IN DURHAM's RECENT history Louis Allen was the first person to offer instruction in the Japanese language and to publish on Japan. Louis was a reader in French but in the war had been sent to SOAS on a crash course in Japanese and was then despatched to Burma as an intelligence officer. Those courses consisted of studying either speaking and listening or reading, since only limited skills could be taught in the time. Louis revelled in telling how lucky it was he had done the reading course since a Gurkha soldier had come back from fighting with a bedraggled document that Louis was able to identify as a Japanese battle plan, and alert his superiors to its contents. After the fighting ended he remained in Burma to interrogate Japanese prisoners and as a result of that began a long term collaboration with a former Japanese soldier. Louis went on to publish a number of books on the war with Japan and became deeply involved in the reconciliation movement. Just before his death we were approached by the Japanese Embassy over their plan to recommend him for an award, but sadly he died before this could happen. In the 1960s and 1970s Louis offered Japanese classes to all-comers on Wednesday afternoons as informal non-credit courses.

The School of Oriental Studies (SOS) at Durham was established in 1951 by Professor T.W. Thacker, a semitic philologist fluent in German who had worked with the code-breakers at Bletchley Park during the war. The funding for SOS came partly as a result of the Scarbrough Report of 1947, an attempt to ensure that Britain did not in the future find itself once again desperately short of qualified linguists, as it had been during the war. The first lecturer in Chinese, Raymond Dawson, was appointed in 1952; when he returned to Oxford he was replaced by Archie Barnes. A second lecturer in Chinese, Keith Pratt, was appointed in 1964, and a third, Don Starr, was appointed in 1971. The latter two brought interests and expertise in Korean and Japanese to the School.

Formal teaching of Japanese for credit began in 1981 when a student of Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies (SOS), Michael Jenkins, expressed a keen interest in taking Japanese as a subsidiary subject.