2023

At the EAJRS conference at Kaunas in 2018 I presented on the three Sagabon utaibon donated to the Bodleian Library in 1629. Among the unsolved questions was how they reached the hands of a country clergyman in England in the early seventeenth century. Since then I have been able to find the answer to this question, which involves a member of the East India Company who worked in Bantam (now Banten in Indonesia) and never reached Japan. I will reveal his name in Leuven and explain the long-distance connection between that clergyman and Japan!

The provenance of Jesuit prints and manuscripts from Japan now kept in collections across Europe and beyond is still understudied. It is thus often not sufficiently clear, when and how they left their country of origin, who their first owners in Europe were and how they were transmitted afterwards. Relying on hints in the objects themselves, but chiefly on hitherto largely untapped sources such as book sale catalogues, this paper provides an overview of owners of such Jesuit sources in 17th to 19th century Europe

This talk aims to introduce a joint Leiden-Yale digital research project centred on a unique early eighteenth-century Japanese manuscript acquired by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Books Library in 2017 (working title: Shudō tsuya monogatari). Set in 1714 in northwestern Japan, the anonymous work describes a samurai same-sex love affair and its tragic consequences. As such, it provides a rare example of an early modern 'true-record-book' (jitsuroku-bon) – a book of rumours surrounding actual events and scandals, illicitly circulating in handwritten manuscript form – on the subject of male same-sex love.

The NIJL has been aiming to make images of approximately 300,000 classical works available on the Kokusho DB since 2014 as part of the Historical Classics NW Project. The NIJL`s joint research project, “Development of ICT-based Educational Programs Based on Images of Classics” is attempting to use the Kokusho DB to develop educational materials for learning about classical knowledge and the local history and culture associated with it in a fun way.

The National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) has carried out the NIJL-NW project for 10 years in cooperation with various domestic and overseas institutions. As a result, it is expected that 300,000 pre-modern Japanese texts will be digitized and made available online. This project will shift to “the Model Building in the Humanities through Data-Driven Problem Solving Project” starting in 2024.
In line with this, we have integrated and reorganized the databases we have offered. Then, in March 2023, the "Union Catalogue Database of Japanese Texts" was released. In the future, we aim to further enrich the database by adding transcriptions and bibliographical introductions, standardizing metadata, and collaborating with domestic and foreign institutions.
In this presentation, we will introduce our current status and future strategies.

L. Kniffler & Co. was founded in 1859 in Nagasaki by the Prussian merchant Louis Kniffler (1827-1888). It was one of the first European trading houses to be established in Japan after the shogunate abandoned its isolationist policy, and within a few years it had become one of the largest. The digital edition of the international business correspondence of L. Kniffler & Co. (1859-1876) is the first attempt to publish the company's business correspondence in its entirety, as it has been preserved in the archive of its legal successor, C. Illies & Co.

This presentation introduces an international collaborative research project, digital humanities research on the beginning and end of the nation-state, which is being conducted by the team research of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (IRCJS).
There are two kinds of our research materials. The first is 140 letters to Tetsujiro Inoue in the collection of the IRCJS Library. The second is the 15,000-piece Seita Toma Archive maintained by the presenter.

In the rapidly advancing landscape of AI technology, it is likely that academic libraries supporting Japanese Studies will also need to undergo transformation to keep pace. Against this backdrop, this panel discussion will focus on themes such as ChatGPT and other LLMs (Large Language Models), AI literacy, and Digital Humanities. The discussion is not aimed at providing definitive answers, but rather at providing an opportunity for viewers and participants to take the themes home and deepen their own thinking.

This paper describes improvements to the Kunten database for Shōsho (Early movable type printing, version 3). Kunten are the annotations such as Kana or marks for reading old Chinese textbooks in Japanese. The textbooks that have Kunten are called Kunten material. There are some small dots or marks written around the Kanji characters in Kunten material. These annotation marks show the verb conjugation (grammar rules), meanings, and readings. These annotation helps to understand the textbooks. The Kunten database supports to the analysis of the changes in the language or the historical differences in how to use the Kunten. The first version of the database was released in 2019. That was designed for the Kunten researchers, for that reason, the search and display methods need specialized knowledge and skills. The improved version has a new search method that uses Kanji + Kana.

In this presentation we will introduce an innovative and collaborative project to enable online access to the content of printed library catalogues.
The British Library’s collection of antiquarian Japanese books and manuscripts is catalogued in several print publications but making them available online has long been a challenge. The two most important printed catalogues are very different in content and format.
The presentation will explain how close collaboration between the British Library’s Collection Metadata Systems and Japanese Collections and Toppan Printing made it possible to produce very accurate electronic metadata which could be manipulated for ingest into the Library’s online catalogue.