Abstract: In the Meiji era, Japanese higher education established a model of foreign language education that required both English as the first foreign language and another second foreign language. Foreign language education has played an important role in the modernization, and internationalization of Japanese society. This article reviews the tradition of multilingual education in Japanese higher education since the Meiji Restoration and several reforms in the past 100 years or so, analyzes the characteristics of the multilingual education curriculum in Japanese higher education institutions, and provided several cases of multilingual education implementation in some key Japanese universities. Implications are drawn for the promotion of multilingual education in Chinese universities.