Japanese Collections

Guest post by Jayden Mitchell

For those of you who have followed our Jiji Manga Wiki, you may remember that we hold a nearly complete collection of the Jiji Shinpō manga supplement, Jiji Manga, published from 1921 to 1931. After the publication of the final issue, Jiji Manga was renamed Manga to yomimono (漫画と読物, Manga and Readings), and beginning with Issue 537, it also appeared under the title Manga to shashin (漫画と寫眞, Manga and Pictures). Under these new titles, the supplement continued publication for just over another year, from July 1931 until October 1932.

The new digital anthology makes rare manga by artists associated with Jiji Manga available for online exploration

We are pleased to announce that Ohio State has gained access to a newly digitized anthology of these later issues, providing online access to Issues 505–572 of Manga to yomimono and Manga to shashin. Complete transcriptions of section titles make the collection fully searchable, while high-resolution digital scans allow researchers to examine each issue in remarkable detail.

Together with our print collection of Jiji Manga and its accompanying Wiki, researchers now have access to nearly the entire run of the publication and its successor titles. This expanded access opens new opportunities for research on Taishō- and early Shōwa-period Japan, including popular culture, politics, publishing history, and the early development of modern manga.

Links

Links to the database:

1. Issues 505-521
2. Issues 522-546
3. Issues 547-564
4. Issues 565-572

For more information about this resource, please contact Japanese Studies Librarian Dr. Ann Marie Davis at davis.5257@osu.edu.  Additionally, to learn more about the Jiji Manga Wiki and how to use it, please see our earlier blog post introducing the collection and demonstrating its search features.

Guest post by Jayden Mitchell

A sampling of some of our materials from this collection

Long-time readers of our blog may remember a post we published in 2015 about the Yurii Kyogoku Collection, a donation of more than 500 Japanese books that once formed part of the library at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. Topaz was one of ten camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated during World War II, making the surviving books important witnesses to a difficult chapter in American history.

The collection was donated to Ohio State by Yurii Kyogoku, who later worked as a Japanese cataloger at Ohio State University Libraries for many years. In our earlier blog post, we shared a list of approximately 60 titles from the donation—a substantial sample, but only a fraction of the collection as a whole.

Prompted by renewed interest in the collection, we recently collaborated with Collections Analyst Karen Ferris to compile a comprehensive inventory. The resulting bibliography identifies 497 volumes and provides the most complete record of the collection assembled to date.

Interestingly, the vast majority of the books—470 volumes—were published before 1945 and are believed to have originated from the personal library of Itsuzō Kyōgoku (1887– ), a Buddhist clergyman who immigrated to the United States in 1919. During his incarceration at the Topaz Relocation Center, Kyōgoku served on the camp’s Adult Education Committee and became the largest contributor to the camp’s Japanese-language library by bringing much of his own collection into the camp. After the war, the books were returned to him, although many had deteriorated beyond repair. The remaining 27 volumes in the donation were published after 1945 and are therefore more likely to have belonged to his daughter, Yurii Kyōgoku, who later served as a Japanese cataloger at Ohio State University Libraries before donating the collection.

The collection is especially strong in Buddhism, philosophy, religion, language, and Japanese culture, while also encompassing a wide range of literary and historical works. Researchers interested in exploring the collection can browse the complete inventory of the 497 volumes.

Some items from the collection include bookplates such as these.

Notice the “Topaz Public Library” stamp on the endpaper here.

Have you ever wished you could read the Japanese calligraphy (kuzushiji) in museum woodblock prints or old Edo-period manuscripts? When it comes to archival sources and manuscripts, even expert Japanologists often feel the need to brush up on– if not start completely from ‘zero’–their Japanese paleography reading skills.

With this in mind, we’ve recently stepped up our holdings in Japanese paleography handbooks, including several nifty new acquisitions by Kobayashi Masahiro, an expert and scholar of historical documents (komonjo).

The image here, courtesy of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, is a digital facsimile of Shojiki-mono (正直者) from Kitagawa Utamaro’s series Kyokun Oya no Megane (教訓親の目鑑).  It is one of several museum pieces featured in Kobayashi’s book Korenara yomeru! Kuzushiji, komonjo nyūmon (これなら読める!くずし字・古文書入門), which roughly translated is “If I Could Read That: An Introduction to Japanese kuzushiji and komonjo.” As the picture suggests, the book offers a variety of lesson as well as useful tips for learning how to decipher such Japanese texts often found in Edo-period woodblock prints.  Describing the moral virtue of being honest for Edo period young women, the body text of famous woodblock prints such this one are all the more legible thanks to Kobayashi’s insightful lessons.

For additional titles on learning Japanese hentaigana, check out these recent additions:

Guest post by Mitch Clark

We are pleased to announce the addition of two new exciting collections to the JKBooks eBook platform at University Libraries: the Dai-ichi Koto Gakko Koyukai Zasshi (published by The Museum of Modern Japanese Literature) and the Kobunso Taika Koshomoku (a major corpus of antiquarian book catalogs). Both of these collections will be useful to scholars investigating topics related to early 20th century culture, especially youth culture, education, literature, and philology. With the addition of these titles, the number of online JKBooks collections now reaches a grand total of thirteen available to OSU users. Below is a short description of these collections as well as some highlights and screenshots of their contents.

Dai-ichi Koto Gakko Koyukai Zasshi (第一高等学校 校友会雑誌)

Two Sample covers of the
Daiichi Koto Gakko Koyukai Zasshi

The Dai-ichi Koto Gakko Koyukai Zasshi is a magazine published by First Higher School of Japan, a former preparatory boy’s boarding school in Tokyo and one of Japan’s most elite institutions of the modern era. Published from the Meiji period until during WWII, the database offers all but 2 issues (380 of 382 ever published) of the magazine. (Issues No. 293 and 295 of 1923 (Taisho 12) have not been found and are therefore not included in the collection).

In the publisher’s words, this “magazine vividly records the mentality fostered within this elite high school” from the pre-war period until World War II. In addition to leading artists and literary figures, many of the students of this school eventually became prominent leaders in academia, politics, the economy, and education. The repository thus “stands as a spiritual record of the youthful times of those figures” during much of Japan’s modern era (1890-1940).

Among other topics, the journal overflows with poetry and prose written by such luminaries as Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 1886 – 1965) and Yasunori Kawabata (川端 康成, Kawabata Yasunari, 1899 – 1972) during their high school days. While many of the issues emphasize the arts, its diverse contents will be of interest to wide-ranging scholars from many disciplines including the social sciences. Some of pages that stood out to me, for instance, were those with multiple essays (as well as a team fight song) about the school’s baseball club in the early Taisho period. An analysis of such sources can certainly help in constructing a more vivid image of early baseball culture in Tokyo and Japan!

Screenshot of the school’s Baseball Club Fight Song, Supplement Issue No. 2, February 28, 1909, pp. 110-11.

Kobunso Taika Koshomoku (弘文荘待賈古書目)

Two Sample covers of the 77-volume
catalog Kobunso Taika Koshomoku

The Kobunso Taika Koshomoku is a 77-volume catalog collection that lists approximately 20,000 antiquarian books. Distributed to customers of the vintage bookstore “Kōbunsō” founded by Shigeo Sorimachi (1901-1991), the volumes were originally published between 1933 and 1984 and filled with detailed bibliographical information, illustrations, and publishing histories. They are therefore an especially useful reference for scholars of philology and bibliographical studies.

In my first browsing of the catalogue, I stumbled upon some Western classics. Entries 93 through 95, for example, list first edition copies of such famous English language books as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

Entries 93-95. Kobunso Taika Koshomoku, No. 48,
Showa 51.01 (January 1976), pp. 106.

JapanKnowledge Books (aka JK Books) is an ever-expanding eBook platform hosted by JapanKnowledge (an online treasure trove in its own right of Japan’s most important dictionaries and encyclopedia). For an overview (or just a refresher) on “JKBooks,” please take the time to visit this past blog. The list below shows a list of the newest collections (marked with *) along with the many others offered through our library.

1. Taiyo
2. Bungei Kurabu: Meiji-hen
3. Dai-ichi Koto Gakko Koyukai Zasshi*
4. Takita Choin kyuzo Kindai sakka genkoshu
5. Fuzoku Gaho
6. Gunsho Ruiju series
7. Bijutsu Shinpo
8. Toyo Keizai Shimpo / Weekly Toyo Keizai Digital Archives
9. Kobunso Taika Koshomoku*
10. Jinbutsu Sosho
11. The ORIENTAL ECONOMIST Digital Archives
12. Kamakura Ibun
13. Bungeishunju Archives

If you have any questions regarding JKBooks, or any other resource offered for Japanese Studies at the OSU Libraries, please contact us!