Japanese Studies

This collection contains mainly materials acquired by the NDL prior to 1969, including books, parliamentary and statutory documents, and children's books.

Aozora Bunko is a open source Japanese digital library. This online collection encompasses several thousands of works of Japanese-language fiction and non-fiction. These include out-of-copyright books or works that the authors wish to make freely available.

The Japan P.E.N. Club Digital Library contains over 1000 works written by the members. It is a great database of modern Japanese literature from the end of the Edo Period through to the current Heisei Period. International version available at http://bungeikan.jp/international/

This collection includes Japanese materials created before the end of the Edo period (1868) including materials designated as rare books and semi-rare books. 76,995 items in this collection including books, arts, maps and plans.

The Pulverer Collection, acquired in its entirety by the Freer Gallery of Art in 2007, includes numerous rare and pristine examples of Japanese illustrated books produced in the Edo period and beyond. For more than thirty years Dr. Gerhard Pulverer, a renowned medical researcher in Germany, and his wife Rosemarie traveled the world and assembled the collection. Their holdings of more than 900 titles encompass almost 2,200 volumes that range in date from the early seventeenth century to the 1970s. Today the Pulverer Collection is regarded as one of the most outstanding and comprehensive collections of Japanese illustrated books outside Japan.

The digital collection consists at present of 74 books and 20 different card sets relating to the poetry anthology Hyakunin Isshu 百人一首 (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, hereafter HNIS), edited by the famous poet and scholar, Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) in the 1230s. It is unquestionably the most famous poetry anthology in the Japanese tradition.

Collection of Japanese illustrated books of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Artists represented in the collection include Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige, who are best known today for their woodblock prints, but who also excelled at illustrations for deluxe poetry anthologies and popular literature. Included in the collection of some 250 titles—more than 400 volumes—are numerous masterpieces of woodblock printing, many of which are nearly impossible to find in such fine condition today.

Images of rare books etc which are held by Tsukuba University Library. Currently you can see images of 18,127 volumes of materials.

Database of images of all rare books in the Nichibunken collection, primarily books treating Japan in Western languages published before the opening of the country to foreign commerce in the 1850s. In addition to graphic images of all pages of these rare books, the database contains searchable text with bibliographic information, tables of contents of the books, and captions of the illustrations.

Includes numerous digitized rare books