Message from Director of Center

The Kansai University Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies has played an active role in the field of East Asian cultural studies for years. This center traces its roots to the famous Chinese academy called Hakuen-Shoin. During the Edo era, it contributed to the Osaka people’s educational needs. In recent years, Kansai University has become well known worldwide as a hub for East Asian cultural research, thanks to our outstanding accomplishments through the Global CEO Program initiative. In fact, we spearheaded new, theoretical frameworks like the “Studies on East Asian Cultural Interactions” and “Approaching from the Periphery” through our Global CEO Program, and they are now common all over the world. Moreover, our library and museum house one of the finest East Asian research material collections, a large part of which is already digitized and openly accessible. Researchers from all over the world envy our rare collections, and our expertise in resource digitization is growing over time.

Kansai University Open Research Center for Asian Studies: KU-ORCAS, through international academic collaboration, is setting up a Digital Archive in our effort to positively contribute toward a digital, knowledge-based society. This archive will host a wealth of resources on the East Asian culture that Kansai University has accumulated over its two centuries of existence. We are working on a three-pronged, open-access policy for our archive: opening our research materials, research groups, and research expertise. This open platform will function as a research hub, open to the world, and will help build a new field of humanity that goes beyond the narrow boundaries of discrete domains and researchers. With this background, we aim to position ourselves as the world’s leading university for  East Asian culture and will make every effort to achieve that goal.

KU-ORCAS is an academic open space for researchers from all over the world across all disciplines. We are sure that our center will be the launch pad for new horizons in the area of East Asian cultural studies and the field of humanity as a whole.

Director of the Center
and Professor of Kansai University Faculty of Foreign Languages Studies