内容简介：
This important collection incorporates many of the key works (in total fourteen) by Western scholars and others on different aspects of the Japanese language which represent the second, or 'rediscovery' phase - the first being dominated by Jesuit linguistic scholarship at the turn of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries resulting from their attempts to convert Japan to Christianity. These language resources and skills, however, were virtually wiped out during the following two centuries when Western culture and religion were outlawed (1630s-1850s). These volumes, therefore, are the result of what might be called a 'fresh start' after Japan opened its doors to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. The substantial Introduction by Stefan Kaiser discusses the position and importance of these early accounts of Japanese in the history of research, and traces the influence they had on Japanese and Western scholarship.