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Conference Report: European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (2023)

Tower of the KU Leuven Central Library (Photo courtesy of Rebecca Corbett)

The European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (EAJRS) 日本資料専門家欧州協会年次大会 convened September 13–16, 2023 for its 33rd annual meeting in Leuven, Belgium. Organized by KU Leuven Libraries – Artes, it received support from the Japan Foundation and the Toshiba International Foundation and focused on the theme “Adapting to Changing Trends in Japanese Studies” （日本研究の時流に適応する）. Every year EAJRS creates an important opportunity for Japan specialists of all backgrounds at universities across the globe to exchange information on the latest tools, methods, acquisitions, and research that impact the field. Many of NCC’s past and present specialists also participated as presenters at the 2023 meeting; this conference report will feature information on some of their contributions.

In 2022, Dr. Ann Marie Davis (The Ohio State University), Katherine Matsuura (Harvard University), and Yukari Sugiyama (Yale University) launched the Notable Japanese Collections Dashboard Project to assist researchers in locating collections related to Japan Studies in North America. In this presentation they discussed the key features of the map, including filters by language, time period, collection format, digital accessibility, and more. Since the launch of this online database the site has had over 1,600 visitors from 26 countries and now features 219 collections. The collaborators have also begun to include Featured Special Topics, such as “diaspora and mobility” and “Post-war Occupation.” As the project looks to the future, they hope more resource specialists will reach out to enhance the collection’s data and are currently considering how they might expand to include data from other institutions in North America, including museums, small colleges, and other repositories that are not represented on NCC or CEAL. View the presentation here.

The recent proliferation of AI technology like ChatGPT and the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) have had a significant impact on academia as a whole, including the libraries and institutions that support Japan Studies students and researchers. This roundtable discussion featured Naomi Yabe Magnussen (University of Oslo library), Nobutake Kamiya (University of Zurich), Toshinori Egami (International Research Center for Japanese Studies), Toshie Marra (University of California, Berkeley), and Makoto Gotō (National Museum of Japanese History), who each shared their own reflections on the role of digital humanities and AI literacy in our changing academic landscape. In particular, they reflected on how the advent of AI and LLMs have facilitated interactions between different modes of analysis and project development, with “engineering thinking” and “humanities thinking” coming to head within the wider field of digital humanities. As the presence of AI continues to expand, this conversation will surely be ongoing at future iterations of EAJRS. View the discussion here.

2023 marked the 100-year anniversary of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake 関東大地震 that devastated Japan. At EAJRS, Setsuko Noguchi (Princeton University) introduced a variety of ephemera related to the earthquake that are now held by Princeton Libraries. These included posters or official notifications by national and regional government bodies (like the one seen to the right), drawings, postcards, and more. Many images produced showcase the emotive and psychological impacts of the disaster on the population at the time.

Figure (right): Teito fukkō no tame ni! 帝都復興のために! Post-1923. Tokyo Shiyakusho 東京市役所. Princeton University.

Their interdisciplinary value makes them important sources of information for historians, anthropologists, art historians, and many other scholars in and beyond Japan Studies. Princeton Libraries is currently in the process of digitizing these materials to curate as a digital collection and exploring other possibilities for digitally interactive representations of their content, including mapping platforms, to enhance the possible applications for scholarship and teaching.

Originally launched in 2005, the Constitutional Revision in Japan Research Project (CRJP) of the Japan Digital Research Center of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies is one of Harvard’s longest-running digital projects. In this presentation, Katherine Matsuura (Harvard University) provided an insightful peek into the transformation of this project over the last two decades. Aiming to capture and preserve materials related to constitutional revision proposals and discussions in Japan for future scholars and students, the CRJP encountered many challenges related to web-archiving and generating born-digital materials. Matsuura discussed the hurdles and pitfalls the project faced as it was forced to adapt to rapidly evolving digital landscapes, highlighting the project curators’ conscious choices to shift from preservation alone to more interactive, user-focused pedagogical and research materials. The site relaunched in summer of 2023 with a host of new functionalities that information specialists and seekers will want to explore. View the presentation here.

Kuniko Yamada McVey (Harvard University, Harvard-Yenching Library) provided a focused exploration of Serizawa Keisuke’s Ehon Don Kihote (A Don Quixote Picture Book) from 1937, five copies of which are held at Harvard’s libraries. Only 75 of these works were ever produced, and each features beautiful stencil illustrations in color; the original stencils used for the production were donated to the Harvard Art Museum. These publications were sponsored by Carl Keller (1872-1955), a Harvard alum and collector of Don Quixote books. Upon meeting Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889-1961), a founder of the mingei (art and craft) movement, at Harvard in 1930, Keller commissioned a Don Quixote work from Serizawa Keisuke (1895-1984), resulting in these gorgeously illustrated interpretations of the story as set in early modern Japan, complete with highly decorative covers and cases made with traditional Japanese materials and patterns. Read more on these works here and view the presentation here.

What possibilities for cross-institutional collaboration and discovery do digital exhibitions offer? Dr. Rebecca Corbett (University of Southern California), Dr. Ann Marie Davis (The Ohio State University), Dr. Matthew Hayes (Duke University), and Dr. Jesse Drian (UCLA) explore this question in their new Scalar project, tentatively titled Off the Beaten Path: Alternative Views of the Fifty-Three Tōkaidō Stations. Dr. Rebecca Corbett introduced the team’s work in progress, which seeks to both develop a dynamic interpretive lens for understanding a wide range of artistic and material representations of the Tōkaidō held at USC, OSU, and Duke Libraries, as well as leverage digital platforms to put small- to mid-sized library collections into conversation with one another in an accessible way. Examples such as the slider view above, featuring two different interpretations of Nipponbashi (Nihonbashi) from OSU’s Tōkaidō emaki scrolls, show some of the interactive tools that will enable users to more fully explore these resources through digital means and explore the concept of “alternative views”. Though the site is still under development, once launched the project team hopes that it will serve as a model for cross-institutional collaborations that can make lesser-known collections more visible and encourage information specialists, scholars, and students to use digital environments to make meaningful connections between their local resources and those in distant locations. View the presentation here.

Given the multitude of challenges to higher education faced by East Asia specialists and academics more broadly over the past several years and more, Dr. Paula R. Curtis (UCLA) spoke to recent hiring trends in Japan Studies using data collected from 2020 to 2023 on job advertisements around the world. She discussed global patterns of recovery in the two years after the COVID-19 hiring freezes, the specific disciplines and geographic regions in which Japan specialization has shown growth or decline, the employment landscape for information specialists, and finally urged participants to consider how these statistical analyses might be used for strategic advocacy for Japan Studies as a whole. The full job report and visualizations on the past three years of job data can be found on her website.

For more on the other fantastic and informative presentations at European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists, you can visit their website at https://www.eajrs.net/. NCC and its specialists would like to express their deep gratitude for the hard work of the EAJRS organizers and to KU Leuven for hosting the event and making this wonderful gathering possible. We look forward to seeing you next year!