井の中の蛙

Japanese historical visual materials are becoming available online in increasing quantities and variety, as seen in two posts from the last week from Pink Tentacle and BiblioOdyssey. The former posted an entry titled “Mythical 16th-century disease critters” which introduces a text owned and published online by the Kyushu National Museum:

Harikikigaki, a book of medical knowledge written in 1568 by a now-unknown resident of Osaka, introduces 63 of these creepy-crawlies and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies. The Kyushu National Museum, which owns the original copy of Harikikgaki, claims the book played an important role in spreading traditional Chinese medicine in Japan.      

BiblioOdyssey’s post introduces a database of late 19th-century, early 20th-century water color depictions of toys. These seem to be by Koizumi Kawasaki (1877-1942): “Japanese Toy Design.” 

Add these to other resources like the Nagasaki University Library’s Metadata Database of Japanese Old Photographs, Database of Nationally Designated Cultural Properties and the Tohoku University Library’s Kano Collection - Image database.

A recent initiative in the US to limit access to birth and death records [via] along with other personal data would severely limit the ability of historical and geneaological researchers, not to mention the epidemiological studies mentioned in the article.

This reminded me that I’d meant to blog a long time ago about Sharon Domier’s H-Japan announcement that a similar law in Japan passed last year was hindering historical researchers. I’ve removed a few of the URLs she provided because they don’t seem to work anymore, but I’d be happy to provide them if anyone wants to root around in the archives.

The Japanese government recently enacted a Personal Information Protection Law that is having a significant impact on both publishing and research. In Japanese it is called Kojin Joho hogo ho.
…
The Japan Media Review is a good place to read about the effect of the new law on publishing. Here is an article in English: http://www.japanmediareview.com/japan/media/1060286367.php

What this means to libraries is that many are withdrawing meibo (registers) that contain personal information. School yearbooks are off limits as are many biographical registers. If you subscribe to online databases that include biographical information, you may find that the content has changed significantly in order to comply with the law. Many of the librarians that I have talked to in my recent travels are grappling with how to preserve materials and be in compliance with the law.

For an article that explains how one library handled historical material (court cases from the Meiji-Taisho period), please see this Asahi Shinbun article in Japanese. http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0414/OSK200504130060.html [I can't seem to find this, either at Asahi or in Lexis-Nexis, sorry]

Please note that libraries are removing the bibliographic records from OPACs so that there is no public trace of the materials that are problematic.

As I replied to Domier at the time, My research probably will be affected, but I haven’t done a Japanese archive trip in a while, so I can’t be sure. It sounds like some of what I had access to — official records with names and addresses — might well be included, so I’m sitting on a stash of “gray market” evidence. One of my concerns — aside from the obvious — is that research already done with these records will now be unverifiable by future researchers. Have you run into a problem in the last year or so? Let us know.

This is a serious issue: privacy and personal information protection are indeed valuable principles worthy of care and protection. But there has to be some way to preserve those principles without seriously compromising our ability to do legitimate research.

While looking for a supplement to the anemic textbook offerings on Tokugawa Japan (none of the stuff is out of copyright, probably, which is why it’s not in the document set), I came across this great collection of links to history resources. (via Early Modern Resources) I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (quick document readings for world history students) but it’s a likely source for something especially visual materials.

Update (1/23/06): I didn’t think I’d find much in the David Rumsey Map collection, because it seemed to be heavily European maps, and I was right: a few interesting maps of Japan produced by Europeans, but not much compared to the wealth of material for Western historians. Then, as I was about to give up, I noticed the link to the Japan collection Yes, the UC Berkeley East Asian Library collection of historical Japanese maps (and a few other images) has been digitized and is available under Creative Commons license. There’s a lot of mid-to-late Tokugawa and Meiji era stuff, in particular: right up my alley.

Here’s a good illustration of the image quality and flexibility of the service: the very center of a 1710 map of the world:

The National Diet Library (NDL) site 国立国会図書館 offers essential resources for research on Japan including the NDL-OPAC (National bibliography) and Journal index 雑誌記事索引 (1949-present) as well as Lending/copying services for both institutions and individuals. (Now they even allow credit cards for payment!) Since some of you may not be familiar with it, so let me take this opportunity to share a little more about this amazing resource.

The NDL’s Electronic Library Collection 近代デジタルライブラリー has continued to grow. It now has some 55,000 volumes of monographs published in Meiji period. Although the Yenching library has the complete Meiji monograph collection available on microfilm (some 120,000 volumes), increasingly we can skip viewing microfilm thanks to this growing digital collection.

日本の国会・世界の議会 The Diet & Parliament section offer a wealth of Modern political history sources including the 国会会議録 since the first postwar Diet session in 1947, the 日本法令索引 since 1884, 閣議決定等文献リスト及び本文 1927-1963, and my favorite 近現代日本政治関係人物文献目録 with 44,000 references. The NDL’s Parliamentary Documents room 憲政資料室 has in-depth resources on modern Japanese political history, and is making a selection of its contents contents viewable digitally here. The problem with the NDL web site is its organization. Parliamentary documents are kept in the ”Nippon in the World” section which is a part of the “Gallery”. “Nippon in the World” has three sections: Scenic Mementos of Japan, Japan at the Vienna Expo 1873, and Parliamentary Documents. There is no logic in grouping them, but they all offer rich and unique information in image and texts. The NDL site map, which reflects NDL bureaucracy but isn’t a ‘universal’ organization of knowledge that we might be familiar with, does not help much in finding things. Anyway, my point is that NDL’s digital resources on the web are growing and it’s worth exploring from time to time. There are many hidden gems on the NDL web site.

P.S. I created a web resource guide for Japanese studies two years ago and it is accessible at the Yenching library web site. I am planning to update this soon. I would appreciate your comments/suggestions for my next guide.

I have an exciting piece of news to share. I am pleased to announce that we have a new and distinguished addition to our list of authors at Frog in a Well - Japan. Kuniko Yamada McVey, the librarian for the Japanese collection at the Harvard-Yenching library has agreed to join us on here as our resident librarian! Let us all make her feel welcome!