What We Collect

Japanese Collection

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The Japanese language collection of the National Library of Australia numbers some 106,000 volumes of monographs and over 4,500 serial titles. It is the largest such collection in the southern hemisphere.

The strengths of the collection lie in the subject fields of the social sciences, especially minorities, burakumin, sex and gender studies, women's studies, statistics, politics and government, law, biography and history after 1868. Focus are also on: fine and performing arts; military science; science and technology(periodicals) and Japanese works on Australia.

Far less emphasis has been placed on the subjects of philosophy, religion, history before 1868, local history and geography, linguistics and literature because these subjects are the collecting responsibility of the Library of the Australian National University under a special agreement.

Another great strength of the National Library's Japanese collection is the large number of Japanese government publications received regularly on exchange from the National Diet Library in Tokyo. These include statistics of many kinds including various censuses and surveys; proceedings of the Japanese Diet; the government gazette; collections of laws and statutes; Japanese diplomatic records; white papers; various ministerial journals, etc.

Much retrospective material is held on microfilm including material on army and navy activities, foreign affairs, and Australia from various government archives; collections of papers of politicians like Okuma Shigenobu; prefectural statistics from the Meiji and Taisho eras; laws from the Tokugawa period; censored periodicals from the Occupation, the collection of General Shozo Sakakibara and so forth.

In addition there is the Harold S Williams Collection which, though predominantly in English, is also serviced from the Asian Collections Reading Room. This collection is comprised mostly of books on foreign settlement in Japan, some of which are extremely rare, and it is considered to be perhaps one of the finest collections on this subject in the world.

 

Contact


Mayumi Shinozaki
Librarian, Japanese Unit
Asian Collections
National Library of Australia

Canberra ACT 2600 Australia

Telephone: +61 2 6262 1615

Facsimile: +61-2 6273 4327

E-mail: mshinoza@nla.gov.au

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