Japan’s Richest Man, Uniqlo CEO Tadashi Yanai, Gives a Record Gift to UCLA

Michael Emmerich, a professor of Japanese literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was helping Uniqlo translate its advertising copy in 2013 when he stumbled into a discussion about the future of Japanese literary studies with Tadashi Yanai, the retailer’s founder. After the academic wrote up a proposal to aid the research area, “it was really a matter of months after that when [Yanai] decided to make his first donation to UCLA,” Emmerich told Observer. A $2.5 million gift from Yanai helped establish the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, which has for a decade operated as a partnership between UCLA and Yanai’s alma mater of Waseda University in Tokyo. Now, Yanai is donating an additional $31 million to the initiative in what represents the largest-ever gift to UCLA’s College Division of Humanities.

The bulk of the funds will go towards supporting Japan Past & Present (JPP), a web-based hub that will offer a variety of research resources and promote greater collaboration among scholars of Japanese humanities. “I am proud to support the study of Japanese humanities at UCLA and around the world because I believe in sharing and valuing the practices and art forms that shape our world,” said Yanai in a statement.

Yanai is currently Japan’s richest person with an estimated net worth of $47.6 billion. After inheriting his father’s line of men’s tailoring stores in the 1970s, he transformed them into Fast Retailing, which acts as the parent company of Uniqlo and brands like Theory and Helmut Lang. Yanai also notably spent nearly two decades on the board of Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank (SFTBF) Group Corp. before stepping down in 2019. Son is currently Japan’s second richest person. 

Creating a more connected global community

Starting out with an initial focus on academics, the Yanai Initiative has expanded over the years to include cultural programming across Los Angeles and global events. Now, the initiative’s JPP project will emphasize taking “the idea of globalizing Japanese humanities seriously,” said Emmerich, who is the director of both the Yanai Initiative and JPP.

A large focus of JPP will be enhancing the interconnectedness of scholars of Japanese humanities by allowing researchers to create profiles with contact information—a feature that will be particularly useful for the field, as many scholars in Japan don’t have public emails, said Emmerich. The digital hub will be available in Japanese and English and include a page dedicated to recent publications on Japanese literary studies, which have traditionally been spread out across different journals and platforms, in addition to providing funding to help people around the world start up projects that can be maintained by the JPP initiative.

“We’re hoping that over the years, more and more people will begin to use this as a kind of digital hub or place where they can come together and begin to see themselves as belonging to a community of scholars that really includes the whole world,” said Emmerich.

Yanai’s new gift to UCLA’s College Division of Humanities surpasses a former record set by the billionaire in 2014 when he gifted the department an additional $25 million to endow the Yanai Initiative. His previous donations to educational institutions include 10 billion Japanese yen ($67 million) to fund medical research at Kyoto University and a 1.2 billion Japanese yen ($8 million) gift to help build a library dedicated to writer Haruki Murakami at Waseda University.