This website hosts the “Digital Momijiyama Bunko,” aggregating data on books formerly held in the Momijiyama Bunko, and employs library reconstruction research to recreate the complete library as it existed under the Edo shogunate. For more information on the history of the Momijiyama Bunko, please see “About the Momijiyama Bunko” on the front page.

1. Library Reconstruction Research

Though they are the product of human hands, books live longer and further-traveled lives than their makers. And during their existence, they may, by design or happenstance, be brought together into “collections.” Over the course of time a collection will go through repeated stages of expansion and dispersal, but at each stage possesses some distinct cultural meaning as a collection. For this reason, research on collections has been conducted under the umbrella of bibliography, in an effort to apprehend historical collections and their cultural meaning.

This methodology holds the possibility of recuperating a now-dispersed collection and the promise that “library reconstruction” can develop into a mode of applied research that can shed light on the cultural meaning of these collections through the analysis of historical documents. This site was developed under this new paradigm of bibliography-based library reconstruction.

2. Employing Historical Documentation

There are several methods that can help reconstitute the now-dispersed collection of the Momijiyama Bunko, one of which is making use of historical records that documented the former state of the archive. Complete catalogs of the Momijiyama Bunko were compiled on several occasions through the work of the archive’s Librarian and the Superintendent of the shogunate’s Shōheizaka School. This series of catalogues provides a vital basis for understanding the development of the Momijiyama Bunko. The “Historical Catalogs” database allows users to view and search the edited text of these catalogs, as well as providing tools to deduce their relationship to extant materials.

Furthermore, the Momijiyama Bunko Librarian kept a record, The Librarian’s Diary, which details events over a 150-year period from the mid- to late-Edo period. From the vast contents of this record, we have excerpted and digitized entries recording additions and departures of specific books from the Momijiyama Bunko. By combining these records with the successive catalogs one is able to glimpse the shifting contents and use of the collection.

Taking the latest catalog, the Expanded Official Catalog of the Genji Era, as our base text, we have provided hyperlinks allowing consultation of work titles across these historical sources.

For more detailed information on these sources, please consult the explanatory note attached to each section of the database. For explanation of the search function, please consult Help from the front page.

3. Employing Extant Materials

The second method for understanding the Momijiyama Bunko is through surviving items from the archive’s collection. While examination of a book depends on in-person interaction, bibliographic description and images can provide core information on the book’s characteristics, provenance, preservation, and history of use. Surviving items from the Momijiyama Bunko collection are precious, and in some cases not suitable for intensive research, but digitized access enables an effective and multifaceted investigative progress.

To this end we provide a database of digitized bibliographic information and images of books from the Momijiyama Bunko collection. There are two paths into the contents of the database, “Traditional Classification” and “Database Search.” While both connect to the same bibliographic data, the former allows for selection of a title according to the “Four Branches” classification of traditional Chinese bibliography, while the latter allows for text-based searches of the various components of the bibliographic data. This search can be selectively applied to any element of the bibliography, including subtitles within anthologies. Furthermore, titles accessed through either search method are linked to digitized images of the complete text.

The objects of our survey were selected from the collections of the National Archives of Japan and the Imperial Household Agency: Beginning with 65 items surviving from the donations made to the shogunate collection by Tokugawa Ieyasu (originally 30 items in 1614 and another 52 in 1616), we additionally surveyed particularly rare items, including medieval manuscripts and Song-Yuan xylographic imprints.

The Cabinet Library collection held in the National Archives is in the process of being systematically digitized through the “National Archives Digital Archive,” so for those works we provide links to the images hosted on their site. Images of those works held in the Imperial Household Agency’s Imperial House Library have been digitized through this research project and are available for viewing on this site. For further details on the operation of the site, please consult Help on the top page.

4. Reconciling Historical Documentation with Extant Materials

In the collection’s current changed state, it is impossible to understand the detailed features or specific value of a book by relying only on documentation of the collection’s past contents. At the same time, relying exclusively on still-extant materials provides no way to grasp the collection as it once existed in totality. Instead the best results can be found by allowing both approaches to supplement one another.

The collection of the Momijiyama Bunko has not been preserved unchanged. With this situation in mind, this site employs digitization to allow for historical documentation and extant materials to be linked and referred against one another. Specifically, using Expanded Official Catalog of the Genji Era, the final edition of the collection catalogue produced at the end of the Edo period, as our base, we have set hyperlinks connecting bibliographic data from extant materials with data from various historical sources where there is possibility of identity between two items. Our policy in making these connections has been to suggest a broad range of possibilities by flexibly drawing on titles and alternate names along with volume/fascicle numbers. This apparatus allows for a more complete understanding of the historical development of the Momijiyama Bunko and its relationship to extant materials.

5. Site Development

This site was developed with the extensive cooperation and encouragement of the custodians of the extant texts, the Imperial Household Agency Archives and Mausolea Department and the National Archives of Japan.

The bibliographic data on this site is based on surveys conducted by the Momijiyama Bunko Collection Research Group, with surveys and analysis conducted by its members:

AITANI Yoshimitsu, ARAKI Hiroyuki, ASAI Mayu, CHEN Jie, HORIKAWA Takashi, HUANG Yu, HYŌNO Kazue, ICHINOHE Wataru, KIMURA Maiko, KIN Bunkyō, KOAKIMOTO Miyahito, KOBAYASHI Yuri, KŌNO Kimiko, LEE Eury, LI Huayu, LIAO Jiaqi, LIU Qing, NAKAHARA Rie, Ōki Yasushi, SAITŌ Shin’ichirō, SASAKI Takahiro, SATŌ Michio, SHIMIZU Nobuko, Brian STEININGER, SUMIYOSHI Tomohiko, SUZUOKI Takuya, TAKAHASHI Yūsuke, TAKEDA Yūki, UEHARA Kyūichi, WAKIYAMA Gō, YAJIMA Akiko, YAMADA Naoko, YANAGAWA Hibiki, ZHENG Xing

Digitization of the historical documentation data was primarily conducted by the Research Group’s Editorial Unit, consisting of:

ARAKI Hiroyuki, ICHINOHE Wataru, KOBAYASHI Yuri, NAKAHARA Rie, SUMIYOSHI Tomohiko, YAMADA Naoko

Construction of the operational system for these digital archives was primarily conducted by the Research Group’s Digitization Unit, consisting of:

AITANI Yoshimitsu, KIMURA Maiko, LIU Qing, SUMIYOSHI Tomohiko, TAKAHASHI Yūsuke, UEHARA Kyūichi, WAKIYAMA Gō

This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI grants “Reexamination of the provenance of classical Chinese books in the Imperial Household Agency Archives and Mausolea Department: Towards the construction of a digital archive” (Heisei 24–28) and “The reconstruction and dissemination of the Edo shogunate Momijiyama Bunko: Philology through digitization of classical Chinese texts in Imperial Household Agency Archives and Mausolea Department” (Reiwa 2–6), as well as cooperative research projects with the University of Tokyo Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia RICAS “Cultural-historical research on the collection and dispersal of Chinese texts in Japan: Diachronic research on the Imperial House Library” (Heisei 24–25) and “Historical research on the circulation of books in East Asia as seen in Chinese texts preserved in Japan: Beginning from a survey of the provenance of classical Chinese books in the Imperial Household Agency Archives and Mausolea Department” (Heisei 26–27).（Tranlated by Brian Steininger）