East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts, the University of Tokyo (EAA)

The East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts is a joint research and education program organized collaboratively by the University of Tokyo and Peking University. The program aims to foster those who will lead the common future of Asia. As the academic basis for this aim, we intend to newly construct “East Asian studies as liberal arts.” What we regard as a new East Asian studies is not merely the area studies of East Asia. As a more collaborative and inclusive approach, we think that it must be research which emphasizes communication among the peoples of Asia, Oceania, Europe, America, and Africa. There, both Japan and China critically relativize each other, as we consider more than East Asia as a geographical sphere. This could be called “Area Studies 2.0” — a research approach to a new liberal arts that questions East Asia in the world and the world in East Asia.

We express our idea of “East Asian studies as liberal arts” in the name “Geimon Shoin (藝文書院, Academy for New Liberal Arts).” This is named after the Book of Han (漢書) “Yiwenzhi (藝文志),” the oldest bibliographical catalog in East Asia and the texts that served to formulate academic genres, and also the word “Shoin (書院)” contains the idea of a community in which teachers and students think and practice together as scholars. Our hope is to establish a completely new platform for research and education by making the most of the academic resources at the University of Tokyo and Peking University, and to create a new model of university education and research for the future.