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Nishogakusha University
MEXT-Supported Program for the Strategic Research Foundation
at Private Universities
MACHI Senjurō*

Nishogakusha was founded as a Kanbun studies academy by MishimaChūshū on October 10, 1877. This is the 140th year since the university’sfounding. Recently, our university was selected for the MEXT-Supported
Program for the Strategic Research Foundation at Private Universities (SRF)
for the ﬁve years between 2015 and 2019 for our eﬀorts at explicating thespirit of founding schools for the education and research of Kanbun. In thatconnection, we are now working on “The Formation of Knowledge inModern Japan through Kanbun Studies.”
Nishogakusha’s SRF project is the successor to our 2004 2008 World
Organization for Kanbun Studies with the 21st Century COE Program.
Through the 21st Century COE Program, we established a database andinternational network organization for cataloguing Japanese kanbun materials
and, as a pillar for the revival of kanbun education we created seven researchgroups. This writer was in charge of the group studying the early modern andmodern eras. Several years after the end of the program, I was oﬃciallyappointed to chair The Department of Japanese Kanbun Instruction andResearch in the Institute for East Asian Studies. At the same time, I cameonce again to anticipate external funding for research on Japanese kangaku,
which led to our being selected for SRF.
The term kangaku in the current project refers to the learning of kanbun
in the broad sense. People tend to believe that in general, kangaku wasreplaced by yōgaku (Western studies) in the 19th century and that kangaku
declined, but this is not the case. Actually, with development of the modern
education system, kangaku metamorphosed into Chinese studies and Orientalstudies in terms of scholarship, and in terms of learning, kanbun, like kokugo(Japanese language arts) became reconﬁgured and absorbed as learning
related to language and ethics. Further, this system of scholarship and* Professor, Research Representative, Nishogakusha University.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

learning also inﬂuenced other nations in East Asia. Thus, the process ofdissolution and reconﬁguration of kangaku as scholarship and learning can be
examined chronologically and from various angles. We realized that wewanted to investigate the characteristics and issues of modernization in Japanand East Asia from kangaku.
There are now four scholars from Nishogakusha University and fromoutside our university heading up four research groups: scholarship research(Makisumi Etsuko), research on learning (Etō Shigehiro), early modern literature (Yamaguchi Tadayoshi), and research on East Asia (Machi Senjurō).
Committees are organized for carrying out research activities under eachgroup chair.
As the fundamental directionality common to our entire project, we arefocusing on “Japan in East Asia” to contribute to the internationalization andprofundity of the research environment of our university overall. For thatreason, we constantly consider research trends related to East Asian countries
and on Japanology in Western nations. We have held many types of symposia
to engage in a wide range of related research and to promote person-toperson interaction.
Further, the SRF project is being conducted in cooperation with graduate
school education within the university as a whole. To foster future scholars inthe ﬁeld we have striven to train young researchers through the hiring ofresearch fellows, research support personnel and assistants, and to support
various types of research.
We are expanding our database of information on images, texts, and people
in kanbun materials, focusing on early modern and modern Japanese kangaku
as a way to transmit various kinds of information about Japanese kangaku.
We are also moving ahead in publication of materials based on our diﬀerent
areas of research. This includes a series on facsimiles of Kanbun, a collectionof modern kangaku materials, lectures on modern Japan and kangaku, andmonographs on biographies of Scholar of Kangaku. We look forward to thesupport and encouragement of all of the members of the Society for Cultural
Interaction in East Asia and all other individuals concerned.