THE JAPAN SOCIETY was founded in 1891, during the International Congress of Orientalists, following a resolution proposed by Arthur Diosy (1856–1923), one of the honorary secretaries of the Japanese Section of the Congress, to establish a society for the encouragement of Japanese studies and to bring together people interested in Japan. The Society's objectives were the ‘encouragement of the study of the Japanese Language, Literature, History and Folk-Lore, of Japanese Art, Science and Industries, of the Social Life and Economic Condition of the Japanese People, past and present, and of all Japanese matters’.

The reference to the ‘study’ of Japan and things Japanese did not in that era specifically denote academic study. As the other essays in this volume indicate, there were very few opportunities in British academic institutions, until well after the Second World War, to engage in academic study of the Japanese language or of Japanese society – or, indeed, of the history and philosophy of Japan, other than as part of broader academic fields of study. There were of course Japanese students formally enrolled at British universities as early as the 1870s (earlier indeed, if we include the Chōshū and Satsuma pioneers, before the Meiji Restoration, in the 1860s). But the discrete study of Japan came later. The Japan Society, as it developed, was therefore able to play something of a role as a forum for public discussion of Japan, and for dissemination of relevant information – although on the whole to an audience of those already persuaded of the significance and value of a closer bilateral relationship between Britain and Japan – at a time when such activities were rare.

It is certainly the case that the Society, in its early years, attached importance to its status as a centre of learned enquiry about Japan. In August 1892, the honorary secretaries described the work of the Society as ‘Encouragement of Research, Dissemination of Information and Stimulation of a Demand for Information [about Japan]’. A number of distinguished scholars were elected as honorary members, including a number active, then or later, at British and Japanese universities.