Ever since it was first established in 2014 as a collaborative project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Waseda University in Tokyo, the Yanai Initiative has been working to realize a sustainable, equitable, globally interconnected future for the Japanese humanities.

As the steady decline of Japan’s population leads Japanese universities to welcome more students from abroad, humanities programs that have long played an essential role in the intergenerational transmission of specialized knowledge of Japan’s past have become small epicenters of globalization. Undergraduates from around the world show up on campuses across Japan eager to learn about Japanese literature, theater, film, art, and popular culture, but often without the basic linguistic skills they need to engage with materials in Japanese. So their universities create classes in English. Whole new departments are founded, staffed by professors capable of teaching nuanced, sophisticated classes in the increasingly ubiquitous global vernacular of English.

The Yanai Initiative was born of a concern about certain negative long-term effects this situation might have, and of an eagerness to build on the exciting potentials it holds out. If there is a risk that the value of knowledge and know-how accumulated over the course of generations within the Japanese academy may, little by little, be overshadowed in Japanese universities by other values, then let’s try to broaden the audience. Create more opportunities for scholars accustomed to working within relatively narrow lineages of transmission to share what they know with wider, more diverse groups of colleagues and students—and, at the same time, to learn a bit about modes of scholarship in other parts of the world. Counter one kind of globalization with another.

This is the core impulse that animates the Yanai Initiative’s activities. And while initially our efforts were directed primarily at academic programming and projects, over the years we have widened our focus to include not just research, but also the doing of culture—creating projects and programming intended for members of the general public..

As you will discover exploring this website, we have done, and continue to do, quite a lot. We host major academic symposia, support graduate student research, and create opportunities for scholars from different backgrounds and areas of the world to forge connections, even friendships. We have been helping to raise a new generation of literary translators of Japanese, and supporting important projects in literary translation. We organize events large and small relating to literature, performance, film, design, music, art, food, architecture. We create educational smartphone apps and other digital content. We work to make the Japanese humanities inclusive and equitable on a global scale.