Greetings!
The 2005－2006 academic year is the forty-third year of existence of the Inter-University Center For Japanese Language Studies. During this period the Center has graduated over 1400 students. This year will be my eighteenth year as Center Director, extending over three periods: 1967－1977; 1995－2001; 2003－present. The most important thing that got the Center off to an excellent start was that it was possible to recruit a core faculty of extremely dedicated and competent teachers, and this high level of competence of Center teachers has continued to the present day. But at the time the Center was established, there were no teaching materials or established methodology available for teaching Japanese at the advanced level. In 1967 Yale University, where I was an Assistant Professor, sent me to the Center to be Director for a one-year period. Upon arrival at the Center, however, I realized that one year would not be sufficient to begin to develop a forty-week intensive program. So, on the basis of consultation with Center Committee members and Yale University, I resigned from Yale to be Director for a longer period. During the ten years from 1967 I worked with Associate Director Mizutani Osamu and the staff of Center teachers to develop materials and approaches for teaching Japanese at the advanced level. By 1977 we had established the basic content and methodology for a unique forty-week intensive program in advanced Japanese. I then resigned as Director to become an international business consultant, a career I pursued in Tokyo for eighteen years.
Since 1977 the tradition of developing Japanese learning materials has continued at the Center and each year significant improvements have been made to the content and methodology of the program. In recent years effort has been made to take advantage of the latest technology to develop computer-based Japanese language learning materials, and the Center has recently completed a CD-ROM based on the Center's Kanji In Context materials which is significantly reducing the time and effort required to master Kanji.
This year there are thirty-one students enrolled at the Center from twenty different universities, eleven of which are members of the consortium of universities that sponsor the Center.
This Inter-University Center web site provides a wide range of information about the Center program. If you have any questions, please contact me: E-Mail
Ken Butler
Director