yen application fee is payable at the time of application.
You pay it to be considered, not to enrol. Budget it as a separate, earlier outlay — and factor it in if you are applying to more than one school, because each application carries its own.
The number that is missing from this table
Every figure above is labelled first year.
Most students on a long-term course stay longer than that. The table does not give a second-year figure, and ISI adds a note that fees for the following year may increase while a student is enrolled.
So the honest answer to “what does two years cost” is: this page does not say, and the school reserves the right to change it.
Two things to do about that:
- Ask the school in writing for the current second-year schedule before you commit. Get it as a document, not a conversation.
- Ask whether the enrolment fee and application fee recur. They are listed once here, under a first-year heading, which is not the same as being told they are one-time.
Schools answer these questions routinely. The reason to ask is not suspicion — it is that a two-year budget built on a one-year table will be short, and you will discover by how much at the worst possible moment.
What this table does not cover
Housing is not among the five line items. Neither is daily living cost, nor the application fee for a second school if ISI is not your only option.
Immigration also expects applicants to show funds for living expenses on top of tuition. That requirement comes from the Immigration Services Agency, not from the school, and the amount is assessed case by case — so treat any single figure you see quoted for it as someone’s estimate rather than a published threshold.
Using the table
Read it as five decisions, not one price:
- Which campus — the spread across ISI’s own campuses is larger than the gap between many different schools.
- Which course type — the career-track campuses carry the highest tuition of the group at 760,000 yen.
- What the facility fee covers — at ISI it includes insurance, which changes any cross-school comparison.
- When each charge falls due — the application fee comes first, before acceptance.
- What year two looks like — not on this page, and worth asking before you sign.
Our ISI Japanese Language School profile lists the campuses, course types and entry requirements alongside the other schools we cover, if you want to compare before working through the fee table.
Fees change by academic year. The figures above are what ISI published for 2027 and 2028 at the time of writing. The source link below goes straight to the page they came from — check it against the year you are actually applying for.