Factbook

Despite the first William Shakespeare (1564-1616) play only being translated into Japanese in 1883, 267 years after Shakespeare’s death, his plays were already being used as a student text at the Imperial University Tokyo in 1878. 

The American William Houghton (1852-1917), a Yale graduate who arrived at the university in 1877, is thought by historians to be the first lecturer or at least one of the first to use Shakespeare to teach at the university. 

Around this period many who would subsequently go on to have a lasting impact on Japanese literature were students at the university. 

Shoyo Tsubouchi (1859-1935), for instance, a Japanese writer and translator and later a professor at Waseda University, a prestigious private university in Tokyo, who completed the first translation of the complete works of Shakespeare in 1928, was a student at the Imperial University Tokyo graduating in 1883. 

Another important example is Soseki Natsume (1867-1916), one of Japan’s most highly regarded authors, who entered the University one year after Tsubouchi graduated in 1884, and is said to have been strongly influenced by Shakespeare’s techniques. To name just two such individuals. 

Interestingly, Soseki later succeeded Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), one of the most famous Japanologists to have lived as a lecturer in the university’s English department in 1903.