In 2018, Kornicki was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun 3rd Class, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the promotion of Japanese Studies in the UK and thus to deeper mutual understanding between Japan and the United Kingdom.
[3] He went to schools in Malta, Aden and Cyprus and was then educated at St George's College, Weybridge.
He spent the academic year 1972-3 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 MSc in Applied Social Studies.
He then moved to St Antony's College, Oxford to begin work on a DPhil on Japanese literature of the Meiji period.
[4] 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.