It is our intention to build an education and research centre which integrates theatre research and film study and furthermore serves as a large-scale international theatre research institute.

The study of theatre and film is already widely carried out in Japan, but the greater part of it is done in professional institutions whose purpose is to train actors or staff members for the production of theatre and films, and in most cases they do not have educational facilities equivalent to doctoral programmes. On the other hand, academics who are involved in doing research on theatre and film are affiliated with departments of literature. There are almost no research centres where those academics gather together to pursue academically the study of theatre and film. In an attempt to remedy this, the Waseda University Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum [hereafter, the Theatre Museum] is establishing a research centre on campus which not only takes over the 21st Century Institute for Theatre Research but also brings together theatre and film researchers. The only one of its type in the East, it will focus upon the study of world theatre, and by using the rich resources of the Theatre Museum, make dynamic research possible.

As a research centre in the 21st Century COE Programme Humanities Division, the Theatre Museum has established a strong network of researchers around the world, and is already recognized as a world-class education and research institute. To theatre researchers around the world, the Theatre Museum serves as a crossroads in Asia. In recent years, academics and those involved in the theatre from various nations have been drawn to the Theatre Museum both to introduce the theatre of their own countries and to present the results of their theatre research. The number of foreign students coming to the Theatre Museum has doubled. In addition, through academic exchange agreements with a variety of overseas universities, the Theatre Museum is promoting the exchange of students and researchers. That is to say, by cooperating with multiple overseas research institutions, a foundation is being laid for the development of theatre research on a global scale. In order to further such developments, we have proposed the global COE Programme "International Institute for Education and Research in Theatre and Film Arts."

As one example of the concrete achievements attained so far, in the field of research on Japanese classical theatre, having restored scattered texts and lost styles of theatre, we have entered a period of extremely fruitful collaborative research with overseas institutions. In research on Western theatre theory, Japanese research on Samuel Beckett is making an impact on academic circles around the world. In Eastern theatre research, the results we have produced in modern Chinese theatre history and folk art and in the gathering of research materials is being taken serious note of in Chinese academic circles. In the field of film research, the discovery of a fragment of the long-lost silent movie masterpiece The Case of Lena Smith, directed by Josef von Sternberg, has been widely announced in Europe and the United States. Such achievements have drawn researchers from around the world and attracted attention to this world-class theatre and film education and research centre.

In addition to the aforementioned activities, we will now promote even more actively new forms of film research. Filming techniques make research on film history and theory different from theatre research. Nonetheless, if one considers the fact that film has been utilized in theatre productions and that theatre productions have been filmed and can be duplicated, it is clear that theatre and film are closely affiliated with one another. At present, not only are the theory and history of film and theatre being considered separately, but from the point of view of film and theatre as contemporary phenomena, it has become essential to pioneer new methodologies for research. In this regard, we are attempting to promote research on the theory and history of filmmaking together with theatre and to build a centre for comprehensive theatre research. In order to realize this, we intend to divide research fields in the following manner and carry out research that traverses them.