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.
ebrary My comment: This still has a limited number of books in our field but if it is there then it is extremely useful. 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.
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.
JapanKnowledge. This is a Japanese language site with a vast amount of high quality material. Its dictionaries are the best available in terms of quality and quantity, for example. If you can read Japanese, this is a great reference site (it is not a repository of academic articles and books, it is reference material). To access do not go directly to the site. Navigate to it via our C. V. Starr East Asian Library / Japanese Studies and hit the login button when you see it. You will need your proxy set up as usual (if you are not using a campus computer) but this proxy won't launch if you try to access the site directly. At least not now (2012).
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.
Google books This service has different layers of how much of a book is viewable online: full, preview, and snippet. If you are using a resrouce, in general I want to know you have engaged the source intelligently in two ways: you consider it academically credible and you have grappled with its ideas. Drawing from various sources to pull together information is generally not very useful in my classes. So, given that, snippet books are rarely OK as a source in my class and preview books are only OK if you can see enough of the book to understand the relevant thesis for your passage. Proceed with caution.
Books in Japanese that are no longer protected by copyright: Aozora Bunko (青空文庫).
Premodern Japanese texts: Virginia Text Initiative / Japanese Texts
Is it translated? (This is an old web page of mine but probably most of the links are still OK.)