abstract

The Prints and Photographs department of the French National Library (BnF) holds several thousands of old Japanese items, including prints and illustrated books. Among those is the Duret collection, after the name of Theodore Duret (1838-1927), art critic and japonesque collector who donated over 500 illustrated books from the Edo period. They cover a wide variety of literary genres (novels, epic chronicles, poems, oraimono, kabuki plays…), some written by renowned authors such as Saikaku, Bakin or Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and illustrated by the finest artists of their time.

Henri L. Joly (1876-1920) was an electrical engineer, with particular expertise in the development of batteries for electric vehicles. He lived in France in the first half his life and lived in London in the latter half. He was also an authority on Japanese art, especially Japanese sword fittings and he compiled catalogues of their major collections. He translated works of Arai Hakuseki and Inaba Tsūryū into English as well as published books and articles on Japanese art.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the anthropomorphic haniwa (jinbutsu haniwa 人物埴輪), with a special focus on the shaman-shaped clay figures (miko haniwa 巫女埴輪) and their paraphernalia. Haniwa are not only important as part of the burial ceremonies, but also representative of the cultural context of protohistoric Japan.

In 2011, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences started its collaborative project with Hokkaido University Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies on comparative study of "Higashi Ezo Iko", a Japanese manuscript on Ainu. The project resulted in publication of the manuscript and its study in Japan in 2014'. That project has led us to an extensive collection of written materials on Ainu, in both Japanese and Russian, collected by Alexander Grigoriev in 1879-1880 and preserved at several institutions in St. Petersburg, including the Research Archives of the Russian Geographical Society.

Beginning in 2020, the author worked on identifying a private collection owned by Turkey-based Italian architect Pietro Montani whose tenure as Chief Architect of Eastern Rumelia (presently – South Bulgaria) was the reason he started living in Bulgaria in 1885. 
The collection consists of 50 ukiyo-e paintings and a printed textile sample. For more than 150 years it has been in possession of Montani's grandchildren who vaguely knew details about the value of the leather-bound album that contains the collection.

The Silistra Gallery collection is of special interest. It was obtained in China by a Bulgarian graphic artist Mircho Yakubov during his years at the Chinese Academy of art where he studied under the guidance of Professor Qi Baishi in the early 50s of the twentieth century. Great Chinese artist influenced Yakubov's artistic style, but another artistic influence cannot go unnoticed either – that of the Japanese artist Hide Kawanishi (川西英 1894-1965). His teachers' influence can be noted in Yakubovs artistic skills in ink painting and in the graphic techniques he adopts. 

Rare Taisho period posters from the USC Libraries collection include works promoting tourism in Japan’s Asian colonies, areas such as the Shandong Peninsula and Manchuria. This presentation will introduce a student curated digital exhibit of posters from 2020 and specifically draw attention to those posters which represent areas beyond the Japanese archipelago, highlighting their use as propaganda.

The Department of Asian Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, under the leadership of Dr. Vampelj Suhadolnik started with the project “East Asian Collections in Slovenia: Inclusion of Slovenia in the Global Exchanges of Objects and Ideas with East Asia” in July, 2018. The project team is composed of Chinese-, Japanese- and Korean-Studies specialists. In cooperation with national and regional museums and libraries of Slovenia, the project examines East Asian collections and individual materials, in order to reconstruct the intercultural connections between the Slovenian and East Asian territories.

'Samurai: history and legend' explored the historic roots of the samurai and the literary image of the samurai in manuscripts and woodblock-printed books from Japan. This exhibition of treasures from Cambridge University Library's collection of rare Japanese books opened in January 2022, nearly two years after the spring 2020 opening that was originally planned. This was the first major public exhibition based on the collection, more than 100 years after most of the UL's historic Japanese books and manuscripts arrived in 1911 and 1912.

In 2015, Princeton University East Asian Library acquired an ephemera collection from the Yoshino region of Nara Prefecture which contains various types of documents from the medieval to the Showa period. Princeton University and the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo (HIUT) conducted a joint research in 2018 and 2019 to investigate about 150 pieces of fragmentary leaves from 14th century to 17th century in the collection.