Background
Kornicki was born at Maidenhead on 1 May 1950, the eldest son of Sq/Ldr Franciszek Kornicki and Patience Ceredwin Kornicka (née Williams).
Kornicki was born at Maidenhead on 1 May 1950, the eldest son of Sq/Ldr Franciszek Kornicki and Patience Ceredwin Kornicka (née Williams).
He graduated with First Class in Japanese with Korean in 1972. He spent the academic year 1972-1973 as a Japanese Ministry of Education foreign student at Tokyo University of Education (now Tsukuba University) and then returned to Oxford and in 1975 received an Master of Science in Applied Social Studies.
He is Professor of East Asian Studies at Cambridge University. He was previously Professor of Japanese History and Bibliography. He went to schools in Malta, Aden and Cyprus and was then educated at Street George"s College, Weybridge.
He matriculated at Lincoln College, Oxford, initially to read Classics.
He then moved to Street Antony"s College, Oxford to begin work on a Doctor of Philosophy on Japanese literature of the Meiji period. In 1976 he was awarded a Japan Foundation fellowship for study in Japan and spent 18 months at the Research Institute for the Humanities at Kyoto University, studying under Professors Asukai Masamichi and Yoshida Mitsukuni.
He taught Japanese at the University of Tasmania from 1978 to 1982, and was subsequently an associate professor at the Research Institute for the Humanities at Kyoto University. In 1985 he came to Cambridge, where he has been a fellow of Robinson College since 1986, and Deputy Warden since 2008.
He was President of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) in 1997-2000.
His main research interest is in the history of the book in Japan, but he is also interested in the lives and work of the British pioneer japanologists Frederick Victor Dickins, William George Aston, Ernest Mason Satow and Basil Hall Chamberlain.