No. 119, May 2001

The Minutes of the Diet of Japan since 1948 
became available through the Internet in April 2001

In January 1999, the NDL started to provide a full-text database of the Minutes of the Diet through the internet. At the start, the coverage of data was limited to recent sessions of the Plenary and Budget Committee meetings, but the Library gradually expanded the coverage, and on April 20, 2001, the records of all Committees since the first National Diet session in 1947 became available on the NDL website at http://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/.

The system covers proceedings of a session in question-and-answer style (questions put by the Diet Members and the answers given by Ministers of State and government officials) and the information of the session (date, Member, etc.). Bills, written questions put by Diet Members (shitsumon shuisho), and written answers by the cabinet (tobensho) are not searchable in the system. 

The retrieval system adopts a menu-display method. The database is searchable by keyword(s), name of speaker, title of speaker, date, house, committee and political group. User can seach by any part of any word or sentence spoken in the Diet meetings or by the names of Diet Members, Ministers, government officials, informants and other speakers, the name of the party to which each Diet Member belongs, the role of the speaker, the title of the speaker. The period, the session number, and House or Committee's name are also available. 

The result of the search is displayed in text. The system is also linked with the image files of the Minutes, so the user can download and print the original image of the Minutes. 

This database is searchable only in Japanese. If you wish to keep your English OS and process Japanese, some related information is available on: 

How to view and input Japanese characters on the web, keeping your non-Japanese OS