EARLY BEGINNINGS

ANY HISTORY OF the development of Japanese studies at Oxford needs to start, as with many other subjects, with the history of the Japanese collection at the Bodleian library. The first known accession of Japanese printed material was three volumes of the so-called Saga-bon, books printed with moveable-type in the Saga district of Kyoto in the early seventeenth century, which were presented to the Library in 1629 by Robert Viney, rector of Barnack, who studied at Oxford in 1621–1625. The Bodleian also possesses some very rare examples of missionary literature of the Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, collectively known as Kirishitan-ban, that were produced from 1590 until the expulsion of the missionaries from Japan in 1614.

The Japanese manuscript collection, numbering about 100 titles, contains over 20 Nara-ehon (Nara picture books), decoratively illustrated literature hand-produced in either book or scroll format from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, including a unique picture scroll of Urashima. The library also has a copy of the shuinjō (vermilion seal document) of 1613 that was issued by Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu to grant the English East India Company trade privileges in Japan, as well as the log-book of William Adams (1564–1620), the first Englishman known to have visited Japan.

The Bodleian has a rich collection of pre-1850 books in European languages dealing with Japan. This includes examples of the published correspondence of the Jesuit fathers, accounts of the early travels to Japan in various published records of European voyages overseas, material relating to the East India Companies of England and Holland, and works of European explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This material vividly illustrates Europe's contacts with Japan from the sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.

All of this material, of course, pre-dates not only the formal study of Japan at Oxford but also indeed the arrival of Japanese students in Oxford, the first of whom appeared in 1873: he was Iwakura Tomotsune, the third son of Iwakura Tomomi, then Minister of the Right in Japan and the man who led the famous Iwakura Mission. The first female student was Tsuda Ume who studied at St Hilda's College in the 1890s and went on to found Japan's first private women's school of higher education.