THE PROGRAMME OF Japanese Studies at Oxford Brookes started in the 1980s on a small scale, with a single part-time Japanese teacher who was hired to add Japanese to the ‘Languages for business’ course and also taught some engineering students, and a halftime anthropologist, who had carried out her doctoral fieldwork in Japan. By the end of the twentieth century, thanks to continuing support from the Japan Foundation, the Japanese Embassy and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, it could boast more anthropologists of Japan than any other university in Europe, possibly in the world, and there was a stream of successful doctoral students who are now imparting their skills in other departments in Japan, the UK and mainland Europe. Oxford Brookes has also hosted both the annual conference of the British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS) and of the World Haiku Association. By 2014, the post-graduate field had declined somewhat with the loss of a unique MA course that did not recruit quite enough students to satisfy the increasingly demanding university coffers, but Oxford Brookes is now recruiting more undergraduates for its popular course on Japanese language and society than any other university in Britain, and its graduates are making their mark in all sorts of Japan-related careers. Thanks to the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the post-graduate offering is also beginning to build up again.

The initiators of the programme were Kumiko Helliwell and Joy Hendry, already friends when they found themselves employed by Brookes, and they started out by creating a Japan Interest Group, bringing together other scholars scattered throughout Oxford Polytechnic, as it was then called, who had a range of diverse interests in Japan. They organised various events including talks and demonstrations of Japanese arts including tea, ikebana and taiko drumming, and the culmination was a huge Japan Arts Day in 2001. Kumiko also invited Liam O’Brien, Kyōshi 7th Dan, and president of United Kingdom Kyūdō Association (UKKA) to initiate a kyūdō (archery) class which has now become the Oxford Kyūdō Society. During the heyday of anthropological endeavours at Oxford Brookes, they founded the Europe Japan Research Centre (EJRC). At that time Rupert Cox, who later published The Zen Arts: An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan (2008), held a post-doctoral position.