Ban Dainagon Ekotob : a premium replica of the late 12th-century Japanese emakimono (picture scroll)

The Library has just purchased a beautiful reproduction of a late 12th-century Japanese emakimono (絵巻) – a set of 3 illustrated narrative picture scrolls called Ban Dainagon Ekotob (伴大納言絵詞 The Tale of Great Minister Ban). The full-colour painting depicts the events of the Ōtemmon Conspiracy, an event of Japan’s early Heian period. The painting, attributed to Tokiwa Mitsunaga, is over 20 m (66 ft) long and about 31.5 cm (12.4 in) tall. The original art work is considered to be Kokuhō (國寶, or a Japanese national treasure) among six such rare and invaluable picture scrolls. Information about their replica can be found here.

The reproduction was published by Chikuma shobo (筑摩書房) in 1971-1974 in a limited edition of 1000 copies. Our Library copy has the set number ’84’. The 3 hand-scrolls are placed individually in 3 wooden cases, each accompanied with a booklet. The set has been catalogued for the Centre for Research Collections. See the bibliographic record in DiscoverEd here.

The material has been purchased in response to needs for a Japanese Studies course called “Supernatural Japan: doing Japanology through Yokai”. As the course takes a ‘learning by doing’ approach, allowing students to experience Yokai in art, literature to discover the historical and cultural value of Yokai in Japanese society, this set of 3 hand-scrolls will give a rare opportunity of authentic reading experience for students of Japanese Studies or anyone interested in Japanese art, history and culture.

Digital library of pre-modern Japanese works for open access

The National Institute of Japanese Literature (Kokubunken) has made their new新日本古典籍総合データベース/Database of Pre-Modern Japanese Works (tentative edition) freely available at: https://kotenseki.nijl.ac.jp/ (Japanese interface) and  https://kotenseki.nijl.ac.jp/?ln=en (English interface).

The database, built out of Kokusho Sōmokuroku, a Japanese reference book published by Iwanami Shoten, and the largest of its kind, contains about 300,000 of 500,000 entries listed in the original book, along with digitized versions of materials referred to by the entries. It also allows one action search across repositories of multiple institutions.

For more information, please see the Project to Build an International Collaborative Research Network for Pre-modern Japanese Texts (NIJL-NW project) websites at:

http://www.nijl.ac.jp/pages/cijproject/

http://kotenseki.nijl.ac.jp/page/about.html#DB

Free access to optional contents of JapanKnowledge

The following contents will temporarily be accessible on the JapanKnowledge platform between 1 June and 30 June 2017:

1. Encyclopedia of Japanese Historical Place Names http://japanknowledge.com/en/contents/rekishi/index.html

2. Fuzoku Gaho http://japanknowledge.com/en/contents/fuzokugaho/index.html

3. Oriental Economist http://japanknowledge.com/en/contents/orientaleconomist/index.html

Please contact shenxiao.tong@ed.ac.uk if you have any feedback.

How to make good use of the NDL Digital Collections for Japanese Studies

The National Diet Library of Japan has released an online training course on how to make good use of their NDL Digital Collections for Japanese Studies outside Japan. The course is delivered as a video in Japanese with English subtitles.

This course provides an introduction to the features of the NDL Digital Collections and how to search its contents from outside Japan. The content of this course is based on a presentation made at the EAJRS Conference in Bucharest held on September 16, 2016.

Anybody can take the courses without registration. Go to http://training.ndl.go.jp/course/under.html?id=58&lang=en. Please ignore the button labelled “This course is fully booked”. Move down to the bottom of the page and click the button labelled “take a course without registering“.

Mango Languages – online language courses for trial

The University Library has arranged a free trial of an online language learning resource called “Mango Languages”. The service offers online interactive courses for learning over 70 languages, including almost all those that are taught at our University:

Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Danish, Finnish, French, Gaelic (Scottish), German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Swahili, Turkish, as well as Shakespeare English!

Mango Languages

It consists of two types of resources: Mango Conversations teaches through native-speaker dialogue, cultural insights, and critical thinking exercises, while Mango Premiere teaches foreign languages through the dialogue and culture found in full-length international films. Proprietary technology includes interactive subtitles and colour coding which allow learners t easily understand meaning, word order, and grammatical structures. Applications for mobile devices are also available through Google Play and App Store.

The trial is from now until 31 October 2016.

For access, please go to the Library’s e-resources trial website at http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/library-museum-gallery/finding-resources/library-databases/e-resources-trials , or go to trial link directly, EASE login is required:

https://www.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/login?url=https://connect.mangolanguages.com/university-of-edinburgh/try/10c39bacf

Happy learning!

Nikkei Telecom21

Nikkei Telecom 21 (日経テレコン) is a reputable newspaper database in business and economics from Japan. The University Library has started a subscription to this resource from 1st January 2016. This is an essential resource for various kinds of studies such as economics, politics, sociology and Japanese language. It gives access to a great number of Nikkei newspaper articles from 1975 to the present. The database also contains hundreds of daily news articles in English published by Nikkei Inc. and Dow Jones & Company Inc. An English Archive Search is available for Nikkei Asian Review and major Nikkei newspaper articles. In addition to news articles, Nikkei Telecom offers various aspects of business information related to Japanese economy, such as profile information of major Japanese companies, personnel information of executives, Nikkei’s survey data, macroeconomic statistics, etc.

Nikkei Telecom21

Staff and students can now access this resource on the University network via http://t21ipau.nikkei.co.jp/ipauth/auth/auth?sid=1 . This resource will soon be added to the Database list and the web link be configured so that it can be accessed on and off campus via EASE login.

A simple user guide is available from here. A full guide can be downloaded from https://www.nikkeieu.com/telecom/en/userguide.pdf.

 

End of Empire website

NIAS Press (NIAS = Nordic Institute of Asian Studies) has set up a very interesting web site, as an experiment with new publishing ideas, which my library colleague at NIAS Ms Inga-Lill Blomkvisk has shared with us. The website is called End of Empire and is designed as a newspaper and  contains news from Asia from the 100 days following Hiroshima 70 years ago, updated daily with that day’s news. NIAS Press is collaborating with nearly a hundred international scholars to produce the website which will eventually result in a printed book. The website is freely available and contains interesting documents, analyses and photos.

Visit www.endofempire.asia and read more.

End of Empire website