Japan - Collaboration

Oxford has strong collaborative links with a range of Japanese universities, businesses and non-profit organisations in disciplines ranging from anthropology and history to physics and medicine. These relationships range from long term, multi disciplinary research collaborations to individual partnerships between Oxford faculty members and their Japanese colleagues. Some of the collaborations between Oxford and Japan can be seen below:

Subaru Telescope
The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and its 8.3 metre Subaru Telescope, located in Hawaii, are an important international resource. In 2008, a fibre multi-object spectrograph (FMOS) was installed on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to assist the study of galaxy evolution, dark energy, and early cosmic expansion. Oxford’s astronomical instrumentation group played a leading role in the international collaboration that designed and made this important instrument.

Oxford University has formal partnership and collaboration agreements with a number of key academic institutions in Japan, including Kobe University, Osaka University and Nara Medical University. We also have an ongoing international collaboration agreement with Jeol Ltd., Japan’s leading supplier of electron microscopes - to conduct ongoing research in the field of Transmission Electron Microscopy.

Oxford also has collaborations with Japanese scientists working in particle physics. Oxford physicists are creating laserwires for the Accelerator Test Facility at KEK (Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation), and for the proposed International Linear Collider.

In Material Sciences, Oxford scientists are investigating properties of different materials with a number of Japanese institutions including Toyo, Tokyo, INSS, Osaka City. The team at ISIS Innovation are working with Mitsui to develop business opportunities for advanced technologies and to establish collaborative relationships with Oxford departments.

All of our undergraduates studying Japanese spend the second year of their four-year undergraduate degree at Kobe University in Japan for extensive language study, combined with the study of civilization, culture and history. Several Oxford colleges also have long-running links with Japanese universities, welcoming visiting students to Oxford from the partner institution: Wadham with Hiroshima; Queen’s with Ochanomizu; and both Hertford and Pembroke with Waseda.

IARU
Along with eight other research-intensive universities, Oxford and the University of Tokyo are members of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). Together, they are tackling major research projects, offering a Global Summer Programme to one another’s students, and taking action on critical university issues such as campus sustainability.

Oxford is highly fortunate to have had the support of a number of leading Japanese organisations in setting up some of its cutting edge research centres. Nissan supported the creation of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies; Nomura, a large Japanese multinational organisation, support the Nomura Centre for Mathematical Finance which was established in 2001; and the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education in Tokyo supports the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics set up in 2002 in the Department of Philosophy.