sofia

Students are increasingly being required to use primary sources in their research, but not all students have enough skill in Japanese to use Japanese language materials.  Primary sources in English, although they are increasing, are not abundant. Nor does every university have major art or print collections.  This paper proposes to examine a number of examples of materials students in Art History have used in conjunction with secondary literature.  While traditionally students did such projects as comparing photographs found in books and using the extensive secondary literature in English to analyze their findings, this paper will focus on an assignment using realia (physical objects) found in the library and on campus.

This paper  examines the survey results of historical paper materials and their methods for conserving original resources at the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo.
At the University of Tokyo, original resources are mainly treated as book collections at libraries including the general library, faculties' library, and institutes' libraries, and categorised as valuable books or originals. These resources have been used for education and research materials and shown as cultural properties from the viewpoint of their scarcity value. In so doing, they are now required to manage new conservations and surveys. In any conservation survey microscopic observations are usually conducted. In the preliminary studies a small mobile microscope with 100 times magnification was used for examining the thickness and density of fibres, the existence and quantity of additives, and the conditions of other materials. These surveys are essentially non-destructive, and presented new standard for distinguishing paper materials accurately. In recent years, USB digital cameras for microscopy and lenses of megapixel cameras have rapidly been upgraded, and researchers are able to gain distortion-free and high-definition images easily.

The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics released the public domain color JPEG images of the British Library’s Amakusa edition of 'Feiqe no monogatari', 'Esopo no fabulas' and 'Qincuxu' in March, 2019.
The Amakusa edition of Heike monogatari, Isoho monogatari and Kinkushū are one of the so-called Christian editions, published in 1592-1593. The British Library’s copy is only surviving copy in the world. Written in a Portuguese version of romanization, we can estimate how Japanese was pronounced at that time.
Furthermore, for the use of Japanese language history class, we developed a viewer that displays the Amakusa edition’s images and transliterated texts side-by-side. This viewer has three type transliterated texts;  kanji and hiragana text, katakana text, Kunrei-shiki romanization text.

The National Diet Library is implementing a plan formulated in 2017 to digitize personal papers from its collection of modern Japanese political documents. We will report on this plan as well as the significance of systematic digitization.
We will present examples of the types and characteristics of documents found in personal papers that have recently been added to the National Diet Library Digital Collection.

This presentation will be a case study (example of University library “Nikola Tesla” from Niš, Serbia) of how even limited resources can make a major impact on local community. The study will include the description of how the library managed to market its limited Japanese resources and sparkle interest in academics and general population alike, by partnering with a local NGO to organize a Japanese-themed yearly festival called “JapanNiš”. We will present experiences and lessons learned from five consecutive years of organizing the festival. The idea is to make the audience rethink the notion that a library or a resource center needs to be huge in order to attract the audiences, and also to share ideas for future actions and possible collaborations.

Isaac Titsingh (1745-1812) was undoubtedly the most energetic and aspiring person among all heads of Dutch East-India Company trade factory in Nagasaki. His endeavor to compile a compendium on Japan made him an outstanding collector of Japanese books, which spread among institutions and individuals in Europe after his death. Paul Schilling (1786-1837) was on a par with Titsingh in energy and ambition. Employed mainly in diplomatic service, he was famed for his inventions in electro-magnetic engineering, including demolitions, communications and lithographing, but of the greatest interest for him was cryptography, which made him an enthusiast in Asian languages and scripts. While in Europe he collected a huge collection of books on Asian languages, including Japanese, and later donated them to the Asiatic Museum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. His autographic list of Japanese books and maps contains 32 items, and 12 of them are marked as being brought from Japan by Titsingh.

The resources for Japanese studies often contain temporal information according to the Japanese calendar. The temporal data in catalogs and documents are usually converted into Gregorian calendar, as most computer systems do not accept Japanese calendar dates. However, periods of years and months prior to 1873 (i.e., when the Japanese calendar was lunisolar), are different for Japanese and Gregorian calendars. This may, therefore, cause problems in retrievals and analyses. Moreover, calendar conversion is not easy as Japanese calendar dates are represented using Chinese letters and the Stems-and-Branches.

On behalf of the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources, this presentation will provide updates on new and exciting projects by the NCC, including the Next Generation Librarian Workshop to be held as a pre-conference workshop in Boston (CEAL 2020), Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery with a focus on the NDL’s Toshokan Soshin Service, the Image Use Protocol Working Group’s new initiative related to moving images, the newly establish Outreach Working Group, the Multimedia History Project, as well as the new Comprehensive Digitization and Discoverability Grants Program. By introducing these numerous initiatives of the committees and working groups, the NCC hopes to get feedback, exchange ideas, and identify opportunities for collaboration with the EAJRS community. 

XXIst century has brought much turmoil into the humanities studies. Digitalization of resources, online platforms, virtual classrooms, development of artificial intelligence… The needs of Japanese studies students, as well as the need for and the expectations from japanology scholarship have changed substantially. Social, political and economic themes have moved up the hot-topic list, whereas literature, arts and cultural topics have suffered a certain hint of negligence.
Since its establishment as a regular course some 30 years ago, Japanese studies at Sofia University has maintained a steady line of development, yet the challenges of the 21st century have certainly raised important questions. 
How do we evaluate the environment in which Japanese studies develop? How do we define the priorities and the strategies for this development? How do we cope with challenges on financial, political and social level?

Although diplomatic relations between Japan and Ukraine are not 30 years yet, the history of the Japanese literature translations into Ukrainian goes back more than a century. First Ukrainian translations of Japanese poetry and fairy-tales, published in literary or artistic journals, were done from intermediary languages, primary English, German and French. Direct translations from Japanese and Esperanto appeared in the Soviet Union period, and this circumstance greatly influenced the subject matter of the translated texts: it was exceptionally Japanese proletarian writers’ novels and short stories. In the early 1930s, almost all orientalists, including few specialists on Japan, were repressed and perished in camps. Until the 1960s, there were no Japanese studies in the Soviet Ukrainian Republic. The ideological situation has improved in the 1970s, and translations have changed significantly in its quantity and quality. The latter resulted as well in a shift from proletarian writers to the pre-modern and modern classical authors. The new epoch of literary translations has started at the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century when Japanese studies’ departments were founded in the majority of big universities and research institutes of the country.