Director’s Note
Thank you for visiting the website of the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
My name is Izumi Hoshi. I was appointed the Director of the Institute on April 1, 2019.
My discipline is linguistics, and my research specialization is Tibetan grammar. In recent years, I have focused my efforts on bringing back the findings of my research to the communities where it was conducted and returning its benefits to society. I have been working with researchers across varied fields on tasks such as translating contemporary literature and compiling a dictionary of pastoral cultures.
The Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa was founded in 1964 and is Japan’s first national Inter-University institution in the domain of humanities and social sciences. We have been engaged in research on Asia and Africa in the three fields of linguistics, anthropology, and history for over 50 years. In this time, we have worked alongside academics from Japan and from other parts of the world, especially with foreign researchers we have invited here as joint research fellows and visiting researchers.
Our understanding of Asian and African languages, cultures, and history has progressed greatly over the years since the institute was founded. Nonetheless, globalization has advanced, and trends in Asia and Africa now exert significant influence on other regions of the world. Since the 2016 academic year, we have concentrated our efforts on a project that aims to respond to these changes: “Establishment of a New Cooperative Research System for Solving Contemporary Problems in Asia and Africa.”
We believe that the import of examining the diverse languages and cultures of the inhabitants of Asia and Africa and the significance of building a body of preliminary research on such peoples will further increase as globalization grows with destructive momentum. We have established a new framework for collaborative foundational research from this year. The staff at the institute are working harder than ever on the joint usage/research center project in conjunction with scholars from Japan and overseas with the aim of carefully cultivating new seeds of collaborative research. We hope that you will monitor our upcoming developments and undertakings.
In accordance with its designation as an International Research Center for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, the institute will continue to develop collaborative research projects with the participation of a wide range of researchers from within and outside Japan. We ask for your guidance and support as we endeavor to share our world-class research outcomes with the academic community and with society at large.
April 8th, 2019
Izumi HOSHI
The Director, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
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