germany

Last year in Sophia, Willy Vande Walle presented the CEEJA Japan Library in Colmar, France.
In our presentation this year, as a follow-up, we will discuss the three issues.

The National Center for Art Research (NCAR) was established in 2023 within the National Museum of Art, Japan, as a central institution dedicated to the promotion of the arts in Japan. While it does not have a physical library-like space, NCAR operates Art Platform Japan (APJ), a web-based portal that provides a range of tools and resources to support both domestic and international research on modern and contemporary Japanese art.

The Art Research Center (ARC) of Ritsumeikan University has been building a large-scale digital archive of materials related to Japanese culture and art for over 25 years. ARC has developed a unique set of databases organized by type of material, enabling researchers to conduct effective research activities. The database clusters include not only materials held by ARC, but also materials digitized by ARC from museums in Europe and North America, as well as materials provided by institutions such as the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the National Diet Library.

The latest trends and future prospects of NACSIS-CAT/ILL and the E-resources Data Sharing Services.

The digital collections of the National Diet Library (NDL) are making a significant impact on the humanities and social sciences, both in terms of their extensive holdings and their powerful full-text search capabilities. This presentation introduces a novel methodological approach using large language models (LLMs) to analyze full-text data of modern Japanese novels provided by the NDL.

Since 1997, Historiographical Institute the University of Tokyo Old Photographs Research Project has been conducting research and preservation activities on collections of old photographs scattered around Japan and abroad whose provenance and transmission are certain and has also been collecting high-resolution digital image data. In some of these cases, the value of old photographs as historical materials has been reaffirmed, and after the survey, they were designated as national important cultural properties. Since 2003, the company has also continued to conduct surveys in cooperation with foreign institutions.

This presentation explores how the Digital Literary Map of Japan (DLM, https://literarymaps.nijl.ac.jp) can be applied to the education and research of classical Japanese literature, with a particular focus on nō drama. As a distinctive form of Japanese theatrical culture, nō frequently features historical landmarks and poetic place names (utamakura) in its poetic texts. These references often play a significant role in constructing the symbolic meanings of the works. Understanding the historical and cultural background, as well as the inherited and innovative literary imagery of these locations, is therefore essential for a deeper appreciation of nō.

For the past four years, we have employed the "Digital Literary Map of Japan" (hereafter referred to as DLM, https://literarymaps.nijl.ac.jp) as a teaching resource in joint courses on Japanese literature and theatre, as well as in international collaborative courses between Osaka University and Heidelberg University. The DLM not only facilitates spatial recognition of utamakura (poetic place-names) through mapping, but also functions as a database that provides geographical and historical explanations for over 100 famous sites and utamakura, along with example usages and visual materials.

Minna de Honkoku (https://honkoku.org/) is a crowdsourcing platform for the transcription of historical Japanese documents, such as manuscripts and printed books produced before the Meiji era. This presentation introduces the platform along with associated tools, research applications, and educational practices.

Research into the application of generative AI is underway in the humanities as well. The International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) has been converting the 67,000 pages of the Kojiruien, an encyclopedia of Japanese culture compiled at the beginning of the 20th century, into text data, which it has been releasing sequentially since 2008. As of May 2025, 22,477 pages are available as searchable text data.