Japanese Studies in Venice from 1964 to Present Day

This paper traces the history of Japanese Studies in Ca’ Foscari University from the foundation of the Course in Oriental Languages and Literature in 1965 to this day. Furthermore, the paper outlines the state of the research in Japanese Studies describing profiles, the scientific production, methods and lines of research of the professors, researchers and scholars in Ca’ Foscari University. The range of Japanese Studies is based on a long standing tradition and includes Japanese Language, Literature, Philology and Linguistic, History and Institutions, Economics, Society, Politic and International Relations, Religion, Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology, Figurative and Performing Arts, Fine Arts, Theatre, Film and Visual Culture, etc. Summary


Introduction
The history of the teaching of Japanese language in Venice was reconstructed by Adriana Boscaro, who was a fundamental figure for the branch of Japanese Studies in Italy during the post-war period, and the pillar of the Japanese Studies section in Venice, in its numerous transformation from Seminar of Japanese Language and Literature, to Institute, and then Department of East Asian Studies, nowadays known as Department of Asian and North African Studies, which, however many changes of name, never Bienati, Boscaro, Ruperti. Japanese Studies in Venice from 1964 to Present Day 195 together the Department of Indian and Far Eastern Studies, which in February 1998 changed its name to Department of East Asian Studies (with the exit of Hindi in July 2003). Here we will discuss only the Japanese Studies branch, bearing in mind that the Korean language course is still active nowadays, starting from a.y. 1997-98. A step back: the event that crucially changed the study planning happened around the '80s, when the competent authorities realised that it was time to divide the teaching programme into different fields, as, for example, a teacher alone, however encyclopaedic, could not possibly cover the whole syllabus for the History of the Institutions of Near, Middle and Far East class, without penalising one, if not more, geographical area.
To think that it was possible to ask someone to be versed in more than one foreign language (and an already difficult one) and to be able to interpret both ancient and modern texts, it was pure madness, and it showed how odd the configuration of an Oriental Studies course not properly organised by Oriental Studies scholars was. The same could be said for the classes of History of Religions and Philosophies, History of Art, Geography, and so on. Thus, the students were not put in the condition of being able to benefit from a proper study plan, coherent with their choice of first language. The 'dismemberment' was carried out in stages, and it took many years of debates and requests in order to find a proper structure and to compose articulated programmes, which in the end comprised not only a more suitable partition in geographical areas (e.g. 'Eastern Asia'), but also a further partition between China and Japan. Another important moment was when the various branches began to host a stable number of fundamentally important mother tongue collaborators, even though the teacher/ student ratio is still not at the optimum level of other centres abroad.
Since it is quite difficult to describe the continuous academic rotation happening, it can be interesting to follow instead the various relocations of the headquarters of the Seminary, first, and the Institute and the Department, after: Ca' Foscari, Ca' Cappello, Ca' Soranzo, Palazzo Vendramin dei Carmini, palaces which all had an important past in the context of the history of the City. Today, they are revived by the presence of hundreds of 'wandering clerics', youngsters who, together with those who frequent the other 40 university buildings scattered around, form a swarming web that spreads all over the city.
At the beginning, in 1965, the Oriental Studies courses found their home at Ca' Foscari. This is not the time to talk profusely about the main building of our University, if not to mention that at the end of the XIV century the Giustinian family waived the constructed land to the Republic, in 1429 (Foscari 2005, 22-37). After some pass-ons, in 1453 the doge Francesco Foscari bought the building for himself and had it refurbished, in the form that can be admired nowadays. 2 It was three centuries later, with another Francesco Foscari (1704Foscari ( -1790, son of Sebastiano, that the decline of the building started. It was then bought by the City Hall in the 1850s. Indeed, by that time the idea that the building could be used as the location for an educational institution was already present. However, it was not until April 1868, after various problems related both to the previous use as a barrack and to the damages caused by the Austrian bombings in 1849, that the City Hall decided to assign the Ca' Foscari building to the Royal High School of Commerce (Sartori 2005, 78-81).
However, the arrangement to hold the Oriental Studies courses in the new wing overlooking the courtyard was not permanent: as the building was soon found to be unsuitable for the ever growing number of students, there was no possibility but to move the courses as soon as possible. Thus, the University bought Palazzo Cappello-Layard in San Polo from the heirs of the lawyer Mr. Carnelutti, and then started its renovation. However, the renovation took more than expected, with great inconvenience for the students attending the classes. In the end, in August 1968, a providential roof fire accelerated this process, and the Palace was soon usable.
As every venetian Palace, Ca' Cappello is not really apt to host various educational activities, given the many restrictions put in place by the authorities regarding plasters, painting, fireplaces, inlaid doors and so on, but still, despite the unforeseen large number of students (the then Seminary of German language was hosted there, too), the Oriental Studies course, which referred to Arab, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Hindi and Iranian Studies, finally found its own autonomy.
Ca' Cappello-Layard is a XVI century Palace, based on a previous gothic building, as the capital of the three-mullioned window on the piano nobile shows, located at the corner of the Grand Canal and Rio San Polo, with a magnificent view of the Ca' Foscari main building. The façade bore frescos by Veronese, which were destroyed in a fire in 1627. The Palace was then bought by Henry and Enid Layard, who lived there from 1883, and transformed it into a house-gallery, with paintings by Giovanni and Gentile Bellini (like the Mohammad II portray by the latter, nowadays at the National Gallery in London), Carpaccio, and Cima from Conegliano in the piano nobile, in rooms upholstered in red, yellow and green damask. Austen Henry Layard had lived in the Middle East for a long time, and participated in the excavations in Ninrud, identifying many imperial palaces and retrieving large bas-relieves that now are part of the Assyrian collection at the British Museum. Honorary citizen of London, he was a politician who was given many important responsibilities, and was then nominated ambassador in Istanbul. After that, he moved to Venice, where The library, the meeting rooms and the professors' offices are also located here, while the classes are scattered around the city.
Across the years, many initiatives have been organised by the Department and it is not possible to mention them all in this brief excursus. Always relevant at an international level thanks to its academic publications, organisation of meetings and seminars in many languages, lectures with Italian and foreign speakers, film showings, theatrical performances, an advanced Erasmus programme, and so on, the Department is the ideal continuer of the project that Francesco Ferrara, director of the School of Commerce, started way back in 1873 as a "bridge to the [then] distant cultures of the Far East". 4

1.2.1
Paolo Beonio-Brocchieri Beonio-Brocchieri (1934-1991 was born in Milan where he graduated in Philosophy with Antonio Banfi. In the years 1957-59 he went to Japan with a scholarship where he continued his studies of philosophy and history of religions under the guidance of the famous Japanese scholar Nakamura Hajime . After returning to Italy, in 1965 he was called to hold the Chair of Japanese Language and Literature at Ca' Foscari, where he laid the foundations of the then Seminar of Japanese Language and Literature and of its library. He held the chair of Religions and Philosophy of East Asia until 1980, when he moved to Pavia and occupied the chair of History and Institutions of the Afro-Asiatic Countries that had been of his father Vittorio . In his quality of scholar of history of international relations, from 1960 to 1982 Paolo Beonio Brocchieri collaborated also with the ISPI (Institute for International Political Studies) in Milan, directed at the beginning by Giorgio Borsa. During the mid-'60s Beonio himself started to regularly contribute articles and essays to the journal International Relations.
His library of about 1.000 volumes, including monographs and periodicals, was donated by his family to the Centro Studi Popoli Extraeuropei "Cesare Bonacossa" in Pavia, of which he was director for many years. Among his important scientific production we must remember at least the fundamental La Filosofia cinese e dell 'Asia Orientale (1977), volume Bienati, Boscaro, Ruperti. Japanese Studies in Venice from 1964 to Present Day 199 2 of the series "Storia della filosofia" directed by Mario Dal Pra, on which generations of students were formed; I Movimenti politici del Giappone (1971); the brief but essential Storia del Giappone ([1972] 1995), and Religiosità e ideologia alle origini del Giappone moderno (published posthumously in 1993), which is based on his first monographic course, taught in the 1965-66 academic year. Furthermore, we should not forget a little gem, Confucio e il Cristianesimo ([1973] 2017), about the Latin translation of the texts of Confucius by the Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta. After his early passing in 1991, at the initiative of Japanese Studies at Ca' Foscari and with the financial support of a former student, Franco Manni, the Paolo Beonio Brocchieri Prize for theses on Japan-related topics was established, consisting of four scholarships; the award ceremony also included a Memorial Lecture held by a specialist in the field of Japanese Studies.
Unfortunately, the award was short-lived, only five years from 1996 to 2000, and on the occasion of the last edition, prof. Gian Carlo Calza made a touching speech about the scientific importance of Beonio-Brocchieri in the field of Japanese and East Asian Studies. Aldo Tollini

Adriana Boscaro
Adriana Boscaro was born in Venice in August 1935, and Venice was where she was destined to spend most of her private and academic life. She remains deeply connected to her Venetian roots despite a willingness to travel frequently, as a citizen of the world, to further scholarly contacts and to meet new colleagues. Her roots are most easily seen in her love of irony; her manner of speaking, which shifts easily from Italian to Venetian; her islander's identity -she likes to quote the local saying that "without a bridge linking the mainland to Venice, Europe would be an island"; and, certainly not least, in the nature of her academic research. Despite the distance between Japan and Venice, Boscaro has always looked for connections between the two. For example, as part of a collective project on the affinities between certain Italian and Japanese cities in given historical periods -a project that unfortunately was never realised -Boscaro chose to focus on the parallels between Venice and Edo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Edo and Venice: cities on the water, cities of commerce, cities with a similar urban structure, cities of entertainment, with their pleasure quarters, casinos, and beautiful women painted by artists and praised by poets. Over the course of the years, the links between Edo and Venice led Boscaro to focus her attention on the Tokugawa period and the years immediately preceding it. Given the broad chronological span and artistic wealth of this period, she soon came to cultivate a range of interconnected interests. To use an analogy better fitted to the pleasure of discovery, the development of these interests was almost an unconscious reaction, i.e. an attraction of similarities.
Boscaro took her first steps toward a career in the field of Japanese Studies in 1956, when she took courses given in Venice by the Mideast and East Asian Institute of Rome (IsMEO). She was introduced to Japan and Japanese culture by a gifted young teacher, Tsuji Shigeru, who later became a professor at Geidai University in Tōkyō. Professor Tsuji was an art historian, a specialist in Giorgione and a translator of Vasari, who was in love with Venice. He communicated his love for Japanese culture so effectively that Boscaro continued to study Japan on her own; she even published some articles while waiting for the University of Venice to inaugurate its Japanese Studies programme in 1965. Since her command of Japanese culture was already substantial, her career as a university student smoothly progressed. In 1969 three major events occurred in her life: she received her degree, she was appointed Assistant Professor at Ca' Foscari and was awarded a Monbushō fellowship. During the eighteen months of her grant term she carried out research at the Shiryō Hensanjo (Historiographical Institute) of the University of Tōkyō under the guidance of Professors Numata Jirō and Kanai Madoka.
While in Tōkyō, Boscaro met Professor Kanai twice a week to discuss her translation of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's letters. These meetings frequently ended in a yakitoriya across from the Tōkyō University campus. Boscaro has often said that she learned a great deal from her long conversations with her advisors. Not only did Professor Kanai answer her questions, but he would also tell facts and anecdotes, thus earning him the nickname 'Machine Gun of Tōdai'. Boscaro's research on the letters was later published as 101 Letters of Hideyoshi (1975).
No sooner had Boscaro returned to Italy -bringing with her much material on the history of the Warring States period (Sengoku Jidai), Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, and eager to begin the new academic year -than a piece of news dampened her enthusiasm. She was told that the programme she was assigned to had to focus more on literature, leaving history within a cultural framework. Boscaro, therefore, turned to an intensive study of Japanese literature, a field of interest that fortunately she had never quite abandoned but that she now sought to explore in greater depth. Having been asked to focus on a contemporary author, she chose Endō Shūsaku, whose Chinmoku (Silence) had recently been the subject of much acclaim. As she had already worked on 'the Christian century' (see below), she was now able to cultivate her interest from a literary perspective. Her long friendship with Endō gave Boscaro privileged access to his literary world -one of the reasons she continues to be regarded as the Italian specialist in Endō.
In the course of the years she taught at the University of Venice  and held, among many positions, those of Director of the Institute of Japanese Studies, Director of the Department of East Asian Studies, and member of the Board of Directors. 5 She taught courses on Japanese literature, the history of Euro-Japanese relations, and the cultural history of Tokugawa Japan (with specific focus on popular literature), as well as seminars on such Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Endō Shūsaku and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō.
Here follows a brief outline of Boscaro's academic interests. Driven by a keen desire to learn more about the impact of the West on Japan, Boscaro began examining early European relations with Asian countries. She took the accounts of Italian travellers -adventurous merchants and clerics who followed the caravan trails east in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries -as her starting point. Her interest in this subject fit well with her teaching program on 'the century of discoveries', when Portuguese vessels made the fortuitous crossing to Tanegashima and St. Francis Xavier reached Kagoshima in 1549. The roughly hundred-year period (1549-1636) of the Jesuits' mission in Japan is called 'the Christian century', a never-ending source of discoveries.
Boscaro continued to study Jesuit letters and reports and to explore related issues (here mentioned at random), such as the introduction into Japan of the moveable-type printing press by the Jesuits; the menace of Hideyoshi; the sixteenth-century mission to Europe of four young Japanese men under the direction of Alessandro Valignano; and the Jesuit Gerolamo de Angelis's discovery that Ezo (Hokkaidō) was an island rather than an extension of the continent.
The journey made by the four young Japanese converts and their Jesuit companions in the eight years between their departure from Nagasaki in 1580 and their return in 1588 was carefully reconstructed by Boscaro on the basis of printed sources of the period. A bibliography of the texts and frontispieces of all the pamphlets issued in Europe on that occasion appeared as Sixteenth Century European Printed Works on the First Japanese Mission to Europe. A Descriptive Bibliography (Boscaro 1973). This work was followed by the publication of several articles detailing their travels to Italy, and an exhibition at the Marciana Library in Venice in 1985, the four-hundredth anniversary of the young men's visit to that city in 1585.
Da Angelis's 'discovery' of the island of Ezo triggered Boscaro's latent passion for cartography. She had already done some research on the representation of Japan in European cartography from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. She now turned her attention to a report and hand-5 Among the collaborators of Adriana Boscaro at Ca' Foscari during the eighties and nineties, I would like to remember Yoko Kubota (which wrote the first complete grammar of Japanese language in Italy, Grammatica di giapponese moderno. Venezia: Cafoscarina, 1989; her publications have been posthumously collected in Frammenti di un discorso interrotto. Venezia: Cafoscarina, 1993), Francesco Marraro and Yasuko Ichihara, which moved to the University of Turin before retirement. written map in the Jesuit Archives in Rome. Boscaro examined the sources prior to da Angelis, and drew chronological comparisons between the various representations of Ezo on Italian, French, Portuguese, English, and Dutch maps, noting errors and discrepancies. She also produced a translation and commentary of da Angelis's 1621's Relazioni e mappa del regno di Yezo, which was not published until 1981. Although this edition is no longer in print, a new one was published by da Angelis's hometown, Enna in Sicily, on the occasion of his being proclaimed a patron of Enna in 1987. All this reference material, used in classes for many years, appeared in print under the title Ventura e sventura dei gesuiti in Giappone, 1549-1639(Boscaro 2008b. Despite the sealing of Japanese borders and the expulsion of Roman Catholic missionaries in 1639, the presence of Dutch merchants at Deshima led to a Japanese interest in Western learning (rangaku). Those Japanese who challenged bakufu authority were interested in the new knowledge and technologies brought by these 'red-haired men' (kōmōjin): medicine, ballistics, telescopes, the compass, oil painting, perspective and so on. These events attracted Boscaro's interest, who examined a number of figures from this period: Shiba Kōkan, Takano Chōei, Hayashi Shihei, Honda Toshiaki, Sugita Genpaku, and especially Hiraga Gennai. Gennai's broad range of interests makes him an extraordinary figure for his time.
Albeit not a genuine rangakusha, Gennai can be seen as a link between science and the spirit of Edo, for he was an imaginative, unpredictable, and ingenious inventor, a product of his time but endowed with a broad vision, as Boscaro observes in her annotated translation of Gennai's Fūryū Shidōkenden (Hiraga Gennai 1990).
In 1987, Boscaro organised the International Conference Rethinking Japan and in 1995 the International Symposium on Tanizaki Jun'ichirō. The latter was an epochal event that is still fondly remembered: Tanizaki experts from all over the world (with the exception of Edward Seidensticker, who was ill at the time) gathered in Venice to participate in the first international meeting devoted to a single Japanese author. The transactions from this conference were published in 1998 as A Tanizaki Feast, a volume jointly edited by Boscaro and Anthony H. Chambers.
Boscaro had already devoted many years to the study of Tanizaki, translating and editing his works, lecturing, and gathering bibliographic material. The result was the publication of Tanizaki in Western Languages. A Bibliography of Translations and Studies (2000b), a list of 263 translations in seventeen languages and 224 articles and books on Tanizaki. One of Boscaro's distinguishing traits is the desire to have an overview of any subject she might be discussing; to inform herself, for instance, on everything about a given literary work: its composition, the chronological order of its translations in other languages, and the choices made by the translators. Hence Boscaro's decision to catalogue all Japanese literature translated into Italian, culminating in Narrativa giapponese. Cent'anni di traduzioni (2000a), which brought to light one little-known fact: that the works of many authors, including Tanizaki, were translated into Italian long before they were translated into other languages. Boscaro's official positions are too numerous to list in their entirety. Suffice it to mention a few. She was a founding member in 1972 of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS), served as president from 1991 to 1994, and has been an honorary member since 2005. Boscaro was also one of the founding members, in 1973, of AISTUGIA (Italian Association for Japanese Studies), served on the board of the Association for many years, and has been its president since 2005. In 1999 Boscaro was asked by Fosco Maraini to become academic director of the new Vieusseux-Asia Center of the Gabinetto P.G. Vieusseux in Florence, where Maraini's library and photo collection are now kept. Boscaro's role at the Center is to coordinate projects aimed at strengthening ties with Japan.
The position of which Boscaro is most proud, however, is one she has held since 1988, that of editor of a Japanese Literature series published by Marsilio in Venice. This is the first series in either Italy or Europe devoted to classical and modern Japanese literature; it has published thirty-one translated volumes to date. Each volume is the work of a specialist scholar and includes a detailed introduction to the life and literary career of the author, an annotated translation, and a glossary. While primarily aimed at an academic readership, the series has attracted the interest of the wider public, and the volumes have been reprinted several times.
In 2000, Boscaro sponsored the awarding of an honorary degree to the scholar and critic Katō Shūichi by the University of Ca' Foscari, Venice. Katō had been a Visiting Professor there in 1983-84. The Italian edition of his book Nihon bungakushi josetsu has been widely used in Italian departments of Japanese Studies.
The most prestigious honours bestowed on Adriana Boscaro has been the Okano Prize for the promotion of Japanese culture in Italy, 1990; the Premio Cesmeo for her translation of Katō Shūichi's work (1999); and in the same year, the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, Third Class. From 1976, in different years, he did his research in Japan. He studied the Shintō tradition, focusing his analysis on the communal rituals connected with rice culture: see his Itinerari nel sacro: L'esperienza religiosa giapponese (1984), and Symbolic Languages in Shinto Tradition (2008). He studied also the ideas of death and the visions of afterlife in Asian shamanistic practices and the ascetic techniques for achieving immortality in the Buddhist esoteric tradition. On these subjects he published the book Il corpo e il paradiso. Le tentazioni estreme dell'ascesi in Asia Orientale (1998) and edited, with Andrea De Antoni, Death and Desire in Contemporary Japan. Practicing, Representing, Performing (2017).
He worked on the Japanese religious traditions (Il pensiero giapponese classico, 2014) but, more recently, he is doing research on the new forms of faith and the mediatic languages in contemporary society in the context of a wider interdisciplinary research on the relationship between forms of language and the ultimate truth as it has been interpreted in different religious traditions (I linguaggi dell'assoluto 2017).
He has always been involved in sustaining/encouraging the inter-religious dialogue: he published Del bene e del male. Tradizioni religiose a confronto (1997) ' Foscari (1983), she spent several research periods in Japan, specialising in Modern Japanese Literature of the Meiji period. She taught many courses on Japanese Modern and Contemporary Literature as a Researcher of Japanese Language and Literature (1999) and then as Associate Professor (2000). Her principal research interests lie in modern Japanese narrative. She translated novels by Nagai Kafū (1999) and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1988,1995,2011)

Carolina Negri
Carolina Negri is Associate Professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Department of Asian and North African Studies. Previously, she has taught Japanese language at the University of Salento (Lecce). She spent four years (1992-96) at Ochanomizu University (Tōkyō), where she received the Master of Arts in Japanese Literature and Philology. She subsequently spent several research periods in Japan because of the awards and fellowships she had been granted. Her main research interest focus on diaries written by ladies in waiting of the imperial court and on the literary production of women in the eleventh century. In this regard, she has edited and published the translations of Sumiyoshi monogatari (

Pierantonio Zanotti
He holds a PhD in Oriental Studies (2009)  2.3 Language, Linguistics, Philology, Japanese Classical Language

Alto Tollini
Aldo Tollini is former Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where he taught Japanese classical language. His fields of research focus on: Japanese premodern language, Japanese Buddhism (especially Zen), Japanese language teaching, Christianity in Japan (Kirishitan) and Japanese culture mostly of the Kamakura-Muromachi period. He is also active in the field of translation into Italian of pre-modern Japanese texts, mostly related to cultural and religious subjects.
Previously, he has taught Japanese language at the Universities of Pavia  and Milan (1997-98), and has been general secretary of the Italian Association for the Teaching of Japanese language AIDLG . In that period he has been actively engaged in research in the field of Japanese language teaching, with particular regard to the teaching and learning of kanji.

Paolo Calvetti
After having taught at the University of Naples "L'Orientale" for about twenty years, Paolo Calvetti, who is Professor of Japanese Language and Literature, arrived at Ca' Foscari at the end of 2009 and soon started his teaching activities focusing on Japanese linguistics and history of Japanese language. Before joining Ca' Foscari, he published the first non-Japanese comprehensive introduction to the history of Japanese language (1999), which was used as a handbook for his courses at Ca' Foscari. His research is focused on social aspects of the language such as 'taboo words', 'impoliteness' and connections between technology (mobile phones) and language changes. His expertise in Japanese lexicography was reflected also in some publications on corpora linguistics and the making of Japanese dictionaries. From 2015 to 2017 he acted as Head of the Department of Asian and North African Studies.

Patrick Heinrich
Patrick Heinrich is Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and Mediterranean African Studies at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. Before joining Ca' Foscari he taught at universities in Germany (Duisburg-Essen University), France (University of Toulouse) and Japan (Dokkyō University). His present research interests focus on sociolinguistics, language endangerment and revitalisation, language planning and policy. He has been awarded the annual research award by the Japanese Association of the Sociolinguistic Sciences in 2010 and since 2014 is an honorary member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages.
He is currently editing The Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics (forthcoming). Recently edited books in English include Language Life in Japan. Transformations andProspects (2011), Globalising Sociolinguistics. Challenging andExpanding Theory (2015), Handbook of the Ryukyuan Languages (2015), Urban Sociolinguistics. The City as a Linguistic Process and Experience (2017), Being Young in Super-Aging Japan. Formative Events and Cultural Reactions (2018), and many others. He is also the author of The Making of Monolingual Japan Language Ideology and Japanese Modernity (2012) and Die Rezeption der westlichen Linguistik im modernen Japan (2002).
He was the recipient of the Okano Prize in 1992 and the Order of the Rising Sun in 2004.

Rosa Caroli
Rosa Caroli is Professor of Japanese History at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and a specialist of modern and contemporary history of Japan. Her major fields of research concern memory and identity in modern Japan, the relations between the central state and its peripheries, and the intellectual history in modern Japan. She has also written extensively about the history of Okinawa and, more recently, about Edo-Tōkyō history. She is adjunct researcher at the Institute of Asian Studies (IAS) of Waseda University, visiting scholar at the Institute of Okinawan Studies and the Institute of the International Japan-Studies of Hōsei University, and Visiting Professor at the Center for International Education (CIE) of Waseda University (2018).
In 2009, she was the recipient of the 31st Okinawa Bunka Kyōkai prize, Higa Shunchō award, for her research on Okinawan history, particularly the last king of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, Shō Tai.
She is the author of numerous books and essays, published in Italy and abroad. Among them: Il mito dell'omogeneità giapponese. Storia di Okinawa (1999) 1873-1940 (2016). He is currently working on a discourse on Republican China in interwar Japan. While at Ca' Foscari, he organised many international conferences, festivals and exhibitions, such as: The Venice Conferences on Japanese Art (1990Art ( , 1994Art ( , 1996Art ( , 1998 He was visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 1989-90 and Fellow of the Japan Foundation (1975,1995). He was the recipient of the Order of the Raising Sun (Golden Rays with Rosette), Okano Prize and Prize Susumu Uchiyama in 2004.

Fine
Among books and catalogues on Asia there are: Hokusai Paintings. Selected Essays (1994); Hokusai: Il vecchio pazzo per la pittura (1999, later also in to English, French, Spanish andJapanese 2003-05); Poem of the Pillow and Other Stories (2010, also in English, Italian, French and German); Akbar: The Great Emperor of India (2012, in English and Italian); Stile Giappone (2012, also in English, French and German).  Paola Cagnoni (1940-2004 was born in Padua and studied Japanese language and literature in Venice. In the years 1969-71 she went to Japan with a Monbushō scholarship; here, she continued her studies of nō theatre. After returning to Italy, in 1972 she started to teach Japanese language and literature, with courses also on nō theatre and later Japanese theatre history, until 2002, when she retired. She was a very original teacher and researcher with great ideas and a passionate approach in her studies and didactic activity; she introduced and applied the most innovative and upto-date methodology, from French structuralism to semiology and poststructuralism, to her research on Japanese theatre, in particular nō thea-  ' Foscari University), and the editor of the book series Schemi Orientali (Cafoscarina). She has co-operated for numerous cinematographic activities with film festivals (Venice, Tōkyō, Locarno and others), for which she has often organised film retrospectives on Japanese filmmakers, and she was Chair of the press conferences related to Japanese movies for the Venice Film Festival, La Biennale di Venezia .

Silvia Vesco
She is a contributor to numerous Italian magazines and the author, among the other books, of Storia del cinema giapponese (2001) Her works are extensively published and she has taken part to numerous conferences, panels and symposiums, both nationally and internationally.

Toshio Miyake
Toshio Miyake is Associate Professor of Japanese Society and Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. After majoring in Japanese Studies at Ca ' Foscari (BA 1997, PhD 2005, he has conducted field works in Japan on anime, manga and youth subcultures at Ōsaka University, International Christian University and Kyōto University (JSPS Postdoc Fellow 2008-10). Since returning to Venice as the first Ca ' Foscari Marie Curie International Fellow (2009-11), he has investigated the intertwinement between Occidentalism, Orientalism, and self-Orientalism in modern Italy/ Europe-Japan/Asia relations. His main research interests are related to the fields of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Race Studies and Cultural History, focusing on a critical understanding of issues related to identity, culture and power. He is the author of monographs on the representations of the 'West' (Occidentalismi, 2010) and on monster culture in Japan (Mostri del Giappone. Narrative, figure, egemonie della dis-locazione identitaria, 2014); co-author, with Marco Del Bene and others, of a volume on modern and contemporary history of Japan (Il Giappone moderno e contemporaneo. Stato, media, processi identitari, 2012) and editor of a special journal issue on media culture and (post)nuclear Japan ("Da Hiroshima/Nagasaki a Fukushima. Cinema, manga e anime nel Giappone postbellico", 2012).