ONE of the many things that World War II taught Americans was the general inadequacy of their knowledge of critical areas outside their own country. Since the war the responsibilities of world leadership assumed by the United States have made more acute the need for Americans to acquire an understanding of the world around them. One result of this growing world consciousness has been an important new development in American higher education: the appearance of graduate training and research centers on the different foreign areas of the world. Such centers have been established in most of the major universities, the areas of specialization depending upon the resources and interests of each university. The University of Michigan's Center for Japanese Studies is one such program.
The University has for many years held a leading place among American institutions the curriculums of which have included training in the Far Eastern area. Some twenty years ago a small group of the faculty at Ann Arbor initiated the Program in Oriental Civilizations. Gradually, this broader program came to be more and more specialized on the Far East; the whole Orient proved to be too large a unit. By World War II the University had a nation-wide reputation in Far Eastern studies, and various area and language schools were assigned to it by the United States government. After the war Professor Robert B. Hall of the Department of Geography, under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, made a survey of the foreign-area resources and interests of the different major universities of the country, recommending a plan for development on a national scale. He was instrumental in bringing the Center for Japanese Studies to Michigan in 1947 and has been its Director from the start.
The Center for Japanese Studies was made possible by generous grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. To these a supplemental annual grant is made by the University. The Viking Fund has been most helpful in supplying equipment for research in the field. The General Library and private donors have assisted in building up a library of Japanese materials.
The aim of the Center for Japanese Studies is fourfold: (1) to build at the University of Michigan a solid base in Japanese studies in terms of staff and library and other research and training resources, (2) to train a limited number of highly selected young men and women as specialists in the Japanese area, (3) to carry out a program of publication of research findings and research materials in the Japanese field, and (4) to maintain a continuing research program of investigation on the total structure of Japanese society.
The Center for Japanese Studies has its administrative offices in Haven Hall. A library, reading room, seminar, and work rooms are on the fourth floor of the General Library. The library, one of the major Oriental collections in the country, now numbers some fifty thousand volumes of which eight thousand are in Chinese and the rest in Japanese. It offers facilities to students and staff for complete research in the Japanese area. The Center also maintains in Japan a field station in the city of Okayama. This station, equipped with living quarters, cars, office equipment, photostat machines, provides all the essentials to students and staff to conduct firsthand observational studies in Japan proper.
The staff of the Center for Japanese