Japanese Digital Resources: Material Culture

The Kotenseki Workshop sponsored by C. V. Starr East Asian Library and the Center for Japanese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and the National Institute of Japanese Literature was held at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library on March 11, 2016. This guide contains PDFs of the presentation slides from that workshop.

A MOOC taught by Sasaki Takahiro and Ichinohe Wataru from Keio University on traditional Japanese books and book culture. This is an introductory course and is open to anyone with an interest in the history of Japanese books. A basic knowledge of the history of Japan and Japanese literature will be helpful but is not required. The course makes use of a number of visual resources; course videos are in Japanese with English subtitles.

A history of advertising in Japan from the Edo period to the present as presented by the Advertising Museum in Tokyo. Available in both Japanese and English, and illustrated with digitized items from the museum's collection.

A database of newspaper advertisements from the Meiji period focusing on publishing.

Includes many images of Japanese stamps of various types, including revenue stamps, from the Meiji and Taisho periods.

A portal site for all things Showa, including videos, products, special sections, food, and history. It also has reviews of current Showa-related products and restaurants, and Showa-related news.

Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address "culture" in much broader ways—cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of "Self" and "Others," and so on.

A project from the University of Rochester about "Japan as destination in 20th century visual and material culture." Includes many images of various kinds of materials from the 20th century.

This project celebrating 150 years since the beginning of the Meiji period in 2017-2018 includes lectures and workshops at UBC, as well as online teaching materials and exhibits as well as a podcast found here.

This is a free, open access journal dealing with how to "read" wahon, or Japanese-style books, through the Edo period.

A search engine for inkan, indexed by personal name of artists, scholars, and calligraphers from the Edo period.

A database of seals stamped in books by collectors. The advanced search function is extremely detailed and allows you to search by size, color, title, author, etc. It provides high-quality digital images of the seals and notes which institution holds the book that was scanned.

A tutorial based on a Meiji lucky-day calendar showing how to read an almanac-style book; also includes a PDF of many examples of these Meiji books.

A searchable and browsable database of images of publishing culture throughout history from the Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku University.

Imaging Kantō was created as a digital complement to Gennifer Weisenfeld’s Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 to archive, crowd-source, and exhibit images of the Great Kantō Earthquake and its Tokyo urban context in conjunction with important historical visualizations of data from the disaster and reconstruction process.