*This page is designed primarily for students in J7A and J7B (that is, for undergraduates studying premodern or modern Japanese literature & culture). However, I point other students to this page as well as most of the information here is useful for various research projects.
Non-Berkeley students: you might be able to obtain access to our library system upon request. Take a look at Doe & Moffitt Libraries Privileges and Access Information or go to the Privileges Desk in Doe Library. You might be able to obtain a CalNet account which will give you access to many of the links below (which are subscription sites paid for by the University and available to you only through a secure login process). Go here to explore your options: About CalNet.
As you know, there are a lot of libraries on campus. Try not to box yourself in to just one of them. The East Asian library, for example, is one of the very best in the nation, although most of the material is not in English.
Stay on top of when libraries are open, and keep in mind the possibility that the resource you seek might already be checked out by another student. Things might go more smoothly if you search early and have some plan Bs in mind. (Remember ebrary, which has full additions of books that are available 24/7.)
Good library searches are a combination of intelligent use of our search engine, Oskicat, and alert work when physically there. (That is, since you are there, take a look are nearby material, flipping through some things, rather than just harvest the one call number you might have noted down.)
Here are overviews of the resources that can be linked through our library web site: Find Books and E-Books and Find E-Journal Titles
Using Oskicat is pretty intuitive but there are two search methods that I would like to point out.
1) You can limit your search to online sources only. Oskicat will check its many (in the thousands) digital databases all at the same time and find results among them. This is very time efficient. Use the drop down menu and select "Available Online" (this note was written Nov 2012, but Oskicat is constantly updating its search methods):
2) If you locate through Oskicat a particular book, it will have as part of its information screen, hyperlinks in its subject area. These are the official Library of Congress subject categories. This subject area gives you a sense for how information is classified and, if you click on a link, it will show any other library holdings under the same category. This can be very useful in locating other works, especially when you are exploring a new area and haven't developed yet a strong, specific set of keywords. (You might think that if you go to the library itself, similar works will be physically close to each other. But since we split holdings across individual libraries, even if the call number is nearly the same, the book itself might be in an entirely different building.)
Cultural Atlas of Japan, my favorite, is non-circulating and available in the East Asian Library and Environmental Design.
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Japan is non-circulating and is available at Doe.
Encyclopedia of Japan is non-circulating and is available at Doe and Moffitt; however, this is a multi-volume set that is good for specific articles but difficult to browse.
Japan Knowledge (must enter through our East Asia Library Web stie) is an extensive online knowledge base (includes, for example, Shogakukan's multi-volume encyclopedia of Japan, Shogakukan's multi-volume dictionary, Kodansha's multi-volume encyclopedia of Japan in English, and so on), almost all in Japanese, available via any Berkeley computer. It is really cool. The Kodansha encyclopedia is more accurate than Wiki for almost anything you want to know about Japan in a brief and concise way.
Try this search on Oskicat: “ Anthology Japan* ” (the * creates a search that will capture any word that begins “Japan” such as “Japanese”). That should give you a result with many entries. You might consider quickly looking through the whole list because there are some interesting anthologies that are specific to limited topics. Some of the more general ones are listed below (beginning with most recent). Note: Early Modern Japanese Literature (Shirane/Columbia UP) is an electronic book in its entirety and can be accessed from any Berkeley computer, or via proxy.
- Traditional Japanese Literature (Shirane / Columbia UP)
- Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Rimer & Gessel / Columbia UP)
- Early Modern Japanese Literature (Shirane / Columbia UP)
- Traditional Japanese Poetry (Carter / Stanford UP)
- Classical Japanese Prose (McCullough / Stanford UP)
- Modern Japanese Literature (Keene / Grove)
- From the Country of Eight Islands (Sate & Watson / Columbia UP)
- Contemporary Japanese Literature (Hibbett / Knopf)
- Anthology of Japanese Literature (Keene / Grove)
Most of the below resources require a subscription. UC-Berkeley provides access to members of its community. If you use a campus computer, chances are that you can go directly to these sites. If you are off-campus, probably you need to set the computer you are using to activate a proxy when web browsing. The library has a web page that tells you how to do this: UC Berkeley Library Proxy Server.
**Remember that with most search engines putting quotation marks around a term usually forces the engine to search for that exact phrase. A Mishima suicide search will try to pair these two terms and return good sources, but it is pretty messy as an approach. "Mishima's suicide" will return exactly that phrase first, which can be useful.
JSTOR From their web site: JSTOR is a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. My comment: I think this is the best of the journal resources for our class. Remember that you can limit the search to categories of journals, but sometimes this skips good articles in publications that tend not to be specifically devoted to matters Asian.
Project MUSE From their web site: Project MUSE provides full text, subscription access to current content from scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. My comment: a now-and-then useful sort of thing, depending on the topic.
EBSCO From their web site: EBSCOhost® databases are the most-used, premium online information resources for tens of thousands of institutions worldwide, representing millions of end-users. My comment: Some students use this; I don't, really. It seems that science students have used this for other reasons and are trying it out for this class. I don't know if this has been working well for them, but I do know that the articles that have been used via this service have been excellent.
ebrary My comment: This still has a limited number of books in our field but if it is there then it is extremely useful, like a dream. You can use a book that someone has checked out already, you can point us to your research source without scanning pages, you can bookmark, do various searches, and there is never a due time.
Google books As we all know, Google is very busy digitalizing a massive number of books even as it is being challenged by publishers that this is copyright infringement. Besides this project, some publishers have cooperated with partial digital access to the books for which they hold the copyright. These actions have created different layers of how much of a book is viewable online: full, preview, and snippet.
That is relevant to our essay process because one of the goals of that process is that you read for a scholar's ideas, not mine a text just for data.
Snippet view makes this impossible since you cannot see enough text to judge the argument, even if you can see enough text to view a conclusion. Therefore, snippet view is not accepted as a source for your essay. ... That being said, there is one qualifier: Not every source you use for your paper needs to be one that delivers analysis or concepts of that author. Overall, your essay needs to evidence the sophistication that comes from engaging the ideas of others, but it will likely have some content that is simply facts. In that case, snippet view is acceptable if you can determine that the work is meets academic standards of quality and reliability.
At the other end of the spectrum—full view—of course there is no problem and this is a very useful tool for us, since all your sources must be accessible to us.
The middle ground, preview (usually called "Limited Preview"), is a gray area in terms of whether it is appropriate for our class. Unfortunately, it is a very common type of Google book access. Sometimes, perhaps often, there is enough text for you to be able to evaluate the author's argument. You need to judge whether we, when grading, would feel that it is sufficient. But there is a risk: Preview blocks your browsing after a certain number (unstated) of pages have been viewed by you. I have been unable to determine if this number of pages is the same for everyone. There have been times when I have felt that more pages were available from a campus computer than from my laptop, but I can't really tell. I have also recently read an article that suggests the services like Amazon and Google adjust what the user sees on the screen based on that users web history with that site, or more generally. In any event, this means that it is possible that what you can see we cannot, and will therefore not accept your source. I think the odds of this are small, but I put it out there so you know.
pmjs My comment: Despite its opaque name, this is a super good site for premodern things. It identifies translations of texts and so on.
University of Virginia Library — Japanese Text Initiative From their web site: The University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center and the University of Pittsburgh East Asian Library are pleased to sponsor the Japanese Text Initiative, a collaborative effort to make texts of classical Japanese literature available on the World Wide Web. My comment: This extensive site provides online versions of Japanese literature, sometimes in translation, usually in the original.
Aozora Bunko From Wiki: Aozora Bunko [青空文庫, literally the "Blue Sky Library," also known as the "Open Air Library"] is a Japanese digital library. This online collection encompasses several thousands of works of Japanese-language fiction and non-fiction. These include out-of-copyright books or works that the authors wish to make freely available. Since its inception in 1997, Aozora Bunko has been both the compiler and publisher of an evolving online catalog. In 2006, Aozora Bunko organized to add a role as a public policy advocate to protect its current and anticipated catalog of freely accessible e-books. My comment: This is a massive site that provides the original Japanese text for modern literary works that are no longer copyrighted.
East & Southeast Asian: An Annotated Directory of Internet Resources My comment: This is just one of lots of online bibliographies. You may or may not find it useful.