History

In December 2013, Dr. Michael Emmerich, who just a few months earlier had joined the UCLA faculty, paid a visit to Mr. Yanai Tadashi, chairman, president, and CEO of global apparel retailer Fast Retailing and founder of Uniqlo. Dr. Emmerich, who had been doing copywriting for Uniqlo for several years, hoped, in this personal meeting, to talk with Mr. Yanai about his concern for the future of the Japanese humanities. Instead, Mr. Yanai himself broached the topic.

Less than a year later, UCLA and Waseda University announced that Mr. Yanai had donated to the two institutions a total of roughly $2.5 million to establish the Tadashi Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities—now officially the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, or the Yanai Initiative for short. The project would be run as a collaboration between UCLA and Waseda, with Dr. Emmerich as its director. Dr. Toeda Hirokazu, a distinguished scholar of modern Japanese literature and film, would help run things on the Waseda side.

During the 2014–2015 academic year, the Yanai Initiative organized eleven events, starting with a lecture by Dr. Toeda. For the most part, these were academic in nature: lectures and workshops on premodern literature, theater studies, art history, and social linguistics; a symposium titled “Tokyo Textscapes.” The celebrated translator and scholar of American literature Shibata Motoyuki spent a quarter at UCLA as the Yanai Initiative’s first visiting professor, teaching an experimental graduate seminar whose primary readings were all translations into Japanese of literary works first written in other languages, which seminar participants read as Japanese literature. The Yanai Initiative brought two Ph.D. students from Waseda to UCLA for a quarter each, and awarded three UCLA graduate students fellowships to conduct research at Waseda. Alongside these academic activities, however, the Yanai Initiative also organized an event featuring novelist Shibasaki Tomoka, as well as the first U.S. screening of director Wakagi Shingo’s quiet, powerful film Asleep, based on the novel by Yoshimoto Banana.

The great success of all these efforts, and the realization that cultural programming was, in fact, just as crucial as academic engagement to realizing the Yanai Initiative’s long-term vision, led to a shift in priorities in subsequent years—or rather, an expansion. Now the intention was to do as much for people outside the university as for students and faculty inside it, and to find ways to blend cultural and academic programming. This realignment resulted in a series of important, thrilling events that drew audiences from all across Los Angeles and beyond: “Five Days of Kyogen,” “Cinema From the Outside In: A Kore-eda Hirokazu Restrospective,” “The Art of the Benshi.” We have hosted readings and performances featuring writers such as Tawada Yōko and Furukawa Hideo; a workshop on “nonsense thinking” and a lecture and musical performance with Maywa Denki; a production of “Blue Moon Over Memphis,” an English-language Noh play centered on the ghost of Elvis Presley. We created the first ever smartphone app to help people—not just burgeoning scholars, but anyone interested—learn to read premodern Japanese calligraphy.

And of course, we have continued all along to develop our academic programming. We are particularly proud of our pioneering efforts to broaden the range of scholars who can benefit from the workshops and symposia we plan, by funding the participation of graduate students and junior faculty from institutions other than UCLA and Waseda, as well as independent scholars, even when they do not yet feel they are ready to present. Among the major events we organized early on that benefitted from this welcoming approach were the workshops “Wahon Literacies” and “Reading Place in Edo & Tokyo” and the symposia “Imagining the World in Premodern Japan,” “Empire of Others,” and “Technologies of East Asian Performance.”

Originally, the Yanai Initiative had been conceived as a six-year project, with the possibility that it might be renewed. The scale of its successes was such that it seemed inconceivable to let it end. And so Dr. Emmerich went once again to talk with Mr. Yanai. Many conversation later, in January 2020, UCLA announced that Mr. Yanai had given $25 million to the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures to endow the Yanai Initiative—the largest individual gift to the Humanities Division in the history of UCLA, and indeed one of the largest gifts in support of the humanities anywhere. Soon after, Mr. Yanai pledged a further $5 million to Waseda University to ensure that the very special partnership between that had made the Yanai Initiative so effective could continue into the future.