2023

With the expansion of the digital humanities, the field of Japanese Studies is progressing on a global scale. Within this environment, researchers wishing to access archival materials from abroad will first and foremost make use of digitized texts that have been transcribed and imaged, followed by historical records housed in museums, archives, and research libraries. However, transcribed texts have been edited and are therefore no longer original. In addition, museums, archives, and research libraries organize materials according to their respective cataloguing requirements. This is because public institutions receiving donations of archival materials have to make these materials available to the public. The materials are thus subjected to a ‘New (Archival) Order’. 
As a result, there is no way of knowing who originally compiled these materials and how they were handed down and held in private homes, thereby obscuring the ‘Old (Archival) Order’ and irretrievably separating it from the ‘New (Archival) Order’. 

Whaling practices of Norway and Japan began to cross at the end of the nineteenth century when Japanese entrepreneurs visited Norway to study the cutting-edge whaling technique called the "Norwegian system whaling technique". Traditional whaling was conducted mainly by nets in Japan until then. Technologies, including the equipment, ships, and skills of gunners, were transferred from Norway to Japan in the early twentieth century, significantly contributing to the development of the modern whaling industry in Japan. Working with Norwegian whalers would influence Japanese workers and local communities, but the cultural aspects of this international collaboration are still understudied. Long-term voyages of pelagic whaling provided whalers extra time to create crafts from whale materials. Norwegian and Japanese whalers painted baleens as decorative objects, and there seem to be similarities in painting styles and motifs.
The presentation will introduce one remarkable baleen painting dedicated as ema, or votive painting, to a local Shinto shrine of Hagi, Yamaguchi, Japan.

Harvard has five of the 75 lavishly produced copies of “Ehon Don Kihote” (1936), featuring stenciled illustrations by Serizawa Keisuke; Harvard also holds the stencils used in its production. The story behind its existence touches on many strands of affiliation and culture.

This presentation will feature a combination of four short lightning talks introducing news from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and our platform CrossAsia (crossasia.org).

The NDL Image Bank is a digital exhibition of beautiful and enjoyable images from the National Diet Library's collection. In this system we can add selected images from the digitized collection of over 3 million items by specific themes. After launching the service in March 2022 with approximately 1,500 images, as of April 2023, over 7,000 images have been introduced in over 120 themes and over 40 columns.