Home - Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies

The academic study of Japan was well-established at the University of Oxford (and in St Antony’s College in particular) by the end of the 1970s, when Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. decided to provide a generous endowment that resulted in the creation of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies in 1981. The Nissan Benefaction initially provided funding for a political scientist, an economist, and a modern historian. A second endowment in the early 1990s financed the construction of the Nissan Institute building within the grounds of St Antony's College and the expansion of personnel to include a social anthropologist, a second economist and two sociologists. Institutionally, the Institute is situated within the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. This breadth in social science complements the focus on history, the Japanese language, and literature found in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

The Institute consists of offices for academic staff and visitors, teaching rooms, and a 150-seat lecture theatre. It houses the Bodleian Japanese Library, which opened to readers in 1993 and holds one of the principal research and teaching collections for Japanese Studies in the UK.

Members of the Institute contribute to undergraduate teaching in their departments and in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, as well as supervising doctoral students. The MSc and MPhil programmes in Japanese Studies were launched in 2007 and enable students to choose options from the humanities, in fields such as linguistics, history and literature, alongside options in the social sciences, such as politics, economics and sociology.

Since its inception in 1981, the Institute has convened the Nissan Seminar in Japanese Studies. Each week, speakers with a national and international reputation in Japanese studies are invited to present a paper about their current research. These seminars are held throughout the Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity terms and are open to the public.  An Occasional Papers Series, of which the last was published in 2010, has enabled selected talks from the Seminar to reach a wider readership.

The Institute has been responsible for the publication of the Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series, in which more than 100 volumes have now been published, making it the largest single series of academic work on Japan in the world.