University of California Berkeley: C. V. Starr East Asian Library

The East Asian originated with the deposit in 1896 of John Fryer's Chinese library. By the middle of the twentieth century, donations of 100,000 items from the Mitsui Library and the 8,850 volumes of the Murakami Library allowed the library to be ranked first in Japanese academic libraries in the country.

Constructed in 2007, the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, where the collections are now housed, is the first freestanding structure built to house an academic East Asian collection on an American university campus. It opened to the public in 2008.

For more information about the Japanese Collection, please contact Toshie Marra at (510) 643-0656 or by email.

Until 2010 UC Berkeley was one of two depository sites for the National Diet Library of Japan. Since 2010 the Library of Congress has been the only depository in the US for NDL publications. As of July 2014 the UC Berkeley Japanese collection totaled 408,000 volumes and is the largest in the US after that at Library of Congress.

Notable Collections:

• Asami Library: contains over 4,000 volumes of classical Korean imprints and manuscripts, including Haedong kayo, an eighteenth-century anthology of Korean poetry compiled by Kim Su-jang..
• Chōhyōkaku Collection: one of the largest and richest collections of Chinese rubbings outside East Asia.
• Gakken Collection: noted for its kanshibun (漢詩文).
• Motoori and Sōshin Collections: comprised of woodblock editions from the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods.
• Ho-Chiang Collection: Buddhist sutras in manuscript and print, this collection documents the development of Buddhism in China, Japan, and Korea.
• Tibetan Collection: includes pre-1949 xylographs of Tantric texts of the Nying-ma-pa sect, as well as an eighteenth-century Narthang edition of the Kanjur section of Buddhist canon.
• Murakami Library: 8,850 volumes, dedicated to belletristic writing of the Meiji and early Shōwa periods, with political economy, social criticsm, history, philosophy, and religion also being represented. This collection was originally collected by Murakami Hamakichi, author of Meiji bungaku shomoku (明治文学書目), and was intended to serve as a primary source for the study of the Meiji Era.
• Sugoroku collection: 150 sugoroku sheets, some with the original wrappers in which they were marked. Primarily from the Meiji Era, the majority are secular in content.

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For all comments and questions about the Guide, please e-mail us:

mlaguide@nccjapan.net