The National Diet Library collects materials related to Asian area regardless of the language, and provides them in the Asian Resources Room in the Kansai-kan. Among the collection are 300,000 volumes of books, 7,500 titles of periodicals and 630 titles of newspapers published in Asian countries. Books are collected from a wide range of fields, mainly in the humanities and the social sciences, while including natural science reference books. The number of periodicals and newspapers is among the largest in Japan, including a number of valuable items which were published in China and Korea just before the Second World War. You can also utilize electronic resources including online journals of China and the Republic of Korea.

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The Asian Resources Room's collection can be searched by the Asian Language Materials OPAC on the National Diet Library website*. At present it contains bibliographic data in Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Tagalog, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Turkish (includes Ottoman Turkish). Materials in each language can be searched in the original scripts. In addition, materials in Chinese can be searched in Japanese-style Chinese character (Kanji) form, Japanese kana reading and Pinyin, and materials in Korean can be searched in Japanese translation. Materials in other languages also can be searched in Roman transliteration.
* For periodicals and newspapers in Asian languages other than Chinese and Korean, please search by NDL-OPAC at https://ndlopac.ndl.go.jp/eng/.

A photocopy of a material which is searched by the Asian Language Materials OPAC can be ordered by postal mail, specifying the part needed within the limits of the Copyright Law. Photocopies of the articles on the Chinese online journal "CAJ (China Academic Journals Full-text Database)" and the Korean online academic database "KISS (Korean studies Information Service System)" can also be ordered by postal mail. For details of ordering, please refer to the page "Photoduplication Service: Request for Photoduplication Service by Mail for Materials in the Asian Resources Room".

The Internet is an important source of other information in addition to printed materials. The Asian Resources Room provides "AsiaLinks-Link pages on Asia-" as a signpost to search out reliable information quickly from the flood of information on the Internet. AsiaLinks are web links which focus upon Asia-related information inside and outside of Japan with an assortment of carefully selected links. Besides countries and regions, you can search the website according to the categories of organizations such as "Administrative Agencies," "Libraries" and "Newspapers & News Sites" and according to the theme such as "Statistics," "News" and "Biography."

This is a directory of Japanese institutions holding Asian-related materials (Japanese version only). It contains 158 institutions as of July 2010. It provides the key to search the library where you can get the materials you need because it contains information about the collection of each institution, how to search the collection and how to use it. You can also grasp the situation of Asian materials inside Japan.

The bulletin introduces current topics on libraries and publications in the Asian region, new reference books, and reference tools. It is useful for not only library staff but also people interested in the Asian region. You can read all contents on the Asian Resources Room website, and you can also receive the titles of current articles by RSS. Please refer to the publications page for details.

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