Japanese Art: Primary Sources

The Asia Art Archive conducts focused research projects, gathering primary source materials including photographs, video, ephemera and more. SInce 2010 they have been digitizing significant resources and making them available via their collections link on their web site. Asia is broadly defined to include, for example, the Arab World, Central and South Asia. Use this site to search for scanned documents re: a specific artist or institution in Asia.

Full text of all issues of this historically important newspaper covering the years 1897-2015. Japan Times is Japan’s oldest English-language newspaper and the country’s only independent English-language newspaper today.

Translations and transcripts of news stories from non-U.S. media sources including newspaper articles, conference proceedings, television and radio broadcasts, periodicals, and non-classified technical reports. Coverage focuses on socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, and environmental issues and events. Dates of Coverage: 1995 - 2013

PMJS is an interdisciplinary forum for those doing research into earlier periods of Japanese art, culture, history, religion and literature. Founded in Sept. 1999 as the "premodern Japanese studies mailing list," it is now known by its acronym. A major project of PMJS is a bibliography of translations from classical Japanese. The PMJS website also offers a classified and searchable index of Monumenta Nipponica. (Monumenta Nipponica, a quarterly journal on Japanese culture and society, was founded in 1938, making it one of the oldest English-language academic journals in the field of Asian studies.

The Japanese Historical Map Collection contains about 2,300 early maps of Japan and the World. The collection was acquired by the University of California from the Mitsui family in 1949, and is housed on the Berkeley campus in the East Asian Library. Represented in this online collection are over 1100 images of maps and books from this Collection. The maps were selected by Yuki Ishimatsu, Head of Japanese Collections at the East Asian Library, and scanned and put online by David Rumsey and Cartography Associates.

Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925) was one of the first Americans to live in Japan (1858-1925); his archive forms the basis of this website. Use for primary source materials -- diaries, drawings, correspondence, artifacts -- on everyday life as Japan went through several transitions.

Rich collections of Japan's national library digitized and available for download. For the visual arts see in particular Rare books and old materials: Japanese items created before the end of the Edo period (1868), Chinese items created before the end of the Qing dynasty, including Nishiki-e (colored woodblock prints), E-zu (old maps and plans) Books: 350,000 fully digitized, published before 1969. See esp. Fine Arts

An online digital collection that documents the activity of Oberlinians in Asia from the 1880s to the 1950s. It contains materials from the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association Records and personal paper collections, and it represents a small percentage of the total amount of materials in the College Archives that relate to the work of missionaries and Shansi Representatives in China and as well as other countries.

The Tokyo National Institute for Cultural Property (TNRICP) offers more than 900 exhibition catalogues on Japanese art, which are freely available and downloadable on the Getty Research Portal. These titles comprise a collection of rare catalogues held by the TNRICP, which document domestic industrial exhibitions, world expositions, and major group shows from the end of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th century.