Domestic Organization Collaboration

The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) Collaborative Project (The 2nd Division)

The main pillar of the 2nd division (the Japanese Education Degree Program) is established in collaboration with the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). Furthermore, with the strong collaborative support of the Hitotsubashi University Center for Global Education, the 2nd division serves as a rich source for unique research and education, despite its small departmental size.

The NINJAL, founded in 1948, is the largest Japanese language research institution in Japan. After becoming an Independent Administrative Institution, it was established as the sixth institution of the Inter-University Research Institute Corporation in October 2009. The institute is located near Takamatsu Station; this is one stop on the monorail away from Tachikawa Kita Station, which is located next to Kunitachi Station near Hitotsubashi University. The institute is one of the most prominent Japanese language research institutions in Japan, primarily conducting research related to modern Japanese. It has been recently recognized for building a "balance corpus of the Japanese written language," which contains over 100 million words and is a driving force in Japanese language corpus study.

As an international research base, its mission is to deepen our understanding of and insight into human beings through comprehensive, multilingual research of the universality and uniqueness of the language known as "Japanese." Based on the accumulation of previous research, the institute conducts large-scale theoretical and empirical collaborative research with universities and research institutes both in Japan and overseas, and makes the results widely available to the community. The strength of the graduate school's 2nd division lies in listening to the voices of the staff involved in this leading-edge research, and in the opportunity to receiving direct guidance from them.