THE GREAT BRITAIN Sasakawa Foundation was founded in 1985 following an initial endowment of ¥3,000,000,000 (L9.5 million) from the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation (now called The Nippon Foundation). The objective was to create an exclusively grant-giving body that could offer financial support towards joint projects and initiatives that would ‘advance the education of the people of both nations in each other's culture, society and achievements’ and so promote and maintain close relations between the United Kingdom and Japan.

The endowment had by the end of 2015 reached almost L26 million. Over the years the Foundation has awarded almost 5,000 grants, totalling over L14 million, to projects and initiatives in all fields of Japan-related activity ranging from arts, culture and society to science, technology and medicine, from the humanities to youth exchange and sport. Whilst emphases between activity fields have naturally shifted over the years, it is support for the study of Japan and its language that has remained a cornerstone of the Foundation's work.

The inaugural press release, whilst describing a background in which ‘more effort should be made in promoting mutual understanding between (our) two peoples’, observed that ‘the British people should have greater opportunities to learn about Japan’. The Foundation's first Annual Report similarly referred to ‘a need to encourage in various ways a greater understanding of Japan and its people’. At a time of relative disparity in mutual understanding, with significantly less known in the UK about Japan than vice versa, these were unsurprising statements. Japan, after all, was a country of growing political and economic consequence, both to the UK and to the world.

By 1988 there was specific mention of emerging priorities:

And records of early trustees’ meetings also begin to reveal a recurring concern among founding trustees that not enough was being done at ‘the national level’ to promote Japan and Japanese studies, for governments ‘seemed to review the health of the field of Japanese studies only about every twenty years, and then only when forced to do so’. (Internal meeting note, 1987).