The USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture is under the academic auspices of the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
The USC Shinso Ito Center was established at the University of Southern California in 2011 with generous support from the Japan Foundation. In 2014, the Shinnyo-en Buddhist organization made a major gift to the Center (for more on Shinnyo-en click here), which led to the renaming of the center in honor of Shinnyo-en’s current leader, Her Holiness Shinso Ito.
The Ito Center’s mission is to promote the study of Japan at USC. The center fosters this area of study through support of faculty-led research and publications, public conferences and events, supporting graduate students, offering postdoctoral fellowships and hosting visiting scholars.
Among the eight major research projects supported by the Ito Center are: the Hybrid Japan Innovation Lab, focused on generating innovative solutions to the question of Japan’s role on the global stage in the 21st century and the Hapa Japan Database Project, dedicated to the study of mixed-roots Japanese people globally from both historic and contemporary perspectives.
