Asian History

Japanese History

This is a brief guide to the material available to Boston College faculty and students on subjects in Asian in history (understood including central, south, east, and south-east Asia).

Reference Shelf Top Box

This page provides access points to BC's subscriptions to reference material on Japanese history. Here, you can find resources for finding definitions (e.g., dictionaries); suggested scholarly material (e.g., bibliographies); as well as background material and explanations written by experts in their fields (e.g., encyclopedia and handbooks).

What's on This Page

This page has a lot on it. You can use the following anchors (links down the page) to jump straight to a relevant box.

Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Asian History.
Call Number: Oxford Research Encyclopedias
Publication Date: 2016+
"Substantive, peer-reviewed, and regularly updated, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History combines the speed and flexibility of digital with the rigorous standards of academic publishing." Emphasizes modern history but does include premodern content.

Find Definitions

Dictionaries are specifically designed to provide people with definitions to words and phrases. They might also give you information on pronunciation, use, and possibly origin. Here, there are two types of dictionaries: language and historical.

Keep in mind as you work that meaning changes over time. For example, which days count as "weekdays" has shifted from Monday through Saturday to Monday through Friday over the last two centuries. Dictionaries--particularly historical dictionaries--can help put those terms in context.

Japanese Language Dictionaries

Denshi Jisho
An easy-to-use and powerful online Japanese dictionary. Made up of several interlinked dictionaries, kanji can be searched individually, in combination, and by radical.
Japanese Garden Dictionary: A Glossary for Japanese Gardens and Their History
Based on the Bilingual [Japanese & English] Dictionary of Japanese Garden Terms published in 2001, the Japanese Garden Dictionary is maintained by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties.
Online Scientific Terms オンライン学術用例集
A dictionary of standardized scientific terms placed online with permission of copyright holders, the Ministry of Education and various academic societies.
Weblio
A Japanese-English, English-Japanese online dictionary site that allows you to search at one time 71 different types of Japanese-English English-Japanese dictionaries and a total of 8,890,000 words (4,160,000 English words and 4,730,000 Japanese words).

Historical Dictionaries

Oxford Reference Online
This is a quick go-to for high-quality, short, dictionary style descriptions, definitions, facts, and figures. Great for date and name checking.

A dictionary of Asian mythology by David Leeming
Publication Date: 2001
This dictionary features stories of revered deities, sacred places, key events and epics, with many recurring themes and traditions. Entries address the key mythologies of the regions we now call India, China, Tibet, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Japan, and broad overviews of specific cultures and their mythic traditions round out the coverage.

Find Recommendations for Scholarly Material

There are catalogs and indices, which list scholarly literature and then there are bibliographies with recommended of literature.

Bibliographies

Bibliography of Asian Studies | 亚洲研究文献目录 | Ya Zhou Yan Jiu Wen Xian Mu Lu This link opens in a new window
Contains titles on all subjects (especially humanities and social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present. Please note, since 1992, newly published individual monographs are no longer being added to the database.

Bibliography of Asian Studies™ (BAS)是研究东亚、东南亚和南亚（尤其是文学科和社会科学）最全面的西方语言书目数据库。数据库有超过900,000条引文信息，可追溯至1971年，其中包括40万多条引文信息可追溯至1992年所有条目均可按作者、标题、出版年份、出版地点、出版语言、期刊名称、国家/地区、主题、关键字、ISSN和ISBN轻松搜索涵盖许多重要期刊以及在编辑卷中的章节，包括未被其他资源编入索引的亚洲出版物利用独特的索引可访问已编辑卷、会议论文集、选集、节日主题和类似出版物资源
Supported Languages: Chinese and other languages

Oxford Bibliographies Online
Access to Boston College's subscriptions to Oxford's bibliographies on subjects including International Relations; Islamic Studies; Military History; Chinese Studies; and more with entries on Japan.

Catalogs

CiNii (NII Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator) NII論文情報ナビゲータ
Citation index to over 15 million articles published in Japanese academic journal with limited free full text access (3.7 million articles). Both Japanese and English interfaces are available.
Nihon Kotenseki Sōgō Mokuroku 日本古典籍総合目録 (Only in Japanese)
A database of pre-Meiji materials maintained by the National Institute of Japanese Literature (Kokubungaku Kenkyu Shiryōkan). This is a union catalogue of early Japanese books. (It also includes Chinese classics and books of the Meiji period). It provides authoritative information about Japanese classical literary works and their authors. It also provides bibliographic information on early Japanese books, and their holding libraries.
Webcat Plus 国立情報学研究所図書情報ナビゲーター
Union catalog of university libraries in Japan. Good content description.

Find Biographical Information (Who's Who)

Marquis Biography Online This link opens in a new window
International in scope, this database includes biographies of people in business, law, science, medicine, the arts, government, and entertainment. Updated daily, this source also includes biographies that have appeared in 24 Marquis Who's Who print titles since 1985, plus historical biographies from our Who Was Who in America volumes from 1607-1985.

Find Background Information

Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture by Yoshio Sugimoto
Call Number: Cambridge Collections
Publication Date: 2009
Traces the cultural transformation that took place over the course of the twentieth century, and paints a picture of a nation rich in cultural diversity.
The Cambridge handbook of Japanese linguistics by Yōko Hasegawa (ed.)
Call Number: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 2018
"The linguistic study of Japanese, with its rich syntactic and phonological structure, complex writing system, and diverse sociohistorical context, is a rapidly growing research area. It consists of five thematic parts including sound system and lexicon, grammatical foundation and constructions, and pragmatics/sociolinguistics topics, with chapters that survey critical discussions arising in Japanese linguistics-- will be welcomed by general linguists, and students and scholars working in linguistic typology, Japanese language, Japanese linguistics and Asian Studies."
Cambridge History of Japan by Donald H. Shively, William H. McCullough, et al (eds.)
Call Number: Cambridge histories online
Publication Date: 1989+
A multivolume set exploring the long span of Japanese history.
A companion to Japanese history by William M Tsutsui
Call Number: Blackwell reference
Publication Date: 2007
Provides an authoritative overview of current debates and approaches within the study of Japan’s history.
A companion to the anthropology of Japan by Jennifer Robertson (ed.)
Call Number: Blackwell reference
Publication Date: 2005
A collection of original essays by some of the field's most distinguished scholars of Japan which, taken together, offer a comprehensive overview of the field. Aiming to retire stale and misleading stereotypes, the authors present new perspectives on Japanese culture and society - past and present - in accessible language.

Encyclopedia of Shinto [Open Access]
The Encyclopedia of Shinto is an emended English version of the Shinto jiten edited by the Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics (Kobundo 1994) with additional links to video, illustrations, photographs, and sound files.

Koji Ruien 古事類苑 by Japan. Jingu Shicho
Call Number: Internet Archive
Publication Date: 1933
An encyclopedia was started by the Meiji government in 1879. Published between the years 1896 to 1914, the Koji Ruien consists of 67,000 pages covering 40,354 topics. It is a useful resource for understanding Japanese culture reflected in pre-Meiji cultural concepts and documents. Digitalizing the work is an on-going project and currently 7,233 pages are available. See also the Nichibun-ken site, which allows key-work searches of the digitalized sections of the Koji Ruien, here.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Asian History.
Call Number: Oxford Research Encyclopedias
Publication Date: 2016+
"Substantive, peer-reviewed, and regularly updated, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History combines the speed and flexibility of digital with the rigorous standards of academic publishing." Emphasizes modern history but does include premodern content.
Routledge handbook of civil society in Asia by Akihiro Ogawa (ed.)
Call Number: Taylor & Francis
Publication Date: 2017
Is an interdisciplinary resource, covering one of the most dynamically expanding sectors in contemporary Asia. Originally a product of Western thinking, civil society represents a particular set of relationships between the state and either society or the individual. Each culture, however, molds its own version of civil society, reflecting its most important values and traditions.
Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History by Sven Saaler (Editor); Christopher W. A. Szpilman (Editor)
Publication Date: 2017
A concise overview of modern Japanese history from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. Written by a group of international historians, each an authority in his or her field, the book covers modern Japanese history in an accessible yet comprehensive manner.

Find Historical Overviews

A concise history of Japan by Brett L. Walker
Call Number: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 2015
Walker's vibrant and accessible new narrative then follows Japan's ascension from the ashes of World War II into the thriving nation of today. It is a history for our times, posing important questions regarding how we should situate a nation's history in an age of environmental and climatological uncertainties.

Oxford Handbooks Online
Contains in-depth, high-level articles by scholars at the top of their field. BC's subscriptions include archeology, history, political science, religion, and more.

O'Neill Library

Bapst Library

Burns Library

Educational Resource Center

Law Library

Social Work Library

Theology & Ministry Library

O'Connor Library

Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies

Asian History

Japanese History

Reference Shelf Top Box

What's on This Page

Recommended

Individual Titles

Find Definitions

Japanese Language Dictionaries

Historical Dictionaries

Find Recommendations for Scholarly Material

Bibliographies

Catalogs

Find Biographical Information (Who's Who)

Find Background Information

Find Historical Overviews