2023 conference abstracts

Digital Exhibitions and Projects are becoming more and more common as institutions seek to go beyond merely providing digitized materials and look to provide scholarly context around them. Here, I will introduce a digital project tentatively titled Off the Beaten Path: Alternative Views of the Fifty-Three Tōkaidō Stations. Typically, digital projects created by librarians focus on resources at their own institution, however, in this project librarians from three schools with small- to mid-sized collections for Japanese Studies (Duke University, University of Southern California, and the Ohio State University) are collaborating to bring together materials in their collections and develop a dynamic interpretive lens around them. We hope that by putting these materials in conversation with one other, in the digital environment, they can be made more meaningful than if studied in isolation.

Where do scholars go to find the most comprehensive list of collections in North America or other regions of the world? How can librarians and resource specialists provide such lists while adapting to changing trends in Japanese Studies? Addressing these issues, our presentation discusses the Notable Japanese Collections (NJC) Dashboard, a digital collection discovery initiative and tool that identifies and promotes distinctive Japanese Studies collections in North America. Through our working group with the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC), we have developed an online database that aims to showcase all notable print and digital materials (including unprocessed or partially processed collections) across the continent.

Continuing from 2022, this report provides an update on the status of Digital Humanities (hereafter DH) and Digital Archives (hereafter DA) as of 2023. While there has been no significant shift from the major trend of transitioning from “only human readable data” to “machine-usable datasets”, and from images to text utilization, there have been some releases and modifications in digital resources. These changes will be elaborated, providing an overview of the current state of digitalization of Japanese resources in Japan

This presentation proposes the role of Ryoshi (料紙, materiality of paper) in analyzing the historical documents in the Hiroshima Domain Government (HDG; Hiroshima-han) from the middle to late Edo period, demonstrated through the materials in the Hiroshima Prefectural Archives. During this era, samurai officers made official use of various papers of different size, folding patterns, colors, and thickness to honor the receiver’s status and expressing the importance of the communique. HDG’s law required samurai officers to use Iro-moroguchi (色諸口) paper and Iro-hanshi (色半紙) paper, which were dyed in pale pink, for all forms of official documents.
Incorporating the evidence from the samurai’s diaries, journals, and the scientific examination of paper materials, this presentation demonstrates that Ryoshi visualizes the four Cs in HDG: Class society, Community spirit, Credibility of official document, and Color-coded network.

Several years have passed since we started the project to create a database list of Japanese Studies-related databases together, and the number of items has gradually increased. However, it has become difficult to read the contents in the current list format alone, so we have created a system that extracts information from the list and puts it into a search system using MySQL, Flask and Docker, so that the contents of the list can be retrieved as soon as necessary. This presentation introduces that system.

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.

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!

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.

Harvard has five of the 75 lavishly produced copies of “Ehon Don Kihote” (1936), featuring stenciled illustrations by Serizawa Keisuke; Harvard also holds the stencils used in its production. The story behind its existence touches on many strands of affiliation and culture.

On September 1, 2023, an unprecedented earthquake of magnitude 7.9 known as Great Kanto Earthquake hit the Kanto region causing one of the largest damages in Japanese history. The number of killed people exceeded 105,000 including missing people. In addition, nearly 1.5 million people were left homeless. Six neighbouring prefectures were affected, and most of the Tokyo metropolitan area was destroyed by the earthquake and fire. In this presentation, I would like to introduce Princeton University’s collection of posters and notifications created immediately following the earthquake by the Japanese national and regional governments, as well as citizen groups, etc. Most of these ephemera items consist of text only in contrast to post cards and drawings that were created later. The contents are rather raw portraying the desperation and urgency of the situation.

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.

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 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.