Japan’s richest man donated $31 million to the study of Japanese humanities at UCLA on Oct. 3.

Tadashi Yanai, the president of Japanese retail company Fast Retailing – the parent company of clothing company Uniqlo – committed the donation to the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. Yanai’s donation is the largest ever to the Division of Humanities, according to UCLA Newsroom, and he had previously donated $2.5 million to establish the Yanai Initiative in 2014 and endowed $25 million more in 2020.

Michael Emmerich, a professor of Japanese literature and the director of the Yanai Initiative, said that while Yanai did not have any direct connections to UCLA prior to the first donation, the money reflects his continued support for Japanese humanities programs.

“Before I could say a word, he (Yanai) said, ‘You know, Michael, I’m kind of worried about the future of Japanese literary studies,’” Emmerich said. “He also suggested that UCLA and Waseda University in Tokyo should partner on what became the Yanai Initiative.”

After the first donation of $2.5 million, Emmerich and others began to expand beyond the academic programming on UCLA campus, creating cultural projects for the broader Los Angeles community such as the Japan Past & Present initiative, which will receive a majority of the $31 million donation.

Emmerich said JPP’s mission is to provide researchers with basic resources by funding and publicizing research projects.

“There’s a kind of imbalance in terms of the visibility of the research that people are doing,” Emmerich said. “The idea is to change that situation, to make it so that people have a clearer sense of what is happening everywhere, because that will strengthen the field, and also to try and lessen the inequities in terms of access to resources.”

Victoria Davis, a doctoral student in early modern Japanese theater and literature, said she was granted summer research funding from the Yanai Initiative in 2019 to study at Waseda University, as well as funding to study Japanese cursive script the following summer.

“Between these two grants, it allowed me access to the materials, time to read the materials and also training to read the materials,” Davis said. “Because I had that early on, thanks to Yanai, I started writing a dissertation chapter, which got me an invitation to be on a conference panel for the AAS (Asian American Studies) National Conference.”

Davis said she hopes the latest donation will help connect graduate students, allowing them to build relationships early on with people from different locations around the world. She said she believes that JPP can assist early career scholars and provide the feedback and connections that graduate students need to build the foundation for their dissertation proposal.

Emmerich said $1 million of the latest $31 million donation will be used to support a digitization project, while around $10 million will be used to hire staff for the Yanai Initiative, and the remaining money will be put toward various research projects under JPP. The money put towards outside research projects includes funding for developing JPP proposal projects and maintaining JPP’s information hub.

Kanako Mabuchi, a doctoral student in Japanese literary and cultural studies, also received support through the Yanai Initiative. She said the funding allowed her to travel to conferences to present her work, attend workshops and further advance her study research.

Mabuchi also said she admires the work JPP is doing under the Yanai Initiative, including its openness of the network to diverse people.

“It’s not about exclusive prestige,” Mabuchi said. “It’s really about opening up to people across different areas, not just Japan and the U.S. (United States)”

Mabuchi further said the diversity of people participating in JPP is very beneficial for Japanese scholars to understand outside perspectives.

Emmerich also said Yanai’s donation will help emphasize the importance of the Division of Humanities, specifically the work of JPP, to further encourage students to learn and participate in Japanese-related studies.

“It (Yanai’s donation) is really embodying the kind of mission and spirit of UCLA as a public school in a way that’s really important and showing of what we can do,” Emmerich said. “It’s inspiring for students … as they’re thinking about the kinds of careers they want to embark upon and the kind of work they want to do to contribute to the world.”