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Category: East Asia

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Perry in Edo Bay: The Dawn of the U.S.-Japanese Relationship

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a cross-post by Neely Tucker, Writing-Editor in the Library’s Office of Communications. It originally appeared on the Library of Congress Blog.) The Black Ship scrolls are a genre of Japanese paintings that captured the historic meeting of two alien cultures: That 1854 moment when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry barged into Edo Bay …

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Centuries of Chinese Rare Books Go Digital

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Qi Qiu, Head of Scholarly Services, Asian Division.) To share the rich pre-modern Chinese resources of the Library of Congress with a wider audience, the Library has presented 1,000 rare books online. The Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection includes the most valuable titles and editions housed in the Library’s Asian …

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The Case of Frederick Starr’s “Missing” Ainu Book Collection

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Eiichi Ito, Japanese Reference Specialist, Asian Division.) Against a backdrop of increasing international awareness and recognition of indigenous groups through such milestones as the “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” in 2007, scholars in Japan and around the world have shown a growing interest in the study …

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South Manchurian Railway Company Publications in the Japanese Collection

Posted by: Cameron Penwell

(The following is a post by Cameron Penwell, Japanese reference librarian, Asian Division.) In 1906, in the aftermath of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the imperial Japanese government set up the South Manchurian Railway Company (SMRC) to promote and manage Japanese interests on the Asian continent. It was incorporated with the legal designation …

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The Strange Tales from Liaozhai

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Jeffrey Wang, reference specialist for the Chinese Collection, Asian Division.) The “Strange Tales from Liaozhai” (Liao zhai zhi yi 聊齋誌異), written in classical Chinese, is a collection of short stories from the early Qing dynasty (1644-1912). It consists of 491 tales in 16 volumes, mostly stories about fox-fairies, flower-spirits, …