NCC News: News

Specialist Spotlight: Shoji Yamada

Through our Specialist Spotlight series we periodically shine a spotlight on the librarians and information specialists of NCC who are often behind the scenes working to support students, faculty, and staff. Whether you’re in the classroom to learn or teach or are conducting research near or far, these hardworking individuals make Japanese Studies possible.

This month we shine our Specialist Spotlight on Shoji Yamada, Professor in the Research Division of Nichibunken (The International Research Center for Japanese Studies 国際日本文化研究センター) and Professor of the School of Cultural and Social Studies at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan.

Yamada began his career at Tsukuba University, first acquiring a Bachelor of Science degree in the College of Policy Planning Science (1986) and then a Master’s degree in the Program of Medical Sciences two years later. While pursuing a doctorate in Engineering from Kyoto University (1998), he also worked at IBM Japan and in the Department of Computer Science at Tsukuba College of Technology, seemingly on a technical path quite outside the realm of humanities and information sciences.

In 1996, Yamada began working at Nichibunken, where he spent over a decade applying his technological expertise to humanistic sources, as well as exploring OCR technology for handwritten historical documents and the possibilities of data mining for premodern Japanese materials. Developing projects that range from character recognition to style analysis of Buddhist statues, his work has been diverse, bridging many different fields of research.

His eclectic expertise has extended to publications. Yamada has published on copyright issues in numerous articles and books, such as “Pirate" Publishing: The Battle over Perpetual Copyright in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012), 『日本の著作権はなぜもっと厳しくなるのか』(Why Have Japanese Copyright Laws Become More Severe?) (2016), and, most recently,『著作権は文化を発展させるのか : 人権と文化コモンズ』 (Does Copyright Advance Culture?: Human Rights and Cultural Commons) (2021). He has also written about historical perspectives on Zen and the exchange of intellectual ideas in the twentieth century in his books Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West (2009) and Tokyo Boogie-woogie and D.T. Suzuki (2022).

Engaged in scholarship and teaching in and beyond Japan, Yamada has held numerous visiting positions at universities and museums around the world, from China and Vietnam to the US, France, Belgium, and the UK. Domestically, he has done outreach for over two decades as an integrated learning advisor for the Middle School Attached to Shiga University (滋賀大学教育学部附属中学校), giving lectures on integrated learning for teachers from all over Japan and observing their classes to provide targeted feedback. This work culminated in the publication 『びわ湖のほとりで35年続くすごい授業』(Incredible Lessons from 35 Years on the Shores of Lake Biwa) on the teaching and learning methods used in their courses of study.

As a part of the NCC, Yamada has served as our Japan Liaison on the NCC Council (July, 2019- June, 2022) and now has agreed to be an advisor to our Resource Sharing Committee (RSC), which helps keeps researchers and librarians up to date with the latest information on how to obtain Japanese-language materials from libraries in Japan. We look forward to learning from his expertise on digitization and copyright law in Japan and appreciate his many contributions to the field past, present, and future.