No. 115 August 2000

Digital Exhibition: Nippon in the World

The Digital Exhibition: Nippon in the World (Japan in the World) started on August 2, 2000, on the NDL website. It is intended to present Japanese culture and history from various perspectives. One of the important themes of the exhibition is the encounter with foreign cultures, because Japan has modernized through contact with the Western world.

The exhibition fits in with the purpose of the international project "Bibliotheca Universalis", which aims to give access to the major works of the world's scientific and cultural heritage - texts, images, sounds - hence fostering cultural exchanges across borders and enhancing services to end users. The NDL is actively involved in the Project.

We produced the exhibition in cooperation with the Association of Broadband-network Business chance & Culture Creation (BBCC). The Library selected the items and compiled the contents, while the BBCC conducted the technical work including digitization.

Welcome to the Exhibition

Japan was closed to foreigners from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. After the opening of the country in 1853, Western cultures flooded in, and Japan's people experienced a rapid change and modernization. In this exhibition, we have tried to introduce Japanese traditional culture that has been lost over the years, and also the first impressions of Japanese when they met with the outer world.

This part contains 168 paintings, illustrations, photos, etc. of good old Japan from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, selected from the collections of the NDL and the Osaka Nakanoshima Library.

Images are categorized by region ["Edo" (Tokyo area) or "Kamigata" (Osaka and Kyoto area)], period [the Edo period (1603-1868) or the Meiji era (1868-1912)], and topic [scenic places, amusements, work, festivals, and fashion]. Search items by these categories, and see images with bibliographic data.
For some images, users can also view comments and a short moving image of the present scene for comparison. You can find how scenery and manners have changed with the passing of time. Comments in detail will help you to understand Japanese popular culture. Among the images are many photographs taken by foreign travelers, giving their first impressions of Meiji-era Japan.

Part 2 is about the Vienna International Exposition in 1873, the first international exposition in which the Japanese government participated. Japan set up a pavilion and put out information on its industry and culture into the world.  We selected this subject to express the theme "Exchanges between people".

It has approximately 50 images: photographs of the Japanese exhibition and illustrations clipped from reports, guidebooks, and newspapers. The images have been digitized from the collections of the NDL and the Tokyo National Museum. The file also contains text and bibliographic references. It is edited to guide visitors on a sightseeing tour of the exposition, the Japanese pavilion and its exhibition, and gives a description of the influence of this event.

This part includes both digital exhibition and a search system of the bibliographic database of the Modern Japanese Political History Materials. Available only in Japanese.

The exhibition presents precious items held by the Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room of the NDL, such as diaries, letters, and business papers, once owned by eminent politicians in and after the latter half of the 19th century, searchable by period and theme.

Modern Japanese Political History Materials are catalogued by the name of the former owner. Through the search system, the name of each collection, summary, and biographical data of former owner can be retrieved. Searching individual documents included in some collections is also available on an experimental basis. We plan to increase and expand data for the future.