IN 1973, THE then Prime Ministers of Japan and Great Britain, Tanaka Kakuei and Edward Heath, released a joint communiqué announcing, inter alia, the donation by the Japanese government of the considerable sum of 300 million yen (then L455,000), for the promotion of Japanese studies in UK universities. The donation was to be made through endowment via the Japan Foundation and to be administered in the UK by the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee (JFEC), which was established for this purpose in 1974 under the auspices of the University Grants Committee (UGC).

Membership of the JFEC was drawn from the UK Japanese studies community, under an independent chair elected by the University Grants Committee (UGC). Although the JFEC is now based in the offices of the British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS) at the University of Essex, the original host institution, the University of Sheffield, continues to provide financial administration.

Amongst the many benefits to the UK Japanese studies field which flowed from the establishment of the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee was support for the UK Japan Library Group's Co-operative Acquisitions Scheme. In many ways it was, ultimately, as with many other initiatives, to become a victim of the success of the Japan Foundation's original aim to promote knowledge about Japan in other countries through cultural exchange and education. What follows is the story of the Cooperative Acquisitions Scheme, based on notes and correspondence between the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee and Japan Library Group (JLG).

When the JFEC was set up, the Japan Library Group was already at work, founded in 1966 by what were then the four main academic centres of Japanese Studies (Cambridge, SOAS, Oxford and Sheffield) and the British Museum Library and the National Lending Library (later merged within the British Library), with the aim of providing co-ordinated library support through the sharing of resources and expertise.

The first major achievement of the group was the publication of a checklist of Japanese language serials held in the UK, an invaluable resource in those pre-electronic days, and this led to the successful identification of gaps in the holdings, and the amalgamation of title runs by donations between member libraries, a process that is still relevant though somewhat less so with the gradually developing availability of digital versions of journals.