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“Japan will laugh together with, and exert itself together with, all the people of Africa as we work toward the resolution of each and every issue Africa is facing. This is not for the sake of Africa, nor is it for the sake of Japan: it is for the sake of the world.” So said our prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru, in his closing speech for the Ninth Tokyo International Conference for African Development (TICAD 9), a gathering attended by representatives of 49 African countries and resulting in the landmark Yokohama Declaration. Prime Minister Ishiba continued, borrowing the words of the eminent scientist Noguchi Hideyo when Noguchi was studying yellow fever in Ghana: “I have not come to teach. I have come to learn.”

This project, “Learning from and Promoting the African Association for Japanese Studies,” represents one, obviously small step in the broad endeavor expressed by Prime Minister Ishiba, an endeavor in which earnest collaboration between Japan and countries in Africa is both the means and the end. The project seeks to draw out insights from, and in turn further develop, the study of Japan across the African continent through cooperation with the African Association for Japanese Studies and other institutions and organizations. It recognizes the signal achievements of that association in advancing Japanese studies, and it also sees opportunities for further growth and expansion. The project is preliminary and exploratory: it seeks to identify what chances and possibilities there might be for the promotion of research and education in Japanese studies at African universities; to form a vision to that end; and to take steps to enable the realization of that vision. It seeks to affirm and establish the relevant organs of the University of Osaka as earnest contributors to the study of Japan in Africa. And, following TICAD 9, it seeks to pay special attention to the promotion of scholarship on Japan among young people and women.

That Africa is the future is both a truism and an urgent exhortation. As Prime Minister Ishiba observed, one out of every four people on Earth in 2050 will be African. “Africa will lead the world,” he predicted. And as he candidly acknowledged, the rise of Africa is occurring as Japan appears to be slipping in its relative global stature. “In the 1990s, Japan accounted for roughly 17 percent of the world’s GDP. Today, that figure is about 4 percent,” he conceded.

The apparent relative decline of Japan’s global power does not in any way imply an attenuation in the importance of the study of Japan. This project departs from the conviction that the study of the history, literature, and culture of our country is meaningful and beneficial to all people in all places, and it is for that reason that access to and generation of knowledge about Japan must develop in Africa as Africa comes to lead the world. Prime Minister Ishiba gestured at the import of learning from the Japanese past: “We must never again repeat a great war,” he declaimed. “Nuclear weapons must never be used.” But of course, the study of Japan is not confined solely to knowing about the horrors that we brought about and that were inflicted on us. It is to African scholars and scholars in Africa that we now turn to learn anew what about Japan to study and how to study it—for the precise purpose of eliminating the bifurcation between African and Japanese scholars and developing a single, unified, and variegated field of Japan studies.

This project intends to provide value to universities and relevant associations in Africa by opening up greater opportunities for them to learn about research and education in Japan about Japan. It hopes to provide value to Japan by promoting knowledge of our country in countries that will come to lead the future. But as Prime Minister Ishiba himself implied, the ultimate beneficiary of this incipient network, if it succeeds, is not any one group of people: it is the study of Japan itself.