{"id":226,"date":"2007-08-31T13:18:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-31T04:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/31\/a-visit-to-the-japanese-national-archives\/"},"modified":"2007-08-31T13:18:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-31T04:18:00","slug":"a-visit-to-the-japanese-national-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/31\/a-visit-to-the-japanese-national-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"A Visit to the Japanese National Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I took a trip to the
\n National
\n Archives of Japan<\/a>, arranged by Visiting U.C. Berkely Professor Fred
\n Gey.  I didn’t realize this, but the National Archives are a short five
\n minute walk from where I work in Jinbouchou, right next to the
\n Japanese
\n National Museum of Modern Art<\/a>. \n<\/p>\n

\nThe mission statement of the National Archives is to preserve important cultural
\ndocuments from Japan’s history.  The documents in the archive range from
\nthe 1600s up until about the end of World War II.  They have some
\nextensive, high resolution scans of maps, pictures, documents, scrolls, and so
\non available on the web.  I was very surprised that they are using
\nJPEG2000<\/a>,
\nwhich I really haven’t seen in use anywhere but generally am in favor of. 
\nThey have some
\nreally
\ngreat maps of Japan from times ranging back in the 1700s to just after World War
\nII<\/a>.  I am going to try to find where I live on one of these olds maps
\none of these days – but I’ll have to do that on my windows machine since I don’t
\nhave JPG2000 support on my Mac. <\/p>\n

There is a really
\ncute
\nflash-based GUI with a man walking over a timeline<\/a> that lets you click on a
\nyear, and then browse through documents from that year.  Unfortunately, I
\ncan’t get Flash to display Japanese characters to me correctly. <\/p>\n

The National Archive is also somehow related to the
\nJapan
\nCenter for Asian Historical Records<\/a>, which has an
\ninteresting
\nonline retrospective on the US-Japan War Talks based on documents from the
\ntime<\/a>.  Based on the talk with the engineers there, it sounds like they
\nhave helped spread their technical know-how on archive architecture and document
\nsearch to a few other institutions. <\/p>\n

Anyway, there is a wealth of information there to look through.  I don’t
\nsee how anyone can get through any reasonable amount of it in a lifetime. 
\nThe maps are really great though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}