Kyoto is a city that has as many as 40 universities and other institutions of higher education and research, boasting the highest ratio between student and residential populations. Doshisha University, the host institution of the conference, is one of the highly acclaimed universities in Kyoto. Local people have been generally respectful of intellectual life, friendly to academics and students, and welcoming to international visitors.
The Faculty of Economics of Doshisha University will be a highly-qualified local host because of its outstanding contribution to academia in Japan in general and to the study of cultural economics in particular. Doshisha University, privately established in 1875 and currently with a student body of 26,000, is one of the leading research universities in Japan, whose Faculty of Economics celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2008. Three members of the staff out of a total faculty of fifty-three have been active in the field of cultural economics and cultural policy, offering taught undergraduate and graduate courses on cultural economics, a few seminars and lectures per semester concurrently.