The Japan Directory Project survey for the United States and Canada was conducted over the past year using very complete lists from all our previous surveys for the Japan Foundation (which were conducted in 1988, 1995, and 2005), plus the current membership lists of JSAC and the AAS (all Japan specialists listed). We contacted every identified academic Japanese Studies program in the United States and Canada and asked them to participate in the program survey, through which they also provided the lists of all their Japan specialist staff. We then cross-checked all the staff lists and added those people to our lists of Japan specialists. We sent out multiple e-mails to every person and every program on our very comprehensive lists, inviting people to fill out the online survey forms. Professor Julian Dierkes, the Canadian PI for the project, also sent out notices through JSAC and announced the project widely. Notices were also sent to H-Japan and SSJ Forum announcing the project and inviting people to register on the site in order to be included in the study.

We received responses and have published data from
1,697 Japan specialists, 287 programs (academic and non-academic), and 88 libraries.

We also collected data on doctoral students in Japan-related fields from both the programs and the specialists, and combined those lists to produce our listing of 673 current and recent doctoral candidates.

Because of the repeated follow-ups and triangulation of data sources, we obtain a considerably higher response rate than a normal survey, but we are unable to identify 100% of the people who might possibly consider themselves to be Japan specialists, and we cannot achieve 100% return rates for those whom we do invite to participate. Unfortunately, we did not get any response from your institution and your name did not appear on either the JSAC or AAS list, so we had no way of identifying you as a Japan specialist in North America. We sincerely regret that neither Queens University nor any of its Japan specialists is included in this edition of the directory. The study is now finished and it is no longer possible to add individuals or institutions. We do not have any further funding and cannot provide any updates to the online directory. It will gradually go out of date, just as a print directory did, although we do hope that in the future the Japan Foundation will provide funding to update the information as a future project.

My thanks to all of those who did participate, and I hope those who did not participate this time will do so the next time the Japan Foundation sponsors this project.
Patricia Steinhoff