ARC-iJAC Activities

Professor Tanaka, thank you for your time today. Firstly, could you please tell us how you joined the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University?

Prof. Tanaka: In 2004, the College of Information Science and Engineering was founded at Ritsumeikan University. I was appointed to the Department of Information Science and Engineering in 2002 as a founding member.

Coincidently, the Art Research Center had been selected for the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program "Kyoto Art Entertainment Innovation Research" by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in the same year and so, the joint research started.

Can you please tell us more about your area of research?

Prof. Tanaka: I conduct research on the ultra-high-quality visualization and visual analysis of cultural heritage to digitally preserve valuable cultural properties in Japan and abroad.

By utilizing the latest 3D scanning technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry techniques, we can obtain large-scale point-cloud data of cultural assets.

We have proposed a novel method of see-through visualization applicable to point cloud data. This method enables us to visualize the complex inner and outer structures of tangible cultural heritage.

Ako City has started to hold the online exhibition Head of the Loyal Warriors: Oboshi Yuranosuke (「義士の頭領・大星由良之助」) from Saturday, November 14, using the Virtual Institute platform of the International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC).

Ako City and the Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University, have been promoting the digital archiving of ukiyo-e with the theme of Chushingura and have made the ukiyo-e collection of Chushingura held by Ako City open to the public.

Since 2019, the ARC and Ako City have been working to hold digital exhibitions centered on the works in its database for the purpose of developing database operation methods and promoting their utilization.

In this exhibition, we are introducing a collection of works depicting Oboshi Yuranosuke (or Oishi Kuranosuke), the protagonist of the play Chushingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers). Based on a historical event, Chushingura tells the story of forty-seven loyal retainers from the Ako domain led by Yuranosuke who avenged their lord's death. This year, the second online exhibition entitled Head of the Loyal Warriors: Oboshi Yuranosuke has been now made available to the public.

You can enjoy various "cool" images of Yuranosuke, such as scenes when he appears, scenes of the famous actors playing the role of Yuranosuke, and scenes depicting him in the act of revenge.

>> Click here to enter the Ako City Chushingura Ukiyo-e Digital Exhibition.

>> Click here for the Ako City Chushingura Ukiyo-e Database.

The Art Research Center is pleased to announce that The World of the Takeuchi Dokei Collection (『竹内道敬文庫の世界』), a treasure trove of early modern Japanese music materials, has been released.

With the aim to digitize and publish one of the representative collections of the Kunitachi College of Music Library - the collection of Takeuchi Dokei - the Art Research Center has been collaborating with the library to release the official version of The World of Takeuchi Dokei and make it available on the ARC's Virtual Institute: https://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/e/v_institute/.

The Takeuchi Dokei Collection is the world's largest collection of modern Japanese music, especially regarding shamisen music, with over 10,000 items in total, including nishiki-e (woodblock prints), music books, and banzuke (playbills).

While we had previously released the nishiki-e database in March 2019, we officially launch an online digital exhibition this time based on the Kunitachi College of Music 90th Anniversary Project: Takeuchi Dokei Collection Nishiki-e Picture Book. At the same time, the entire banzuke collection (over 5,600 items) with the focus on kabuki and joruri theater playbills will be made available to the public from our banzuke database.

Please feel free to use this as an online hub for your research on Japanese music: https://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/lib/vm/kunitake/.

As we strive to continue with the digital archiving of music books to release them in the next fiscal year and beyond, please visit our website again in the future.

Furthermore, our digital exhibition is also accessible from the top page of the Kunitachi College of Music Library: https://www.lib.kunitachi.ac.jp/.

The Art Research Center is pleased to announce that the group of drawings by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) made for a book called Great Picture Book of Everything (『万物絵本大全図』) and published online by the British Museum on September 3, 2020, is now also available in the ARC database.

The metadata in the ARC's database is more detailed than the original database due to the additional information provided with the ARC's own research.

<Background>

The existence of these drawings that were formerly owned by Parisian jeweler and art collector Henri Vever had been unknown to the wider world for 70 years after they were sold at an auction. It was only last year when they were finally re-discovered and acquired by the British Museum.

In a total of 103 drawings, Hokusai depicted a wide range of subjects related to natural phenomena, landscapes, ancient China, India and Southeast Asia, amongst others. The discovery of these drawings is especially significant as they stem from a period in the artist's career, the late 1820s, where he was previously thought to have created relatively little due to a series of difficult personal challenges. However, this group of drawings actually marks a turning point in the artist's career, giving him a new burst of creativity that was to be reflected in his subsequent famous print series, Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji (c. 1831-1833).

◇Ukiyo-e Portal Database:

https://www.dh-jac.net/db/nishikie/results.php?f1=BM-2020.3015&-max=50&enter=portal&lang=ja (in Japanese)

https://www.dh-jac.net/db/nishikie/results.php?f1=BM-2020.3015&-max=50&enter=portal&lang=en (in English)

◇The Early Japanese Books Portal Database

https://www.dh-jac.net/db1/books/BM-2020.3015/portal/

The published images were taken by Art Research Center staff.

<Cooperation with the British Museum>

The ARC has been engaging in the digitization of the British Museum's Japan-related artworks for more than 10 years.

While the artworks that have been digitized by the ARC are available in the British Museum's collection search system, they are also published online by the ARC based on the contractual terms, and many items are only available in the ARC database.

Please refer to the ARC's databases for the British Museum below.

◇The British Museum Japanese Old Books Database (1,567 items)

https://www.dh-jac.net/db1/books/search_bm.php (in Japanese)

https://www.dh-jac.net/db1/books/search_bm.php?lang=en (in English)

◇Ukiyo-e Online Database for the Collection of the British Museum (20,436 items)

https://www.dh-jac.net/db/nishikie/search_bm.php?lang=ja (in Japanese)

https://www.dh-jac.net/db/nishikie/search_bm.php?lang=en (in English)

The Otojiro & Sadayakko Kawakami's Album of European and American Performance Materials (commonly known as Otosada Album)/「川上音二郎・貞奴一座欧米公演関係資料アルバム（通称【音貞アルバム】）」 has been published in the Art Research Center's Shochiku Otani Library Special Data Browsing System.

Implementing the FY 2020 Adopted Joint Research Project (Open Theme) "A Study on the Construction of a Theater Material Image Search System that Utilizes the Theater Performance Record Database (演劇上演記録データベースを活用した、演劇資料画像検索閲覧システムの構築に関る研究)" as part of the International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC), the Shochiku Otani Library has released the Otojiro & Sadayakko Kawakami's Album of European and American Performance Materials (Otosada Album).

Please access the database from here:

https://www.dh-jac.net/db1/resource/search_sol.php?lang=en

The Shochiku Otani Library Special Data Browsing System has been developed by the ARC-iJAC.

The digital archiving of these materials was made possible by funds raised through the crowdfunding project [No.7] Preserving the Trajectory of Otojiro & Sadayakko Kawakami on the Global Stage for the Future that was launched by the Shochiku Otani Library in 2018. Currently, the crowdfunding project has successfully reached to the round [No.9].

Otojiro Kawakami was a pioneer of the Liberal Civil Rights Movement, actor, and entertainer who enjoyed great popularity with his Oppekepe song. Regarded as a founder of the shinpa theatrical form that originated in the Meiji Period, he played a major role in the modernization of Japanese theater. Furthermore, Sadayakko, who became his wife, is considered as Japan's first actress in the modern period.

This album is extremely valuable because it contains letters and magazine articles from the time when Otojiro and his troupe toured the United States and Europe starting from April 1902.

For more details on the Otosada Album, please see the article below:

https://readyfor.jp/projects/ootanitoshokan7

The Shochiku Otani Library, founded in Tokyo in 1956, is dedicated to materials concerning Japanese theatrical works (mainly kabuki, bunraku, shinpa, shingeki, and commercial plays) as well as movie and TV-related scripts, magazines, posters, and photo collections, amongst others.

The Art Research Center (ARC) is pleased to announce that a video of the "Katayama Noh Online Special Performance" held on September 5, 2020, at the Nagoya Noh Theater has been released and will be available on YouTube until October 10, 2021.

The ARC has been closely working with the Katayama Family Foundation for the Preservation of Noh and Traditional Kyoto Dance to film and digitally archive their performances for more than 20 years.

With the changes in the global environment in 2020, the world of classical performing arts has also entered a phase of exploring new methods for disseminating performances.

To address the issue of how to promote classical Japanese performing arts to the world amid a global pandemic, the Katayama Family Foundation for the Preservation of Noh and Traditional Kyoto Dance and the ARC have been conducting practical research on the topic "Study on the Effective Promotion of Noh Theater to the Global Audience (能楽の効果的な世界にむけた発信に関する研究)".

This research project is one of the FY 2020 Adopted Joint Research Projects (International Joint Research to Utilize the Center's Facilities and Equipment) of the International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC).

The video represents one of the research achievements of this project.

Program:

Noh "Yoroboshi" / performed by KATAYAMA Kuroemon and others

Noh "Sessho-seki" / performed by MIKATA Shizuka and others

Click here to access the official YouTube channel of the Katayama Family Foundation for the Preservation of Noh and Traditional Kyoto Dance.

Prof. Yano, thank you for your time today. As an expert in the field of human geography and geographical information science, your research comprises digitally archiving the historical city of Kyoto. Can you tell us about your motivation and how it all started?

Prof. Yano: The rapid advancement in ICT technology and the development of Internet-based GIS (geographic information system) in the past decades have eased the digitization of cultural assets and their distribution via the Internet.

In the early 2000s, the Department of Geography at Ritsumeikan University had accumulated an enormous amount of geospatial information on the historical city of Kyoto including paper maps, digital maps, and national land information, while the Art Research Center (ARC) had been proactive in using cutting-edge information technologies.

The ARC Day, an annual event where the faculty members of the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, take turns to introduce their research projects for the new fiscal year in brief presentations, took place on Saturday, August 1, 2020.

To prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, this event was held online via Zoom and broadcasted live on YouTube.

For the first time on the ARC Day, four collaborative research projects had been presented which share a common theme「"遊び": アート・エンターテインメント研究」 ("Play": Art Entertainment). The purpose of these collaborative projects is to develop research activities that further integrate humanities and sciences to create new future directions for the ARC while fostering and supporting young researchers and graduate students, who are working jointly on these projects.

To stimulate these young researchers and graduate students in their research endeavors, they also actively participated in the ARC Day as discussants in the Q&A sessions that followed the research presentations.

Program of the ARC Day 2020

The handouts with red icons are protected with passwords. If you wish to download any of them, please email us at r-darc(at)st.ritsumei.ac.jp (Please change "at" to @.)

August 1st（Sat）　14:00～17:10（JST）
14:00-14:05	Opening remarks
14:05-14:35	Session 1 Firstly, each project leader will introduce their projects within 3 minutes in the order of the program. Then, the rest of the session will be spent on Q&As. We will take questions from the participants on Zoom and questions from YouTube participants via Twitter。
	1.	「Research Project on the Japanese Cultural Resources using the Concept of "Metahistory" or "Les lieux de mémoire"」 Project leader: Koichi HOSOI, Professor, College of Image Arts and Sciences, RU
	2.	「A System Development Project for Exhibition of Images such as Ukiyo-e through the Means of Games」 Project leader: Ruck THAWONMAS, Professor, College of Information Science and Engineering, RU
	3.	「Play between Creativity and Learning」 Project leader: Akinori NAKAMURA, Professor, College of Image Arts and Sciences, RU (Presenter: Akito INOUE, Lecturer, College of Image Arts and Sciences, RU）
	4.	「Digital Archive of the Techniques, Processing and Enjoyment of Manga and Anime with its Focus on International Spread and Propagation of Culture」 Project leader: Ryosuke YAMANISHI, Associate Professor, Faculty of Informatics, Kansai University
	5.	Collaborative Project ① Project leaders：Prof. HOSOI, Prof RUCK, Prof. NAKAMURA (Presenter: Mr. Toshinari TSUJI, M1, Graduate School of Letters, RU)
14:35-15:05	Session 2
	6.	「Play and Discovery in Kanji Characters」 Project leader: Lin MENG, Associate Professor, College of Science and Engineering, RU
	7.	「Construction and Transmission of a Kyoto Street Culture Archive」 Project leader: Shinya SAITO, Associate Professor, College of Image Arts and Sciences, RU
	8.	「Playing in the City of Kyoto - Construction of a Virtual Kyoto Using VR and AR」 Project leader: Naomi KAWASUMI, Associate Professor, College of Letters, RU (Presenter: Hirotaka SATO, Assistant Professor, College of Letters, RU)
	9.	Collaborative Project ② Project leaders: Prof. RUCK, Assoc. Prof. SAITO, Assoc. Prof. KAWASUMI (Assis. Prof. SATO)
	10.	Collaborative Project ③ Project leaders: Prof. MAEDA, Assoc. Prof. MENG, Assoc. Prof. Fumio GOTO (The Shirakawa Shizuka Institute of East Asian Characters and Culture/ Grad. School of Professional Teacher Education)
15:05-15:35	Session 3
	11.	「Acoustic Sound Reconstruction and Playing-Support with Traditional Instruments」 Project leader: Takanobu NISHIURA, Professor, College of Information Science and Engineering, RU
	12.	「A Project on the Intellectual Linkage of Large-Scale Cultural Information」 Project leader: Ryo AKAMA, Professor, College of Letters, RU
	13.	「Project of developing Evaluation Datasets for ARC Collection Databases」 Project leader: Akira MAEDA, Professor, College of Information Science and Engineering, RU
	14.	「Digital Archiving of Indonesian Cultural Heritage and Development of 4D High-Definition Visualization Contents」 Project leader: Dr. Fadjar I. THUFAIL, Senior Researcher, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) (Presenter: Satoshi TANAKA, Professor, College of Information Science and Engineering, RU)
15:35-15:50	Break
15:50-16:20	Session 4
	15.	「Collection and Preservation of Traditional Games from around the World, the Systematization and the Study of Cultural Relevance of Them」 Project leader: Isao UMEBAYASHI, Part-time Lecturer, Shitennoji University
	16.	「Visualization for Re-experiencing the Psychology/ Festival using VR Technology」 Project leader: Kyoko HASEGAWA, Lecturer, College of Information Science and Engineering, RU
	17.	「Generation Z Web Content Archiving Project」 Project leader: Yumi TAKENAKA, Professor, Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, RU
	18.	Collaborative Project ④ Project leaders: Prof. TAKENAKA, Dr. HASEGAWA
16:20-16:50	Session 5
	19.	「Digital Archive Project of Japanese Arts in the Collection of Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, India」 Project leader: Shinya MAEZAKI, Associate Professor, Dept. of Apparel and Space Design, Kyoto Women's University
	20.	「Edo Period Map goes Digital - The O Edo ezu as an Interactive Resource」 Project leader: Michael KINSKI, Professor, Japanese Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt
	21.	「Using Digital Archives to Create a Research Network of Japanese Cultural Resources in the UK and Utilizing Digital Resources for Japanese Studies」 Project leader: Ryoko MATSUBA, Senior Digital Humanities Officer, SISJAC
	22.	「A Database Construction of Japanese Medieval Handwritten Copies of Sutras Located in Europe and their Analysis Using Machine Learning」 Project leader: Toshiaki AIDA, Lecturer, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in Health System, Okayama University
16:50-17:05	Buffer（15分） Q&A Session （Questions from each session and other questions）
17:05-17:10	Closing remarks

Due to the spread of the new coronavirus, the Gion Festival in Kyoto, one of the biggest and most important festivals in Japan celebrated for more than 1,100 years, will take place on a much smaller scale this year as the grand Yamahoko Junkō parade and other related events have been canceled.

Despite this situation, to provide an opportunity to learn about and experience the Gion Festival, the Art Research Center's International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC) at Ritsumeikan University, in cooperation with the College of Letters, will be launching "The Gion Festival Digital Museum: The Past, Present, and Future of the Gion Festival" from July 1 - July 31, 2020, on its website.

The Gion Festival, which usually takes place in Kyoto in the same month, is widely known in Japan and abroad as one of the three major Japanese festivals. The Art Research Center (ARC) provides an online platform where its research results on the festival so far are published so that people around the world, who are interested in Japanese culture, can deepen their understanding of the Gion Festival by virtually experiencing it.

On the ARC's website, 2D and 3D maps of the Gion Festival and videos of a virtual Yamahoko Junkō, the magnificent procession of decorated floats and the crowning event of the festival, will be made available. Besides, one can discover the three-dimensional, see-through visualization model of the Hachiman-yama float, one of the festival floats, with new perspectives otherwise invisible to the human eye. Furthermore, the Byobu Matsuri, or Folding Screen Festival, at the Nagae Family Residence, a Kyo-machiya designated a cultural property by the city of Kyoto, will be exhibited in the virtual space.

By digitally archiving traditional events such as the Gion Festival and making them accessible to the broad public, the ARC is dedicated to research, analyze, record, organize, preserve and disseminate the tangibles as well as intangibles of Japanese cultural and historical heritage to retain their significance for future generations.

Access to The Gion Festival Digital Museum (available from July 1, 2020)

https://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/lib/vm/gionfestivalDM/

Event Schedule

July 1 (Wed), 2020: The Gion Festival Digital Museum 2020 opens to the public (new content to be continuously added after its launch)

July 19 (Sun), 2020: Web event will be held at the Nagae Family Residence (details to be announced on the website later)

The Annual Conference of the Japan Art Documentation Society (JADS), hosted by the Japan Art Documentation Society (JADS) in cooperation with the MEXT International Joint Usage / Research Center International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC), Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, took place on June 27 (Sat) and 28 (Sun), 2020.

To prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the event was held online for the first time this year and more than 130 members and non-members of the JADS participated.

As part of this year's annual conference, a symposium on 「芸術文化資源デジタル・アーカイブの国際的共同利用 -- オンライン環境での知的生産システムとそのツール」 (The International Joint Usage of Digital Archives for Arts and Cultural Resources -- Intelligent Production Systems and their Tools in an Online Environment) was held.

The symposium began with a welcome speech by Prof. Koichi Hosoi, Director of the Art Research Center (ARC), who introduced the international research activities of the ARC-iJAC in the field of digital humanities.

Following his opening remarks, three presenters proposed activities and tools for the next generation of digital research environments in light of the role of digital archives until now which only had a focus on reference information. In this context, they discussed ways and future directions to construct an online knowledge cycle for arts and cultural resources.

Among these three speakers, Mitsuhiro Tsuda, a researcher at the Art Research Center, publicly presented the concept and utilization of the ARC Research Space and ARC Database for the first time and explained their role in effectively building relationships between digital resources and intellectual activities.

In supporting the activities of the Japan Art Documentation Society (JADS), the ARC-iJAC aims to contribute to the establishment of such an online knowledge cycle which may enable researchers, curators and librarians not only to "browse" information, but also archive the "relationships" between these resources and produce new knowledge by "editing" and "re-archiving" them in the future.