New boost for Japanese studies
08 Oct 07
Oxford is one of 13 universities across the UK to receive a boost to the study of modern Japan. The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and The Nippon Foundation, a Tokyo-based private grant making body, have announced a £2.5m cash injection for UK institutions.
At Oxford University the grant will fund a Career Development Fellowship, the Sasakawa Lectureship, for five years. The post will be held jointly by the Department of Sociology and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies. The Nissan Institute was founded in 1981 and has become one of the top European centres for the study of the social science of modern Japan, with 14 senior faculty members engaged in Japanese-related research and teaching, of whom six are based in the Institute itself. The lectureship is the latest funding award to benefit the Nissan Institute following £1.5m of funding from Nissan Motors last year to commemorate the centre’s 25th anniversary.
The wider funding programme will establish 13 teaching and research posts at UK universities. These posts will focus on aspects of contemporary Japan, covering fields such as politics, economics, international relations, culture, media, and society, and aim to improve the current national situation where several university departments have had to close over the past 10 years due to a lack of funding.
The Earl of St Andrews, Chairman of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, said: ‘Japan remains the world’s second largest economy and one of the UK’s most important partners for both trade and investment. Expertise in Japanese language and in the country’s economy, culture, history and politics will remain essential if the British-Japanese relationship is to prosper and British interests in relation to Japan are to be safeguarded.’
Dr Ian Neary, Director of the Nissan Institute, said: ‘This generous support from the Sasakawa Foundation will fill an important gap in the teaching of social sciences at Oxford by enabling us to appoint someone able to work on key issues troubling Japanese society. Japanese has become a vulnerable subject in UK universities, as it is more expensive to teach per head than more popular languages such as French and German. At Oxford, however, the number of students offered courses in Japanese is set to grow. We have created new Masters courses combining language teaching with courses examining Japan from the perspective of the disciplines of political science, economics, law, literature, sociology, and history.’