LOS ANGELES—Billionaire Japanese businessman Tadashi Yanai has committed to donate $31 million to the UCLA College Division of Humanities, the largest gift in the division’s history, the university announced Thursday.
The donation will support the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, which was created at UCLA—in partnership with Tokyo’s Waseda University—in 2014 thanks to a $2.5 million donation from the businessman. Yanai in 2020 donated $25 million to the initiative.
Yanai, considered one of the richest—if not the richest—people in Japan, is the founder and CEO of Fast Retailing, the parent company of the Uniqlo clothing brand.
The bulk of his latest donation will support “Japan Past & Present,” which is based in the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and is designed to “transform the field of Japanese humanities by promoting easy and equitable access to research and teaching resources and fostering greater collaboration among scholars throughout the world.”…