Ancient East Asia consisted of one unified cultural world, modeled around the advanced culture of China. This East Asian world was formed on a common ground of education and world-view based on common graphs (Chinese characters or kanji) and written style (classical Chinese or kanbun). Of course every region, including the Japanese archipelago, had its own civilization. However, in parallel with the formation of specific civilizations in the region, conscious engagement in fitting “oneself” into an existing cultural framework led to the creation of one unified East Asian world.

Such a world cannot be analyzed through a paradigm that treats the classics of every country from separate ethnologic and national perspectives (as with the study of ancient Japanese literature in Japan, or of ancient Chinese and Korean literature). What is now needed is a resuscitation of the study of ancient Japanese literature (as well as ancient Chinese and Korean literatures) in the East Asian cultural tradition based on the common Chinese writing system. The objective of this project is to rethink ancient Japanese literature in this context of East Asian Classics, toppling old governing ideas that, for example, see Japanese literature as centered around Japanese vernacular writing (wabun), or treat Chinese texts as ‘foreign.’

This perspective became the basis for the development of a specific course at the Department of Classical Japanese and Chinese Literature of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, a course that rethinks the history of the culture of the Japanese archipelago in a broader historical context, based on Chinese writing and the Chinese classics. (The section on the early period [kodai] was taught by Konoshi Takamitsu.) A collectively authored book based on this course, Horizons of Classical Japanese: The Japan that Kanji Built, was published by the University of Tokyo Press in April, 2007. Furthermore, a more focused treatment of this topic in the ancient period, Konoshi Takamitsu’s Kojiki as a Kanji Text, was published by the same press in February, 2007.

These books provide a model for the scrutiny of ancient Japanese literature as part of an East Asian classical tradition. Adding to this research direction, this project fosters further discovery by assembling a multi-disciplinary team of scholars, including specialists in Chinese classics and foreign scholars of East Asian literature. This extensive international network will provide diverse insights and far-reaching participation while allowing individual research projects of member scholars to continue unimpeded.

An additional goal of this joint research project is the creation and promulgation of a corresponding educational program that seeks not only to foster new academic viewpoints but also to cultivate the basic practical and technical skills of philology and interpretation required for East Asian studies. This interaction between academic scholarship and on-the-job educators will provide the impetus for a new and specific model of research. Thereby this project will go beyond the conceptual level, aiming to create constant feedback to its joint academic ventures from actual classes and training courses held at various locales. This will lead to the establishment of a new training program to nurture the next generation of research scholars.

Additionally, we believe this project will elevate research on Japan as an element of the East Asian classical tradition within the field of Japanese studies, not just in East Asia but at a more profoundly international level. The new conception promoted by this research project has the potential to change the status of Japanese Studies in Europe and the United States, where it is still treated as peripheral to Sinology, or, conversely, as a branch of area studies parallel to those devoted to China and other countries.