kaunas

This presentation describes the purpose and methods of the "Kuzushi-ji seminar" held in France and Germany funded by JSPS. The purpose of this seminar is to train young researchers in Europe how to decipher Japanese manuscripts, picture scrolls and printed books archived at European libraries and museums.

The National Museum of Japanese History (NMJH; popularly known in Japanese as Rekihaku) is developing a comprehensive digital network of Japanese historical resources as part of the core research ‘Constructing Integrated Studies of Cultural and Research Resources’. This project enables access to data in universities and museums across Japan through interdisciplinary studies in the humanities and sciences using information infrastructure. This digital network includes links to relevant information; search results can display advanced information.

Beverley Art Gallery in East Yorkshire (UK) is a regional council-run public gallery, part of the East Riding of Yorkshire Museums Service in the North of England. In my talk, I would like to introduce this Museum and its collection of Japanese items, which have never been researched or exhibited.

The use of technology is often recommended to effectively promote students' learning and teachers are strongly encouraged to use it for teaching at Finnish universities. This paper focuses on the use of digital resources for learning Japanese as a foreign language as well as Japanese culture and society in the context of Finnish universities and reports the results of a pilot study on the topic. The focus of this research is students who learn Japanese at the University of Helsinki and University of Turku. A survey by questionnaire and interview was conducted in autumn 2017 at the University of Turku and in spring 2018 at the University of Helsinki.

The NIJL-NW Project, hosted by National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL), launched the “Database of Pre-modern Japanese Works” in 2017.
In cooperation with various domestic and overseas universities and specialized institutions, this database publishes images of pre-modern Japanese works widely. It allows general public to access easily the pre-modern Japanese works from anywhere on the ground, without which they have to visit libraries and holders of such works around the world.

One feature of CrossAsia (crossasia.org) are the thematic portals that present topics related to the Specialised Information Service Asia (Fachinformationsdienst Asien) that is provided by Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK with its partners. The aim of the thematic portals is to uncover e.g. smaller special collections or very specific holdings within our local collections in order to make them better known to a global research community.

In January 2018, Nichibunken Library registered the some 300,000 titles of the Japanese and non-Japanese works in its collection with the OCLC WorldCat, through a tie-up with Kinokuniya Shoten. Of that data about 170,000 entries have been newly added to the WorldCat. From April 2018, moreover, Nichibunken also started to provide interlibrary loan and document delivery services through the OCLC WorldShare ILL. Participation by libraries in Japan has been limited to only a few institutions including the National Diet Library and Waseda University, and Nichibunken is the first one among national universities and research institutions in Japan. Through this service, we succeeded to improve operations of international ILL/DDS, and researchers around the world can find and gain use of the materials in the Nichibunken more smoothly.

East Asian studies and interest in East Asian region have been gradually growing in Lithuania as well as the necessity of the resources for this topic in Lithuanian language. What is more, with the growing spread and usage of the Internet more and more resources can be found online. Therefore, in order to increase the accessibility of resources for learning about the East Asian region it is important to pursue their digitalization. Moreover, as the number of research in different fields of Asian studies in Lithuania has been growing, there is a need for a database which would include all the information about the publications and research related to Asian studies.

The current paper talks about the fruitful collaboration between the artist Kaburaki Kiyokata (1878-1972) and the highly praised Meiji author Kyōka Izumi (1873-1939). The famous nihonga painter has initially made his living as an illustrator, producing kuchi-e woodblock prints, frontispieces illustrating popular novels from the late Meiji period. His prints were admired by Kyōka Izumi who desired that his books would also include kuchi-e prints done by Kaburaki