国際共同利用・共同研究拠点関連

The crowdfunding initiative of Shochiku Otani Library in Tokyo that Professor Ryo Akama--Deputy Director of the Art Research Center--has been supporting in its digital-archiving activities was featured in the Tokyo Shimbun on October 17, 2021.

The article introduces the 10th anniversary of the crowdfunding initiative that aims at digitizing and making online available severely damaged materials in the library collection.

Nearly half of the donations for the crowdfunding initiative have been made by repeated users, and the number of young users who came to know about the library through crowdfunding has steadily increased.

The Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University, is delighted to announce the release of the 'Surname Map'--a research project led by Professor Keiji Yano (College of Letters), Deputy Director of the ARC.

Project Background

Until the end of the Edo period, Japanese surnames had exclusively been granted to the emperor, nobility, and samurais. Following the Meiji Restoration and the enactment of the family registration law in the early Meiji period, farmers and other commoners also began to adopt surnames.

With more than 100,000 different surnames, Japan is not only characterized by great diversity in surnames but also regional variations in their distribution.

Based on big data of about 40 million surnames from Japanese telephone directories and large-scale residential maps, the Surname Map visualizes the contemporary spatial distribution of surnames across all prefectures in Japan.

This research began in 2005 when Professor Yano, then a visiting researcher at University College London (UCL), joined Professor Paul Longley's research project on surnames around the world at the Department of Geography, UCL.

Professor Longley had mapped surnames from the UK's 1881 Census of Individual Voters and the 1998 Electoral Roll to analyze the movement of surnames over more than a hundred years.

In the UK, a country with an ethnically diverse population, he measured ethnic residential segregation by inferring ethnic origins from surnames.

For the project of Professor Longley to create a world map of surnames, Professor Yano provided the Japanese surnames.

Features of the Surname Map

The interactive map provides users with valuable insights into the geographic distribution of their individual surnames in a simple and illustrative manner.

Firstly, the map displays the frequency of a surname in absolute numbers (人数) and ranking according to prefectures.

Secondly, the map shows the relative degree of accumulation, i.e., how evenly a surname is distributed throughout the country, with the specialization coefficient (特化係数).

An option is available to display the absolute numbers and specialization coefficient on two maps side by side.

Furthermore, the distribution trends of two surnames can be compared side by side.

Explore Regional Variations

The map enables users to explore and identify the geographic concentration and regional clusters of surnames.

For instance, the map reveals that some surnames are particularly unique to a region, such as 'Ganaha' (我那覇) in Okinawa.

In the case of Okinawa, the heavy concentration of 'Ganaha' (我那覇) has been considered a result of the relative isolation of the Ryukyu Islands that has led to minimal surname exchange with mainland Japan, whereas there are different reasons for other localities, such as government policy implications on the settlement of Hokkaido.

Current & Future Research Endeavors

Professor Yano's Surname Map builds on the growing interest in the regional analysis of surnames in Japan and other parts of the world.

As in the UK, there exists no exhaustive historical surname data for the whole country in Japan. For Kyoto, however, a database has been created as part of the Virtual Kyoto Project--another project led by Professor Yano. He is working on establishing links within this data that comprise name data from land registry maps from the end of the Meiji period (1868-1912), telephone directories, and the names of people in commerce and industry during the Taisho period (1912-1926).

Other projects include an investigation in the hometowns of the Tonden soldiers (屯田兵) and migration flows of their descendants, identifying the hometowns of Nikkei (日系人) who emigrated from Japan, as well as a study of population movements in local areas of Japan over the past fifteen years, linking them to the census data at town and village levels.

Finally, Professor Yano is pursuing the possibility of digital humanities research on surnames, including the relationship between surnames and the name of places.

<Access the Surname Map>

<Access the UK project 'Named by PublicProfiler' of University College London (UCL)>

The Surname Map has been created by Ritsumeikan University in cooperation with Acton Winds Co., Ltd.

Further reading:

1. Cheshire, James A., Paul A. Longley, Keiji Yano, and Tomoya Nakaya. "Japanese surname regions." Papers in Regional Science 93 (2014): 539-555. https://doi.org/10.1111/pirs.12002.

2. Longley, Paul. A., Alex D. Singleton, Keiji Yano, and Tomoya Nakaya. "Lost in Translation: Cross-Cultural Experiences in Teaching Geo-Genealogy." Journal of Geography in Higher Education 34, no. 1 (2010): 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098260902982476.

3. Yano, Keiji. "GIS based Japanese family name maps and their potential in Geographic Information Science." Jinmoncom (2007): 47-54. http://id.nii.ac.jp/1001/00100574/. (in Japanese with English abstract)

The 92nd International ARC Seminar will be held as a Webinar on Wednesday, October 13, starting at 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Topic: A 60-minute introduction to the right-clearance for building and exploiting digital archives 「60分でマスターする、デジタルアーカイブ構築と発信の権利入門」

Speaker: Kensaku FUKUI (Representative Partner / Attorney, Kotto Dori Law Office, Tokyo)

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Date: Wednesday, October 13, 2021 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: Online via Zoom, free of charge (no reservation required)

*This Webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are also invited to participate via YouTube.

The 91st International ARC Seminar will be held as a Webinar on Wednesday, October 6, starting at 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Topic: The Goals of Japan Search「ジャパンサーチが目指すもの」

Speaker: Akihiko TAKANO (Professor, Digital Content and Media Sciences Research Division,
National Institute of Informatics and ARC-iJAC Steering Committee Member)

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Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2021 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: Online via Zoom, free of charge (no reservation required)

*This Webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are also invited to participate via YouTube.

**Please note that the latter half of the seminar will not be available on Youtube. It will be a discussion between Professor Takano and young researchers.

Japan Search has launched an online gallery based on the digital exhibition 'Japanese Legends of the Supernatural World' (「日本の伝説　異界展」) created by the Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University.

Following the introduction of the legend of Tengu, we are delighted to announce the release of a second PV about Kintaro--a child of superhuman strength from Japanese folklore--who later became known as Sakata no Kintoki in his adult life.

The PV features various woodblock prints from the ARC Ukiyo-e Portal Database.

Japan-Indonesia Maritime Network in Southeast Asia Webinar Series (The 3rd)

Collaboration of P2W-LIPI and ARC-iJAC Ritsumeikan University International Joint Research Project "Digital Archiving of Indonesian Cultural Heritage and Development of 4D High-Definition Visualization Contents"

Topic: "Punjulharjo Boat: Indonesia and Southeast Asian Traditional Boat Building"
By Agni S. Mochtar, Balai Arkeologi, Yogyakarta
Date: Friday, September 10, 2021 16:00~ JST (14:00~ WIB)

JAPAN SEARCH has launched an online gallery based on the digital exhibition 'Japanese Legends of the Supernatural World' (「日本の伝説　異界展」) created by the Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University.

On this occasion, JAPAN SEARCH has released a PV to introduce its online gallery 'Japanese Legends of the Supernatural World'.

The online gallery offers insights into some of the unknown aspects of the Legend of Tengu, amongst others--drawing from the contents of the ARC's digital exhibition 'Japanese Legends of the Supernatural World' available in our Virtual Museum.

We are pleased to announce that the Art Research Center's journal--ART RESEARCH--will be reborn as an online journal from volume 22-1.

The purpose of the journal is to widely publicize the results of the research projects and activities conducted by the Art Research Center and its partner institutions and collaborative researchers. As an academic journal specializing in arts and culture, it has received many contributions from industry experts every year.

Since its establishment in 1998, the Art Research Center (ARC) has been selected for several national grants as a center of excellence for research in culture, art, and information science. In FY2019, the center assumed the role as the International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art & Culture (ARC-iJAC) upon its accreditation by the MEXT as an International Joint Usage/Research Center. The ARC is highly regarded as a leading hub for the digital archiving of Japanese art and culture.

Our online journal will be published several times a year, and at the end of the fiscal year, a print booklet summarizing all contributions will be distributed..

By accepting manuscripts any time from now, we hope to greatly increase the submission opportunities for researchers.

We look forward to receiving your manuscript submission.

Read more>>

The Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University, is pleased to announce the launch of the Sumo Digital Institute within the ARC Virtual Institute, along with the release of the online database of the Teiji Kojima Collection--a treasure trove of sumo banzuke and old sumo documents.

The ARC has been working to create a digital archive of materials related to the history of sumo collected by the late Teiji Kojima, a renowned scholar of sumo history. Along with the release of his collection in June, we decided to publish the results of our research in sumo history under the Sumo Digital Institute.

The Teiji Kojima Collection consists of approximately 1,000 paper documents and dozens of volumes of old sumo-related materials, mainly sumo banzuke, covering a total of 264 years from 1742 (mid-Edo period) to 2006. These digital images are now accessible online at any time.

In addition to browsing the digitized materials, the Sumo Digital Institute offers an online exhibition. It is an attempt to bring to light the many facets of Edo-period kanjin-zumo tournaments by picking up sumo-related articles from the Bukō nenpyō--a compilation of Edo-period events in chronological order--and linking them to sumo banzuke related to the events from the Teiji Kojima Collection, ukiyo-e prints in the Ukiyo-e Portal Database, and materials from the Early Japanese Books Database.

We hope that this online exhibition will encourage people to take an interest in the world of kanjin-zumo that is very different from today.

The exhibition not only links to the Kojima Collection but also to sumo paintings in the Japanese Collection of the Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, available in the ARC Virtual Institute.

The ukiyo-e paintings that traveled to the Netherlands as soon as they were published are beautiful and well-preserved, retaining their original colors. We hope you enjoy them.

The Sumo Digital Institute strives to collect a wide range of visual data and literary materials about sumo from the Edo period to the modern era and make them available to the public through a digital archive. We hope to raise the public's interest in sumo by releasing these rare sumo materials. [Person in charge: Nozomu Ataka]

The Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University, is pleased to announce the release of the Asahi Shimbun Collection of Shibai Banzuke (Kabuki Playbills), held by the Osaka Prefectural Nakanoshima Library, in our Shibai Banzuke (Kabuki Playbills) Portal Database.

Since the Edo Period, flyers, posters, and programs of kabuki and jōruri plays have provided detailed information about actors, names of the cast, and the content of those plays at that time.

The materials, originally cataloged in the Asahi Shimbun bunko mokuroku (「朝日新聞」文庫目録), were published by the Osaka Prefectural Nakanoshima Library in March 1970. With the permission of the library, the Art Research Center has digitized the materials and re-examined the catalog data, making the images online available through the ARC Shibai Banzuke Database System.

By the end of 2017, the ARC had released around 700 un-cataloged items from the library. This time, we added 1,443 banzuke, bringing the total number of items available in our online database to 2,129.

You can either access these materials from the Osaka Prefectural Nakanoshima Library's website under 'Various Catalogs and Databases' or the ARC Shibai Banzuke Portal Database by selecting the holding institution 'Osaka Prefectural Nakanoshima Library'.

Our Shibai Banzuke Portal Database also comprises banzuke held by other institutions, thus allowing you to browse and compare to find supplementary information.

Furthermore, the Shibai Banzuke Catalog of the Osaka Prefectural Nakanoshima Library, published in October 1968, contains approximately 2,500 items other than the above, which will be digitized in our third project next year. We hope to complete a large-scale database with almost 4,600 items within three years.