THE DAIWA ANGLO-JAPANESE Foundation was established in 1988, generously funded by donations from Daiwa Securities totalling L20 million over its first two years. From the beginning, education was its core mission. The first of the Foundation's three charitable objects, set out in the Trust Deed, is ‘The advancement of the education of the citizens of the United Kingdom and the citizens of Japan in each other's institutions, business organisations, economy, culture, heritage, history, language, literature, art, music and medical and scientific achievements.’ The other two objects also refer to education, and describe the Foundation's objectives of giving scholarships and grants respectively.

Although the Trust Deed itself implies a symmetrical education of both countries about each other, there was always a perception that it was more at the UK end that education was required. With English as the lingua franca of international exchange, there was no shortage of Japanese people with knowledge of the UK's language, but very few British people had knowledge of Japanese. One undated early document in the Foundation's archives states that ‘underlying the establishment of the Foundation lay the belief that the emergence of Japan as a world power…had left large gaps in the United Kingdom's and Europe's understanding of modern Japan…[R]esources were still needed if…the United Kingdom were to begin to have the same understanding of Japan that Japan already had of the West.’

Similarly a note dated February 1992 states that:

Within a couple of months of the Foundation's establishment Sir Hugh Cortazzi, then Chairman of the Japan Society, wrote to Chino Yoshitoki (then Chairman of Daiwa Securities and Vice-Chairman of the Foundation) on 4 October 1988 stating that he was ‘very interested in the development of Japanese studies in the UK’, and attaching an article he had recently written on the subject for the Nihon Keizai Shinbun, in which he emphasised that while ‘we need no longer be ashamed of our efforts in Japanese studies’, ‘resources are not yet adequate to build up a significant corps of Japanologists’.