abstract

Following on from last year's presentation, this session will introduce the latest developments at the National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU) and the National Museum of Japanese History, with a focus on emerging trends in Digital Humanities (DH) and Digital Archives (DA) in Japan.

A central topic will be the newly launched initiative, The Consortium Project for Digital Humanities of Japan, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), with NIHU serving as the core institution.

The Keio University Library has learned a lot from overseas initiatives in its history. Even now, the library complies with international standards in its cataloging rules and library systems. In terms of human resource development, we continuously send our librarians abroad as long-term stay trainees to some oversea libraries. In addition to the collection and preservation of unique materials, the library has also contributed to developments in Japanese studies through digitising classical books and other collections from the Edo period to the early Showa era and making them available to the public both in Japan and abroad.

This year, at the 35th EAJRS Conference, we aim to address another prevalent issue in the conservation of Japanese books: the fragility of the original sewing structures used in their bindings. As books are intended to be handled, read, preserved, and—more recently—digitized, their sewing often weakens over time, with threads deteriorating or breaking due to repeated use and manipulation.
In this presentation, we will explore how to best preserve the integrity of these bindings while maintaining the fundamental purpose of our collections: to ensure that these books remain accessible, readable, and capable of disseminating knowledge to future generations.

This presentation discusses the extracted records of official documents written in the “Imanaka Daigaku Diary” and manuals and analyzes the changes over time in the types of paper and formats of the document.

Anonymously, Satow sold his collection of Western books at Sotheby's on 24 June 1913. Therefore, publications of book auction records, such as "Book Auction Records", "Book Prices Current", etc. contained the information of his books only vaguely. However, we could identify them through those publications, using the names of auctioneers, the date of the auction and Sotheby's lot numbers. Also, we could trace or find them through catalogues of bookshops and libraries, online resources, etc. in some cases. Because of the progress of digitisation, we can even read some of former Satow's books on the internet.

The digital transformation of scholarship has brought access to a steadily increasing quantity of digitized Japanese resources for European Japanese Studies researchers – not the least thanks to the ardent activities and services of libraries both in Japan and Europe. What is more, digital humanities research methods are also gaining momentum in Japanese Studies. However, when it comes to institutional knowledge infrastructures at universities in Europe, it is still a shared experience that they can fall short in accommodating the required linguistic and geo-cultural diversity, especially regarding data and tools (software) in non-Latin scripts like Japanese.

This year we entered the fourth and final funding period as FID which will last until the end of 2027. Currently, the DFG is launching a follow-up programme under the name "FIDplus" that will allow FIDs to continue their activities, if they meet certain criteria. In this presentation I would like to give a summary of our services and achievements for the research community in Germany and Europe so far and outline future challenges and perspectives for the continuation of our work.

This keynote lecture explores the case of a “private library” in Kyoto during the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on the book collection of Kamo no Suetaka, a Shinto priest of the Kamigamo Shrine. Drawing on specific historical materials, the lecture examines the formation, administration, and operation of his collection, known as the Kasendō Bunko.

This presentation offers a framework to explore automating various aspects of work in Japanese studies librarianship using AI tools such as ChatGPT and CoPilot. Progressively complex use cases will demonstrate immediate solutions requiring little to no technical expertise, and advance to more sophisticate solutions that highlight AI's limits in automation and problem solving.
The framework I propose is built on several interrelated pillars: verifiability; expedience; expertise, both in subject matter and technical prowess; and active vs. passive learning.

In a previous presentation I introduced my studio and how I work with damaged Japanese books. I showed different possibilities of treatments and materials that restorers use in the restoration and/or conservation of books. This time, I want to focus my research and my practices on a very specific problem. As is very often the case, we find holes made by insects in our collections of Japanese books. I will present a case study with 6 different possibilities (such as adding fibers manually, adding fibers by machine, by doubling, etc.). All these possibilities will be demonstrated, analyzed and discussed in terms of feasibility in relation to the conservation of books/collections.