netherlands

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.