人文知と情報知の融合事業

Abstract:

This piece discusses the contemporary state of the journal landscape in the field of global Japanese studies. Drawing on a recent editorial roundtable held at AAS-in-Asia 2024, it historicizes the journals currently operating within the field, details the measures that they are taking in response to changes in both the field and the wider scholarly world, and concludes with a challenge for the future.

Keywords: academic journals; rankings; writing styles; interdisciplinarity; editing; editors

1. Introduction

Despite predictions of imminent demise tracking the diminishing clout of Japan's economy, Japanese Studies has blossomed over the past couple of decades. Together with the proliferation of courses and departments both within Japan and abroad, there has emerged a critical mass of scholars who understand themselves as doing "global Japanese studies." This is an inherently interdisciplinary enterprise that seeks both a greater understanding of Japan in and through its relations with other countries, and a more integrated approach to research on Japan that takes proper account of studies being conducted in other idioms, both linguistic and scholarly. The institutionalization of this more global perspective on Japan clearly has the potential to go beyond Area Studies conceptions of the utility of Japan as an object of comparative study. With the emergence of this interdisciplinary field, however, the need for and importance of publication venues has never been more apparent.

This edition of Trends in Japanese Studies offers a sweeping overview of the publication opportunities available to scholars of Japan publishing in English. Drawing on a recent roundtable which took place at the AAS-in-Asia 2024 conference in Yogyakarta, the piece provides a brief history of the state of English-language publication in Japanese studies, and concludes with some reflections regarding the opportunities for these journals, and the challenges they are likely to face in the future.

2. A Japanese Studies Infrastructure

The expansion in global Japanese institutes is a recent trend, but the journals upon which it relies are largely of a more mature vintage. This is the case both in Japan and overseas; the current expansion in global Japanese studies is occurring on the back of a journal infrastructure established during earlier efflorescences of interest in Japan.

The roundtable on "Publishing for Global Asias: The role of academic journals today" was held as part of the AAS-in-Asia conference on Global Asias: Latent Histories, Manifest Impacts at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in July 2024. The roundtable was chaired by Bettina Gramlich-Oka, professor at Sophia University and editor of Monumenta Nipponica (MN) for 2014-2023. It featured four editors of journals supporting a global Japanese studies field. These were Matthew McMullen, associate professor at Nanzan University and editor of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (JJRS); Ellen Van Goethem, associate professor at Kyushu University and editor of the Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University (JAH-Q); Tristan Grunow, associate professor at Nagoya University, co-editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (APJJF) and Digital Media editor for Critical Asian Studies (CAS); and finally the author of this piece, associate professor at Nichibunken and editor of Japan Review (JR).

The composition of the panel is itself indicative of trends within the field. MN is the most venerable of these journals; established in 1938 as an "international platform for researchers of different nationalities and disciplinary backgrounds to publish original scholarly contributions" on Japan, and translations of key texts. [1] https://dept.sophia.ac.jp/monumenta/about-mn/history-and-mission/ The journal's history showcases two key transitions in the field. First, in 1964, the disappearance of other European languages of scholarly production. The global Japanese studies field today is dominated by academic output in English, existing in an at times awkward relationship to both its source material, and research output published in Japanese. A second key date to note is that the journal has received Japan Foundation support since 1973, signalling a growing willingness within Japan to support academic publishing on Japan in English.

Nanzan University's JJRS also has a distinguished pedigree, but a more complex lineage. It was established in 1960 as Contemporary Religions in Japan, was revived as JJRS in 1974 and has been published by the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture since 1981. [2] Thanks to Matt McMullen for these details on the journal's origin story. The journal's existence points to the funding available for studies on specific aspects of Japanese culture from non-governmental sources, particularly religious, and shows that by the 1980s this was of a level to merit a journal specifically on Japanese religions. Like MN, JJRS is published by a private Christian university, highlighting the longer history of missionary engagement with Japan and its role in producing knowledge on the country.

The growing concern of Japan itself with shaping that knowledge is shown by the establishment of Nichibunken in 1987, and in the emergence of JR three years later. While initially an English-language bulletin of the center, by 2010 the journal was a leading per-reviewed English-language journal in the field. Reflecting the expansive aims of Nichibunken, its remit was broad.

By contrast, CAS emerged as the result of a desire of a number of progressive scholars to critique the effects of American foreign policy on the region. APJJF emerged from a similar intellectual milieu, and a number of figures were involved in the establishment of both of these journals.

Finally, JAH-Q is the youngest of these journals, established in 2015 as a journal of Asian Humanities, although initially practicing as a Japan studies journal. Founded by Kyushu University, it is indicative of the growing presence and importance of English-language global Japanese studies to Japanese institutes of higher education.

The journals represent different eras in the development of the study of Japan. All of them share a relatively broad conception of scholarly inquiry, explicitly positioning themselves as interdisciplinary endeavours, an approach shared by journals like the DIJ's Contemporary Japan. They exist alongside a number of discipline-specific journals based in Japan which would not necessarily consider themselves as engaged in global Japanese studies. These would include the Social Science Japan Journal (from 1998), Japanese Journal of Political Science (from 2000), and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (from 2001). The establishment of these journals, whether by universities or academic societies, reflected the growing emphasis in Japan on English-language publication from the 1990s onwards. In practice, however, although such journals claim a disciplinary focus, their empirical base tends to be concentrated in the wider region, and most obviously upon Japan itself. While their connections to global Japanese studies are under-emphasized, such publications may be considered as part of the broader ecosystem within which this attention to a global Japan is flourishing.

There are also Japanese studies journals published abroad. Traditional scholarly articles on Japan used to appear in publications devoted to Asia more broadly, such as the Journal of Asian Studies or Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. More recently, beginning with the foundation of the Journal of Japanese Studies in 1974, there emerged journals dealing with the study of Japan taking place within particular parts of the world: the likes of Japanese Studies (1981, Japanese Studies Association of Australia) and Japan Forum (1989, British Association of Japanese Studies) are considered emblematic of this. As with the disciplinary-specific journals which emerged in Japan around 2000, these grew out of academic associations, and represent the emergence of a Japanese studies field in these parts of the world.

A global Japanese studies is predicated on an increasing exchange between these distinct disciplinary and geographical areas of scholarly production, in order to bring the research of Japanese and foreign scholars within Japan and overseas into dialogue through the establishment of a genuinely interdisciplinary field. As the roundtable at AAS-in-Asia made clear, the field's development necessitates training the next generation of researchers to work within it, and it is in this regards that the event in Indonesia offered a particularly timely platform to reflect on some of the challenges and opportunities currently available to journals within the field.

3. Developing Japanese Studies

The above journals offer publication venues necessary for a global Japanese studies field to develop and flourish. At the same time, as the roundtable emphasized, this scholarly infrastructure is entering an era of rapid change, to which journals and their editors are seeking to respond. In dialogue with an engaged and enthusiastic audience, the roundtable reflected on some of the issues facing scholars and journals today.

A key issue that emerged related to journal rankings, and the extent to which journals care about them. Grunow pointed out that, as editors, we care to the extent that our authors do. Our existence is predicated on authors submitting their research to us. It is incumbent on editors to make it as beneficial as possible to publish with a journal, and as universities increasingly demand publication in ranked journals, they are a consideration we need to respond to in order to diversify our author base and make the journal a more attractive destination to publish in.

It was also noted, though, that these requirements differ in different disciplinary and national contexts. In Japan, the focus since 2017 has been on SCOPUS journal rankings, but these are not universal. The trend within Europe is towards mandating Open Access publication, which the featured journals are well able to cater for, being genuine Open Access journals which publish and archive at no costs to authors. This enables scholars to foster a wider interest in the work. While rankings are therefore an issue for journals, they are not the sole determinants of where to publish.

Another key issue mentioned in this regard was the length of time to publication. All the editors recognized the trade-off between speed and quality, but felt there were still clear benefits to the checking and copyediting provided by a recognized journal. One way forward, recently introduced by JR, is the Early Access publication of articles. Articles are given a fixed Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which can be used to cite it the moment it is released online. This makes the journal publication model a little more flexible for authors. More broadly, the traditional format of issues and volumes is a legacy of the print era, and the move will increasingly be towards continuous publication in the future.

A number of questions dealt with differences between academic traditions and different modes of writing. One questioner highlighted that many articles in Japanese would be thought narrow in English. Van Goethem pointed out that Japanese scholars are writing for very specific, defined audiences, and that any audience in English will naturally be broader in scope and specialization. Articles in English thus require a wider angle on the study to make them more accessible to people without that level of background knowledge. Boyle pointed out that as interdisciplinary journals, articles need to position themselves and specify the literature they are contributing to. Research should be detailed, but have its broader significance explained to readers. This is also an advantage of the review process, as referees will often help to position a study more effectively, and highlight other areas to which it could make a contribution. McMullen noted that publishing an article is rarely a matter of just translating it between languages. Articles do need to be written differently in English, and structure and format are crucial.

A number of other questions touched on different modes of writing. Grunow noted that APJJF reaches a much broader audience, and that the language of contributions should reflect that. McMullen emphasized the importance of writing for specific journals, while Boyle insisted that it is important for scholars to be able to write to different audiences. Scholars should be involved in wider debates in society, but also need a space in which academic ideas are subject to scrutiny — this is what the peer-review journal system should offer both the individual scholar and the scholarly field in general.

4. Shaping the field

The roundtable demonstrated the breadth of the field, and emphasized that the participating journals do not see themselves as competitors, but as filling different niches. For scholars, it is a question of where your work, or where different presentations of your work, fit at any particular time. The job of editors is not to serve as gatekeepers, but to help scholars position their work and bring it to bear in the place where it will have the greatest impact.

The roundtable's moderator, Gramlich-Oka, provocatively concluded the session by asking whether, given that we had structured the conversation around publishing for global Asias, these global Asias would all come to be defined by American standards of academic publishing, valorising arguments and topic sentences over other traditions of scholarly knowledge production. These are absolutely valid concerns, and are only resolvable through a dialogue in the field which incorporates the producers and disseminators of academic knowledge, a dialogue facilitated by events like this one.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thanks to Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Tristan Grunow, Matthew McMullen, Ellen Van Goethem, and everyone at the Roundtable in Jogja. The comments of two anonymous referees strengthened the final piece. All opinions are solely those of the author, as is responsibility for any errors.

[1] ^ https://dept.sophia.ac.jp/monumenta/about-mn/history-and-mission/
[2] ^ Thanks to Matt McMullen for these details on the journal's origin story.

Trends in Japanese Studies

Publishing for Global Japanese Studies: Trends and future prospects

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