2026

This presentation examines the impact that records concerning Hirado’s trade history have had on research into 19th century foreign relations. Hirado was a trading port until the Dutch Factory moved to Deshima in Nagasaki. Research on Hirado can be divided into two areas: studies of trade based on documents from Dutch and English factories, and studies of domain administration based on documents from the Matsura family (the lords of Hirado).
However, local historical documents in Hirado city have not yet been transcribed, meaning they cannot be used to their full potential for research purposes.
This study examines the following three points using both documents from townspeople and documents from the Matsura family.

In 1906, the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo took over a project compiling diplomatic documents from the late Edo period from the Japanese government. The Institute has continued to compile and publish Dai Nihon Komonjo: Bakumatsu Gaikoku Kankei Monjo (Documents relating to Foreign Affairs in the Last Days of the Shogunate, 1853-68).
The project’s primary source material is now the collection known as ‘Gaimu-shō Hikitsugi Shorui’, which was transferred from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Institute alongside the project. The collection consists of approximately 3,000 items, primarily in book form, and includes valuable original documents from the late Edo period, such as those produced by Shogunate officials responsible for diplomacy and letters received from diplomats stationed in Japan.

近世日本における蔵書家は、単に稀少本を愛好する個人という枠を超え、地域における「知の拠点」として極めて重要な役割を担っていた。彼らは京都や江戸の最新刊から古写本までを網羅的に収集し、中央の高度な知識を地方へ還流させる文化的なハブとして機能したのである。蔵書家のもとには自然と学者や文人が集まり、書物を媒体とした読書会や研究会が頻繁に催された。こうした私設図書館や文化サロンの存在が、当時の日本全体の教養水準を底上げしたといえる。

In recent years, the University of Tokyo has been actively promoting the digitization of its institutional materials and making a wide range of resources available through the UTokyo Digital Archive Portal. In 2025, the General Library released the complete set of the “Briefe” from the A. v. Siebold-related materials on this portal.
This “Briefe” consisting of diverse paper fragments in both content and form, has been catalogued and transcribed in Acta Sieboldiana (edited by Ruhr University Bochum). However, it has been revealed that the digital images include items not covered in Acta Sieboldiana.

The first photographic image of Japan emerged from Dutch–Japanese collaboration in pioneering photography on the island of Dejima. In the 1850s, photography was taught within the framework of the earliest 'Dutch studies': education in modern science and technology provided by Dutch physicians at the medical clinic on Dejima to selected groups of Japanese students. Dr Jan Karel van den Broek (1814–1865) installed a photographic darkroom in the clinic. Using chemicals from Dejima’s pharmacy and European photographic manuals, Dutch and Japanese practitioners worked together as pioneers. These experiments marked the emergence of photography in Japan.

During the period of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868), Japan largely followed isolationist policies. Only the Chinese and the Dutch were allowed to trade with the Japanese. In 1609, the VOC opened their first trading post in Hirado. In 1641 they moved to the artificial, fan-shaped island Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki. Several officials at Dejima collected Japanese maps and sent them home to the Netherlands. One of the most active map collectors at Dejima was Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), a German physician, botanist and geographer who lived in Nagasaki between 1823 and 1829.

Von Siebold was a German medical doctor who stayed at Dejima, a Dutch trading post in Japan, from 1823 to 1829. We present our materials relating to von Siebold mainly through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).
First of all, we present three French translations of von Siebold’s letters from the 1820s. Two letters are addressed to Baron van der Capellen (1778-1848), former Commissioner-General of the Dutch East Indies, and one letter is addressed to Baron von Derfelden van Hinderstein (1783-1857), chairman of the Central Commission of the Société de Géographie. These three letters on the works of von Siebold in Japan, published in the “Bulletin de la Société de Géographie,” will serve as the introduction to our presentation. After returning to the Netherlands, his research in Japan bore fruit as “Nippon” in the 1830s.

This presentation discusses the necessity, challenges and possible future directions for the transliteration of Japanese, particularly in the international context. Transliteration is not merely a supplementary tool for non-native speakers; it can be said to be indispensable for native Japanese speakers as a foundation supporting the international dissemination and sharing of information.

When romanising Japanese text written in mixed kanji and kana, it is necessary not only to apply rules for converting kana into Roman letters, but also, at a minimum, to determine how words should be separated. Word separation, in turn, inevitably involves rules based on part-of-speech classification, such as distinguishing particles and auxiliary verbs from other elements, and identifying prefixes and suffixes. These distinctions are generally not easy to make.
The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics has developed and made publicly available morphological dictionaries for automatically segmenting Japanese texts into words and assigning information such as part of speech and readings, together with the online tool WebChamame, which makes use of these dictionaries for the construction of Japanese corpora.

Although the significant lack of language sensitivity and inclusivity remains prevalent across research infrastructures, multiple attempts are underway to bridge the gap between hegemonic languages, primarily English and languages with Latin scripts, and minoritized languages with non-Latin scripts, including Japanese. Cross-institutional initiatives, such as OpenMethods and Disrupting Digital Knowledge Infrastructures (DDKI) collective, have been actively addressing these issues while raising "awareness of the peculiarities and challenges that those dealing with non-English texts and non-Latin scripts in a digital context regularly face" (Horvath, 2021).
Drawing on these initiatives and following the presentation "Challenging Anglocentric Library Infrastructures" given at the EAJRS conference in 2024, this presentation reflects on a collaborative in-class library search workshop for the students from Japanese language studies at Helsinki University in early 2026.