Japanese language and culture have been taught on our campus for over a century; the Center for Japanese Studies was founded in 1958. Our favorable location in the San Francisco Bay Area allowed us to quickly emerge as a cardinal link between Japan and the U.S. The university's commitment to intellectual excellence and interdisciplinary research has made the Center for Japanese Studies an ideal environment in which to explore Japan's social, cultural, and economic effects on the wider world.
In 2008, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library opened thanks to generous support from donors. Its collection of nearly 290,000 Japanese-language texts is the largest of its kind found outside Japan, and is not only for our own use, but for use by non-academics, local community members, and scholars from around the world. A humidity-controlled rare book vault stores ancient manuscripts and maps, Buddhist calligraphy, and woodblock prints. In other collections on campus, you can discover folding paper teahouses, films dating back to the 1930s, or diaries penned in the 1850s.