THE UNIVERSITY OF East Anglia was established in Norwich in 1963, and the first Japanese students arrived in the 1970s. Since then, Japan has been regarded as a trusted and reliable friend of the University, but it has really been over the past few years that UEA's relationship with Japan has truly blossomed.

In 2012 Norwich was designated a UNESCO City of Literature, the first English city to receive this honour. One of the University's great strengths lies in literature and creative writing: the famous MA in Creative Writing was set up by Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury in 1970, and the second student was one Kazuo Ishiguro, who went on to pen such masterpieces as The Artist of the Floating World. The first graduate from this course was Ian McEwan, now regarded as one of the best current writers. UEA's connection with Japanese literature continues, and in recent years, with the generous support of the Nippon Foundation, many distinguished Japanese authors and their translators have featured at the annual Summer School run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, established by W. G. Sebald in 1989. A recent Director of this centre, Dr Valerie Henitiuk, who is now a professor at McEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, was herself a specialist in the translation of classical Japanese literature and published Worlding Sei Shōnagon: The Pillow Book in Translation (2012).

Building on the reputation for Japanese studies established by the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC) discussed elsewhere in this volume, UEA embarked on a new phase of engagement with Japan in 2011, with the creation of a Centre for Japanese Studies and new degree-level programmes in Japanese. With the generous support of Yakult UK, a University Lecturer in Japanese Language was appointed, Dr Nana Sato-Rossberg, a specialist in the burgeoning field of translation studies. At the time of writing, the fourth cohort of undergraduates studying for a degree in Japanese language has just started, and the first cohort has just returned from their year abroad, at one of 14 Japanese universities. The University now has four lecturers in Japanese language in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Language and Communication Studies, led by the Yakult Lecturer and Head of Japanese, Mika Brown.

Introduction

Archaeologists have worked for over a century to document the diversity in the material remains of past human activity in the Japanese archipelago. First and foremost has been the classification of archaeological material into a series of ‘types’, recurrent associations which comprise archaeological ‘cultures’. It is now accepted that there were many Palaeolithic, Jōmon, Yayoi and Kofun period cultures. What is less widely agreed is how to interpret this multiplicity. One way has been to regard them as ethnic groups with a shared sense of identity, but this approach is extremely problematic. Incorporating this diversity into general accounts of Japanese archaeology has also caused problems, as archaeologists search for ways to make their esoteric subject matter more comprehensible to the public. As Clare Fawcett suggests in chapter 4, archaeologists often fall back on simplification, stereotypes and familiar images in dealing with the public, leaving their presentations open to political manipulation.

The Wa, Kumaso, Hayato and Emishi are all ethnic groups mentioned in historical sources on early Japan. Unfortunately, these accounts are sparse and mostly written by outsiders. Many scholars have attempted to relate these groups to contemporary Japanese populations. Physical anthropologists and historical linguists have grouped past populations into physical types and language groups. Archaeology has produced accounts of the material remains in terms of repeated sets of associated material culture. The interface between the study of ancient material culture and the study of ethnic groups and ‘ethnogenesis’, however, remains problematic.