Ryukoku University

The Japanese Culture and Language program is excellent for beginning and intermediate students of the language - although taught in Japanese, the classes are graded, and absolute beginners are catered for, and the pace is excellent. I would recommend learning the hiragana and katakana syllabaries before you come (it's not so hard to learn on your own, and well worth the effort once you get here). If you don't speak Japanese and you come here on exchange, this is the course you will be doing. If you already speak Japanese, mainstream courses here are a little more academically lax than most Western countries, or so I hear. The common wisdom in Japan seems to be that most real learning takes place in the workforce.

Not really - the pace is good and there were no classic japanese sensei figures making me do push-ups on my knuckles etc when i failed anything.

The academic level of the English courses wasn`t that high.