THE FIRST FORTY YEARS

WHEN THE STUDY of Japan and Japanese finally came to be introduced at Cambridge in 1948 it was established in what was then called the Faculty of Oriental Languages. The Faculty was subsequently renamed Oriental Studies in 1955, but remained in essence devoted to the study of a wide range of languages, including Hebrew, with a prime interest in those of the Middle East and India. The common thread was an interest in philology and religion that ultimately went back to colonial and imperialist times. The regius professorship in Hebrew was founded in the time of King Henry VIII and the first chair in Arabic had been established in the 1660s. There were also chairs for Sanskrit and Egyptology while the chair in Chinese dates from 1888. Japanese was a newcomer and had been added not because of student demand but as a matter of strategic priority. Nevertheless Faculty politics ensured that it remained a minority subject for many years. As late as the 1970s it was considered more important to fight for the retention of a post in Ancient Iranian than to create a new one in modern Japanese history.

The first lecturer in Japanese was Eric Ceadel, who was appointed in October 1947. By 1948 he had persuaded the university authorities to agree to the establishment of Japanese as a subject, which could lead to a BA degree. He had graduated in 1941 with First Class Honours in Classics and had published three articles on metrical problems in Greek tragedy in the Classical Quarterly while still an undergraduate. In January 1942 he was posted to the inter-service course in Japanese held at Bedford and was made an instructor there in November 1942, a position that he held until October 1945. Twenty years later in 1967 he resigned his post as lecturer in Japanese in order to take up the post of University Librarian where he ensured that the university library had an extensive and valuable collection of Japanese books. He also devised the library's system of arranging and cataloguing its Japanese books. He died in 1979, an early example of what is now known in Japan as karōshi or ‘death through overwork’. His academic work in Japanese centered on the Kokinshū and its prefaces.