Last week, I took a trip to the
National
Archives of Japan, arranged by Visiting U.C. Berkely Professor Fred
Gey. I didn’t realize this, but the National Archives are a short five
minute walk from where I work in Jinbouchou, right next to the
Japanese
National Museum of Modern Art.
The mission statement of the National Archives is to preserve important cultural
documents from Japan’s history. The documents in the archive range from
the 1600s up until about the end of World War II. They have some
extensive, high resolution scans of maps, pictures, documents, scrolls, and so
on available on the web. I was very surprised that they are using
JPEG2000,
which I really haven’t seen in use anywhere but generally am in favor of.
They have some
really
great maps of Japan from times ranging back in the 1700s to just after World War
II. I am going to try to find where I live on one of these olds maps
one of these days – but I’ll have to do that on my windows machine since I don’t
have JPG2000 support on my Mac.
There is a really
cute
flash-based GUI with a man walking over a timeline that lets you click on a
year, and then browse through documents from that year. Unfortunately, I
can’t get Flash to display Japanese characters to me correctly.
The National Archive is also somehow related to the
Japan
Center for Asian Historical Records, which has an
interesting
online retrospective on the US-Japan War Talks based on documents from the
time. Based on the talk with the engineers there, it sounds like they
have helped spread their technical know-how on archive architecture and document
search to a few other institutions.
Anyway, there is a wealth of information there to look through. I don’t
see how anyone can get through any reasonable amount of it in a lifetime.
The maps are really great though.
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