To become a global leader, Japan must make a fundamental commitment to supporting the research activities of researchers at every stage of their research life. This requires making changes to both the educational institutions and the research journals that support them by incentivizing and supporting quality research.

Japanese linguistics uses Japanese text materials and conversation materials as research data. For that reason, most studies on Japanese linguistics have assumed that readers can understand Japanese and have therefore been written primarily in Japanese. This practice has undoubtedly contributed to low degree of internationalization of Japanese linguistics.

Japanese linguistics has a long history of research and can boast an impressive accumulation of results. With the aim of promoting the internationalization of Japanese linguistics, it is necessary for academic societies in Japan to take action as organizations in order to disseminate the research results of the field. At the same time, it is also important to make available for researchers all around the world a wide array of Japanese primary data, which would then form the basis for future research.

This article discusses how to disseminate research outputs in humanities in Japan to researchers abroad. It begins with an introduction of the various activities conducted by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) for the internalization of Japanese linguistics. It will then describe the difficulties that researchers in humanities may face when they try to share their knowledge with scholars abroad. The second half of the article explores the reason why our knowledge should be disseminated in the common language of English and suggests several policies that can help us accomplish this goal.

During the 17 years from 2003 to 2020, universities in the People’s Republic of China promoted reforms aimed at becoming “world-class” institutions and raising their position in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. This paper outlines the impact of the so-called World-Class University reforms on humanities fields in China.

In 2003, Xu Zhi-min, president of Peking University, unveiled a World-Class University plan that introduced a performance evaluation system to judge professors’ scholarly output. Under this plan, scholars were to be evaluated numerically based on how many papers they published in certain core journals within a certain period of time. They have also been asked to improve their English proficiency, the planned criteria for promotion to full professor included the ability to teach courses in a “foreign language” (in most cases English), and a record of publishing papers at an “international standard” of scholarship. Until recently, it has been common in China to teach courses and to publish research outcomes in the humanities in Chinese-language formats. As a result of plans for “internationalization,” however, scholars—including those working in the fields of Chinese literature, history, and philosophy—have had to justify teaching their courses and publishing their research results in Chinese. Scholars now have pressure to show that their Chinese-language courses and publications meet an “international standard.” The situation in China at the 2003 start of the World-Class University reforms resembles the current situation in Japan, where Japanology is also facing demands to be “internationalized.” The arguments that have been presented for and against the pursuit of “world-class university” status and the promotion of English-language scholarship in China merit consideration in light of conditions in Japanese universities today.

In 2020, Peking University was ranked twenty-third in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Most courses in the fields of Humanities for Chinese students are still taught in Chinese.

Currently Japanese humanities scholars are under pressure to use English in teaching and writing irrespective of whether they have sufficient proficiency in it even in cases where there is no absolute necessity to use that language. Given this awkward situation, I would like to address such questions as 1) what are the roles of English and Japanese in the process of “internationalization”? and 2) how will it be possible to create a common platform on which literary scholars specializing in different languages can share their knowledge and experience. Finally, I would like to reconsider the ultimate question: why is it necessary to “internationalize” literary studies and what does it really mean to “internationalize”? In my view, Japanese foreign literature scholars have valid reasons for their use of Japanese when conducting their academic activities; after all, the very process of studying and understanding foreign culture while basing oneself on Japanese language and culture can be a challenging, yet highly positive cross-cultural experience which can bring about fruitful findings and new contributions. English should be actively used as a tool for communication in the international academic community of which Japanese literary scholars should be an integral part.

After Commodore Matthew Perry (1794-1858) demanded the opening of Japan to the world in 1853, renowned Japanese thinker and educator Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901) visited the United States of America twice, in 1860 and 1867. Fukuzawa translated into Japanese Thomas Jefferson’s drafted “The Declaration of Independence” (1776), the democratic spirit of which he incorporated into his own million seller An Encouragement of Learning (1872). While Fukuzawa promoted Japan’s modernization and reform of its education system by advocating the Anglo-American example, it is also true that influence went the other way, too, with traditional Japanese literature shaping western modernist writings around the turn of the century during the heyday of Japonisme.

A striking instance of this is Yone Noguchi (Noguchi Yonejirō, 1875-1947), an international poet in the US and the UK who had studied at Keio University, the private school Fukuzawa established in 1858. Noguchi taught western poets such as William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound the essence of Noh theatre and haiku poetry. He argued too for a literary analogy between the master of Japanese haiku, Matsuo Bashō (1644-94), and the major voice of American Romantic poetry Walt Whitman (1819-92). Hence, Pound’s masterpiece: “In a Station of the Metro” (1913): “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Deeply inspired by the Haiku poetics of Arakida Moritake (1473-1549), with this poem Pound succeeded in creating the exemplary Imagist poem, and revolutionizing western literature in the process.

While Noguchi stimulated Anglo-American modernists, Nishiwaki Junzaburō studied in England in the 1920s and digested the literary fruits of the modernist movement as represented by Pound and T.S. Eliot. Nishiwaki transplanted Modernist seeds in the Japanese literary soil with his translation of Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922), and by publishing his own surrealist poems. Take a glance at his first collection of poetry Ambarvalia (1933), which opens with the following poem entitled “Weather”: “On a morning of an upturned gem / Someone whispers to somebody at the doorway. / This is the day a god is born.” This is undoubtedly a beautiful poem filled with sublime images. However, we would be remiss if we failed to notice how it opens with an allusion to British poet John Keats’ Endymion (1818). Nishiwaki simply translated Keats’ passage “an upturned gem” directly into Japanese. What is more, the poet composed its second and third lines with an eye to Edward Burne-Jones’ illustration for Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400). Whereas the romantic geniuses that shaped Yone Noguchi’s opus were well-known for their emphasis on originality, the modernist poets with whom Nishiwaki Junzaburō felt strong affinities pioneered the poetics of quotations, which was laid out in the idea of the “simultaneous order” of literary history detailed in Eliot’s Modernist manifesto “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). Then, Pound, who met Noguchi in the 1910s, so highly esteemed Nishiwaki’s poetry as to recommend him as a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

In this way, Modernist literature is nothing less than the fruits of intercultural transactions. Although Noguchi and NIshiwaki have rarely been mentioned in Anglo-American literary history, we should not ignore the fact that these Japanese geniuses promoted a Modernist poetics of transnational intertextuality.

For many years, the dominant position of Japanese literary scholars maintained that any academic endeavors surrounding the field of Japanese literature could only be of merit domestically within Japan and could furthermore only be conducted by the Japanese. From the 1970s onward, however, a new notion of “Japanese Studies” emerged, challenged this outdated view and gained considerable traction. What's more, as of the 2000s, the closed and self-centered attitude of researchers in social sciences and humanities at large became the target of criticism for their disregard of any relationship with the outside world. In response to these pressures and trends, the Japanese scholars began to actively participate in workshops held overseas, which in turn resulted in collaborative efforts with foreign academics and the manner in which research is conducted shifted so as to engage foreign audiences. In addition to this form of internationalization, new currents and developments in the realm of comparative literature have likewise continued to shape Japanese literature studies into an increasingly open field. The following paper, which focuses on the aforementioned developments, will accordingly discuss the evolving state of Japanese literary studies.