abstract

The mission of our journal is two-fold: to make scholarship on Japanese Studies written in English available to scholars all over the world, and to make Japanese scholarship accessible to Anglophone readership through translation of original Japanese scholarship. As a result, Japanese Studies will not be limited only to Japan and will be able to reach the world.
This presentation will discuss 1) How we modernize Monumenta Nipponica by utilizing digital connectivity to make Japanese Studies in the humanities widely available and accessible to the world; 2) How we continue to explore the possibilities, limitations, and hazards in the rapid development of AI; 3) How we upheld editorial and publication traditions to maintain the highest standard of publication. This presentation will include a Q&A about the journal for potential contributors and interested researchers.

In contemporary higher education, key skills include being able to apply knowledge and use a variety of resources, which are also needed in the world of work. This paper presents the case of an applied project course for master's level students at the University of Helsinki in spring 2024. This course aimed to support students in improving competences in using Japanese resources. In the course, students majoring in Japanese language or Japanese studies were tasked with planning and organizing the "Japanese Stories about Food Seminar", which was open to the public. They were also responsible for managing related events, such as online exhibition of Japanese materials brought from Japan by the seminar lecturers and materials held by the Finnish National Library. Finally, the students translated lectures from the seminar to be published later on various channels.

The name of Ariga Nagao (有賀長雄, 1860-1921), a Japanese jurist and sociologist, rarely appears in books on the history of Japanese intellectual thought. My attention to him was attracted due to the translation of his work "On Bungaku" (『文學論』, August 1885) as "Theory of Literature" (Bugaeva, Dagmara. Japanese Publicists of the late 19th Century. Moscow, "Nauka", 1978). For a long time, I truly believed that "On Bungaku" was the only main paper on Confucianism and its role in the development of modern Japan. However, I changed my point of view after discovering Ariga's "The Correct Vision of China. Complete works" (『支那正觀全』, 1918), where "On Bungaku" was published together with "On Philosophy of Confucius" (『聖門哲學論』, December 1885) as appendixes to the final work "The Correct Vision of China". Consequently, "On Bungaku" became an introduction to his study of the foundations European and Chinese-Japanese civilizations and their interaction, in which Ariga presents the "ideal model of culture" (by Seki Ryōichi).

EAJRS panel discussions have been held several times until last year, but this year we would like to think together about topics that we could not fully discuss due to time constraints.
The term "open science" has been used for some time now, but when libraries consider supporting open science, what kind of skills are required? This panel discussion aims to consider, with a view to preceding studies such as "Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills and Competency Profiles" (Schmidt et al. 2016), what skills librarians will need in the future in the following areas:
Citizen science
Data/AI literacy
Digital humanities

In 2023 the Language of Cataloguing Taskforce (LoCT) was set up in the British Library to look at existing rules for the derivation of non-Roman script cataloguing records from other libraries with the aim of finding new sources of records (our main sources hitherto being OCLC including LC records and, for Japanese, NACSIS records). Particular attention was paid to whether it would be possible to use records whose language of cataloguing (as found in MARC 21 field 040$b) was not eng (English) and if so which fields would need to be altered. This would be a major difference from cataloguing practice hitherto.

Although multilingualism or multi-scriptiality is a constitutive factor for research, teaching, learning, and working in all academic institutions, academic infrastructures such as (university) libraries have been developed primarily by and for English and Latin script. This has resulted in a tremendous gap in resource findability between Latin and non-Latin scripts.
This affects not only the accessibility of library holdings in non-Latin scripts like Japanese, but also the rising scholarly field of digital humanities and (digital) social sciences in the area studies disciplines, which are dependent on the use of multilingual (meta)data, multilingual digital tools (platforms, software, ...) and, in particular, the use of non-Latin scripts in digital environments.

日本語教授法で人口知能の使用

The Centre Européen d’études japonaises d’Alsace holds about 135,000, making it one of the biggest Japanese studies libraries in Europe. Its holdings are an aggregate of several components. The oldest comprises books from the former boarding school of Lycée Seijo d'Alsace. These were meant to serve as reference materials for the boarding schools pupils. They constitute a wealth of reference works, of encyclopaedias on a wide range of topics, as well as anthologies and collections of Japanese literature.
Several more donations were added. In 2020, Christiane Séguy donated her books on the Meiji period. The library also received a large collection of several hundred volumes from professor Hayami Akira related to economic and social history, and historical demography, and recently the personal library of Hidemura Senzô (1922-2021).
Although the various above-mentioned components are impressive, they are dwarfed by the personal library of Regine Mathias and Erich Pauer. Regine Mathias is a specialist in economic history of Japan, and Erich Pauer is an expert on the history of technology in in modern Japan. Although their library covers just about all major areas of Japanology, it is especially the studies and resource materials that are related to their respective fields of research that are extensive and rare among Japanese studies libraries in Europe.
I will introduce the richness and especially the specific characteristics of this library, I will give an overview of its constituent components, present its main sources, and highlight its strengths.

In Osaka during the early modern period, there were many academic institutions where townspeople taught, townspeople learned, and townspeople financed and operated. The Tekijuku school of Ogata Koan, the Kaitokudo school of Nakai Kouken and others, and the Gonsuidou school of Hiranogo are representative of such institutions. Osaka University is a national university founded along these lines.
Currently, there are several collections in the Osaka University Library. The above-mentioned three collections of academic institutions are also divided and collected by several faculties, libraries, and research institutes of Osaka University. However, while the collections of the Osaka academies are an intellectual legacy that is vast in both quality and quantity and retains the value of unexplored research, because of the wide variety of fields involved, they have never been comprehensive, and no unified database exists.
In addition, of the bunko that have already been digitized, only the Akagi bunko (Ko-joruri Shohon), Oshinjoji bunko, Ono bunko (Edo period song books, stylish books, etc.), Sasano bunko (approximately 200 joruri books), and Tekijuku-related materials are available from the National Institute of Japanese Literature's Kokusho database.
Therefore, there are many issues to be addressed in the future, such as the longitudinal use of materials that have been made available to the public in the form of images. In this presentation, I would like to report on the current status and future prospects.

Umeda Noriko was one of the pioneering speech scientists who first automated a range of voices – such as male, female, and child – in speech synthesis. She earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Tokyo and initially worked at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL, 電気試験所). Her significant contributions at ETL led to her recruitment by Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL). After moving to the US, Umeda and her team developed groundbreaking technologies in the 1970s, including the origins of female voice and natural speech in computer synthesis, as well as audio interfaces for blind individuals. Her remarkable work marks an early era in the history of AI. Later, Umeda became a professor of linguistics at New York University and later director of the Institute for Speech and Language Sciences.