This presentation is a modest report by two members who met at the EAJRS Oslo Conference in 2017, where we question how we at this stage should proceed in the future. Both Mayumi Tsuda and Merete Pedersen are worried about the increase in institutions that hold Japanese collections, but do not have any staff that understand Japanese.
Vytautas Magnus University possesses approximately 7,000 items in Asian Books Space at main library of university, however, it is quite low frequency of use by Japanese language students. There were 40 students in the second-basic and intermediate level of Japanese language classes, and only three of them had borrowed books in 2017.
My paper will be based mostly on my own experience of writing Japonijos istorija (History of Japan) as a Lithuanian-language teaching material for Vilnius University students and incorporating it into the curriculum of BA program of Japanese Studies. I will concentrate on pragmatic reflections in this paper but also touch upon broader pedagogical considerations on the production of native-language material in Japanese Studies and adjusting its contents to local needs, as well as building a course around it.
Over a period of three years Japanese resources specialists of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences have conducted a research project on identifying private collections of Japanese manuscripts and woodblock-printed books among those preserved at the institute. In our previous presentation at EAJRS conference in Bucharest we attempted to view some early collections of Japanese books and manuscripts and their pathways to Russia as a part of the history of early Russia-Japan relations. This time we are going to try to show how a closer examination of the contents of these collections can contribute not only to the study of early Russia-Japan relations, but to the history of early modern Japan as well.
'Late Hokusai: Thought, Technique, Society' at The British Museum and SOAS, University of London (04/2016-03/2019) is an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project exploring the last thirty years of the life of Japanese painter and print artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). One component of the project is building a pilot contextual research database with semantic web tools on the open-source platform ResearchSpace. Combining legacy data with current research outcomes and the conceptual reference model CIDOC CRM, the project’s aim is to explore how semantic web technology can support the Hokusai research community by digitally recreating ways for them to connect, query and explore information.
The East Asia Resource Library (EARL) was established at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. EARL is a library established through a partnership of the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Arts.
In October 2016 the Korean Corner was opened, in April 2017 the Japanese, in May of the same year Taiwanese and in October 2017 the Chinese Corner was officially opened. The Japanese Corner receives support from the Embassy and the Japan Foundation, and enables access to the JapanKnowledge Lib Database. In addition, the Japanese Corner also includes a part of the Hamaguchi Collection which was donated to the Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts.
The paper shall focus on the research and in detailed study of the Osaka prints in the collection of the National gallery in Prague and of the records on the activities of the Czech collectors. The Osaka prints (about 500 of them) represent a significant part of the National Gallery in Prague collection. A collection of Osaka prints exists in the Czech National Museum (Náprstek Museum of Asian, African and Asian Cultures) as well, consequently there is the possibility of comparing the two convolutes. Unlike the Náprstek Museum collection, there has been no major record on the Osaka prints in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague published so far, the comparison of the two collection may thus bring interesting results.
This presentation will provide an overview of a number of tools that are useful for researching information published by Japanese government agencies, including the National Diet Library (NDL) Digital Collections, the Web Archiving Project (WARP), search guides, and other material created by the NDL as well as tools created by other institutions such as the National Archives of Japan Digital Archive and the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR).
Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) operates a database that has released many records relating to Chiune Sugihara. Sugihara spent about sixteen years, from 1919 to 1934, in Harbin, Manchuria (Manchukuo from March 1932), and there were numerous documents produced over this timespan. Sugihara started in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs by enrolling abroad at the Russo-Japan Association School (later Harbin Institute). Subsequently Sugihara worked in the Japanese Consulate in Manchuria, Japanese Consulate General in Harbin, and at the Office of Agents Stationed in North Manchuria, Manchukuo.
At the National Institute for Japanese Language Studies, we are constructing the "Corpus of Historical Japanese " as a diachronic corpus where you can study the history of Japanese from the Nara period to the Meiji and Taisho eras. This corpus enables advanced search by annotating word information to the whole sentence. It can be used online through the search service "Chunagon" (https://chunagon.ninjal.ac.jp) for free of charge.