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。
Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture (REJ) conjoins an original collection of early- to mid-20th-century multimedia tourism ephemera with a collaboratively built, open-access digital archive that dynamically displays these objects in digital space. Designed to allow curated access to resources documenting representations of Japan and its place in the world, REJ’s archive draws on Carole Palmer's idea of a Thematic Research Collection, a web-based resource in which scholarship is embedded in both the product and its use. Silent cinema research and film preservation work inspired the original collection of travel-contingent objects that make this hybrid project a tool for re-envisioning Japan's past in granular detail.
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.
For libraries and GLAM institutions, the widespread adoption of generative AI represents a significant turning point. This panel discussion examines, from multiple perspectives, how libraries should engage with generative AI.
Specifically, the discussion is structured around two key aspects: (1) utilisation, understanding and education from the perspective of those using generative AI, and (2) the question of how data should be provided to generative AI systems.
Scholarly communities emerge around and are sustained by archives. As a digital information hub and repository for open-access resources, Japan Past & Present (JPP) seeks to mobilize the centripetal force of the archive to reimagine the Japanese humanities as a genuinely global field. On the one hand, JPP works to provide global access to archives and information; on the other, it offers funding to incentivize the formation of global groups of scholars who tap into the potential of local archives.
The data of the “Meiji-Portraits” portal was originally compiled by Bernd Lepach until 2022 based on his own research and presented on the website of the same name (http://meiji-portraits.de/). Mediated by Erich Pauer, who repeatedly supported Bernd Lepach in his work, and Regine Mathias (Vice-President "Études Japonaises", Centre Européen d'Études Japonaises d'Alsace (CEEJA)) the Specialist Information Service Asia (FID Asia) took over this data and stored it. Its transformation into the present website took place in 2025 as part of the work package “SOLR as a Service” during the project phase 2025-2027 of the FID Asia.
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.
CiNii Research, operated by the National Institute of Informatics, is able to search a wide variety of contents such as books and journal articles, but it can hardly be said to be adequate in dealing with papers and articles in books, which is an important position for research in humanities and social sciences, such as the center of "Japanese studies". There are several reasons for this, but one of them is that almost no records of "microcontents" such as "chapter" and "part" that constitute the contents of these books have been created in the country. Therefore, papers and articles that have been included in the so-called "collection of articles" in book form are not listed in the search results of CiNii Research, and their authors' achievements have not been sufficiently visualized.
Tohoku University Digital Archives (ToUDA) is a platform that integrates Japanese resources held across Tohoku University—including its library, archives, museum, and archaeological unit—and publishes images and metadata via a bilingual Japanese/English interface. Launched in April 2024 with the guiding concepts of "integration, visibility, and research use," ToUDA aims to excavate dormant content, visualize it centrally, and expand continuously based on a versatile data design. It is operated through a faculty–staff collaborative framework centered on the University Library, the Center for Academic Resources and Archives, and the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies.
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.
This presentation introduces digitize Japan-related collections at the Museum of Cultural History of University of Oslo and the University of Oslo Library.
The University Museum preserves a diverse range of Japanese handcrafted objects, including suits of armor and other weapons, many of which have entered the collection through donations. In autumn 2025, the museum launched a portal of series of themes based on items already digitized in its collection database. One of these is focus on seventeen suits of Japanese armor, the sites are available in English, Norwegian, Japanese. In addition, 3D “Samurai” exhibition is available which was held at the museum in 2023.
Despite the fact that the CEEJA Japan Library contains a variety of special collections that, at first glance, might appear more pertinent to the conference theme, this preliminary introduction will focus on the extensive collection of regional and local histories, in Japanese "chihôshi".
This assertion may initially appear counterintuitive; however, upon closer examination of the global image of Japan, it becomes evident that regional and local histories play a pivotal role. The global image of Japan is predominantly influenced by the national narrative, which conveys a generalised representation of the nation. Conversely, regional and local histories have the capacity to contribute to the deconstruction of the national narrative and global image by serving as sources of diversity and variety.
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.
This presentation introduces, to Japanese studies scholars in Europe, some of the outcomes of an ongoing initiative on the structuring of textual data for the humanities. The initiative is being carried out by Keio University—through its implementing body, Keio Museum Commons (KeMCo)—as a sub-contractor of the National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU), under the MEXT-commissioned project "Research and Development Promotion Project toward the DX of the Humanities and Social Sciences" (JPMXP1624).
In March 2026, the project has published two principal deliverables: the Guidelines for Structuring East Asian Textual Data in the Humanities and a set of Tutorials(1) that bridge the Guidelines to actual practice.
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.
This paper examines a remarkable collection of Japanese illustrated books from the Edo period, preserved within the Japanese holdings of the Guimet Museum Library. Acquired in 1893 from the collector Léon Joly de Morey (1837–1896), who remains little documented today, this collection nevertheless constitutes a corpus of exceptional quality, both in its coherence and its state of preservation.
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.
法政大学国際日本学研究所では、日本政府文部科学省「国際共同に基づく日本研究推進事業」その他の助成を受けて「在欧博物館等保管日本仏教美術資料データベース」の作成を進めている。このデータベースは、最終目標としては全欧州の博物館に所蔵されている日本仏教美術を共通の基準でデータベース化し、公表することによって、そこから浮かびあがる欧州における日本観を描き出そうとするものである。
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.
The National Diet Library (NDL) makes available to its overseas patrons the Digitized Contents Transmission Service for Libraries (DCTL) and Remote Photoduplication Service (PDF download) as useful tools for Japanese studies.
The DCTL provides patrons at NDL partner libraries with access to digitized materials that are protected by copyright but out-of-print or otherwise difficult-to-obtain. The reception of digital content transmitted by the NDL is considered to be subject to the law of the country where the content is received, which means that compliance with the laws of the receiving country must be ensured. For this reason, partner libraries overseas are required to follow a special application procedure.
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.
Since the time of the Man'yōshū, Mount Fuji has been a constant subject of literary works. As Japan’s most iconic mountain, it has come to symbolize the very essence of the country. Poetry, in particular, has played a significant role in this regard. The kana preface to the Kokin Wakashū, the canonical collection of waka poetry, states that one’s feelings of love are likened to the smoke rising from Mount Fuji, and that those who hear the smoke has ceased to rise find solace in waka poetry. The question of whether Mount Fuji’s smoke is rising or not is addressed in a subtle manner. Below, we will examine how people who actually saw Mount Fuji described its smoke.
The Historiographical Institute, the University of Tokyo, has built a foundation for research use by surveying, reproducing, and cataloguing Japanese historical materials held by institutions in Japan and abroad. This presentation examines how the Institute publishes historical images and related data for materials whose originals are held by institutions other than the Institute itself.
Since traditional Japanese books are paper-based materials, it is often assumed that their conservation follows standardized methods, aside from differences in binding structures. In practice, however, conservation approaches are determined based on careful observation of each item’s condition, including the degree of deterioration, the fiber composition of the paper, the properties of inks and pigments, and traces remaining on the surface, such as needle holes and crease marks. In addition, the anticipated frequency of use and the storage environment are also taken into account in determining appropriate treatment policies.
Additionally in conservation practice, reversible materials with reversible properties are used in many cases, taking into account the possibility of future re-treatment.
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.