The Japanese department was founded in 1993. It started to recruit undergraduates in 1996, and graduates in 2002. Nanjing Agricultural University was among the first China’s agricultural universities to establish a Japanese major, and the first to obtain approval to offer master’s degrees in Japanese Language & Literature and Translation Studies. The department hosts a Japanese Language & Culture Research Institute and a Japanese Training Center. It is also a member institution of the Jiangsu division of the Chinese Association of Japanese Teaching Research.

Japanese Language & Literature is a college-level specialty subject and a key discipline. Extensive reading in Japanese is an advanced, college-level course. In recognition of the high standard of the program, the textbooks developed for this course received an award from the Provincial Education Department for Learning Materials in Higher Education in 2014.

In recent years, international exchange programs organized with the department have included:

· The Japan Foundation

· Exchange Program of Japanese Teachers

· JSPS Young Teachers Research and Studies Program

· Jiangsu and Ishikawa Prefectural Government Japanese Education and Cooperation program.

Meanwhile, the department has coordinated student exchange and study abroad programs with Waseda University, Miyazaki University, Kagoshima Prefectural College, Chiba University and Daiwa Institute of Language Education. The department also cooperated with the Daiwa Institute of Language Education to found the university’s first overseas teaching and internship base. The practice and teaching base set up in conjunction with Jiangsu Shunyu Technology Company Ltd has been listed as a Nanjing Agricultural University key construction project. 80% of faculty in the Japanese department have research or study experience in Japan, and nearly 30% of students have studied or done research abroad.

The department’s students have achieved numerous awards in, for example:

· The Ambassador Cup Chinese Composition Contest in Japanese

· The Asahi Cup Japanese Speech Contest

· Kagoshima’s Japanese Speech Contest for Non-native Speakers

· Jiangsu Province Japanese Dubbing Contest

One student from the class of 2015 even won a study-abroad scholarship worth 4.8 million-yen. As a result, graduates of the Japanese Department have come to be highly sought-after by employers.

Head of the Japanese Department

Director: YOU Yiming

Contact Number: 025-84396706

Deputy Directors: SHI Bi and WAN Feng

Contact Number: 025-84396721