Text encoding for East Asian and Japanese (EAJ) texts—especially practices guided by the TEI Guidelines—has not diffused widely in Japan, creating a persistent obstacle to sustainable international sharing and cross-corpus research. To address this gap, the SIG East Asian/Japanese, established in 2016, has continued community-based efforts to promote TEI-oriented encoding. Since 2024, this trajectory has been strengthened through a program supported by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, bringing international text encoding onto the national research-policy agenda. In parallel, Japan’s National Diet Library has released free OCR software that provides TEI output, indicating that TEI adoption is increasingly supported at an infrastructural level.

At the same time, outside the context of the humanities, Japan has also seen a range of independent initiatives in text encoding. Widely used formats include the Aozora Bunko markup and various forms of Markdown and their derivatives. When annotation is not embedded directly in the text, RDF is also commonly employed. Although RDF statements can be expressed using <standOff>, doing so still requires a solid understanding of the underlying data model. Consequently, effective education in text encoding cannot be achieved by teaching TEI alone. It must also address the roles, affordances, and limitations of coexisting formats and make interoperability strategies explicit—particularly through data conversion between TEI and other representations, and through TEI-centered transformations that enable heterogeneous datasets to interoperate, even though generative AI can now help draft such conversions and workflows.

Against this background, and with attention to the distinctive features of EAJ texts as they bear on encoding design, we are developing a TEI textbook that integrates TEI instruction with conversion-oriented pedagogy across multiple encoding ecosystems. This presentation reports the textbook’s scope and structure and situates it within these institutional and technological shifts.