JAPANESE STUDIES AT Manchester University grew out of a long-term collaborative language-teaching and business development centre run by what were then the four universities in Greater Manchester (the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology [UMIST], Salford University, Manchester Metropolitan University and the Victoria University of Manchester). After early attempts to establish an MA foundered, the so-called Greater Manchester Centre for Japanese Studies was largely a business and teaching service operation until in 2006 it was finally absorbed into the new Manchester University, which was created following the 2004 merger of the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST. The formation of the new University of Manchester was significant in providing opportunities to reach out into new areas of scholarship and teaching. Japanese Studies was developed along with Chinese Studies (established a year earlier, in 2006) through internal university development funds.

Ian Reader was appointed as the foundation professor in 2007 and he worked with Professor Steven Parker (then head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures) and Jonathan Bunt, who formerly worked at the Japan Centre developing language- teaching programmes and has published a dictionary and grammar of Japanese for learners, in order to develop a full department and programmes of study. The new department has had a focus on modern and early modern Japan from the outset. Professor Reader, who is an expert on modern Japanese religion and the author of Sendatsu and the Development of Contemporary Pilgrimage (1983) and Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyō (2000), was joined by two lecturers who were specialists on modern Japanese society, Dr Peter Cave, an anthropologist who works on education and has written Primary School in Japan: Self, Individuality and Learning in Elementary Education (2007), and Dr Mara Patessio, a historian of Meiji Japan who wrote Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement (2011). With language tutors from the former Japan Centre, a degree programme was launched in 2007 and although the programme had not been fully advertised nearly twenty students were enrolled.