UWM Libraries Research and Course Guides: Japanese: Find Scholarly Sources

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Japanese Romanization System
Japanese Romanization Tables by the Library of Congress in ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts.
Online Guide to Japanese Romanization
Online Guide to Japanese Romanization -- a website put together by The University of Hawaii at Manoa Library.

Databases for Research in World Languages

Mango Languages
Self-paced language learning modules for over 70 languages.
MLA International Bibliography
MLA International Bibliography indexes international scholarly materials, including over 4,400 journals, books, working papers, and conference proceedings on language, literature, linguistics, and folklore. It is updated 10 times a year.
JSTOR
Provides access to journal articles, books, images, and primary sources. Contents include the Artstor image collection, archival and current scholarly journal content, and historical documents.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
Access ends March 31, 2025.
This database abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Documents indexed include journal articles, book reviews, books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers.
Project Muse
Provides digital humanities and social sciences content with full text access to 350 journals and select full text access to ebooks. Limit to subscribed full text using the advanced search and selecting, "Only content I have access to". Why can't I access some of this content?
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Ethnic NewsWatch incorporates both current Ethnic NewsWatch and Ethnic NewsWatch: A History, providing a full-text collection of more than 2.5 million articles from over 330 titles, from 1959 to current. Ethnicities include: African American/Caribbean/African; Arab/Middle Eastern; Asian/Pacific Islander; European/Eastern European; Hispanic; Jewish; Native People.
Humanities International Complete
Humanities International Complete includes all data from Humanities International Index (more than 2,100 journals and 2.47 million records) plus unique full text content. The database includes full text for more than 890 journals.
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 7,000 full-text periodicals, including nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 11,000 journals and a total of more than 11,600 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 journals.
WorldCat
WorldCat holds tens of millions of bibliographic records that represent more than one billion items. It encompasses hundreds of languages and all formats, including rapidly growing numbers of electronic resources and digital objects.

Databases for Research in Japanese Studies

NDL (National Diet Library) Zasshi Kiji Sakuin
The NDL Zasshi Kiji Sakuin (雑誌記事索引) is a bibliographic database that provides detailed bibliographic information of many journals published in Japan and received d by the National Diet Library (NDL) from 1948 to present.
CiNii Research
CiNii is a database service for articles, Books, Journals & Dissertations published in academic society journals, university research bulletins or articles included in the National Diet Library's Japanese Periodicals Index Database or held by university libraries in Japan.
Japan Search
Japan Search is a national platform for aggregating metadata of digital resources of various fields and operated by the National Diet Library, Japan, in cooperation with a variety of organizations in Japan under policies established by the Working Group Steering Committee of the Digital Archives Japan Promotion Committee. Japan Search is now linked to 170 databases, and contains 25,327,385 searchable contents.
Kotenski Sogo Database
Provides access to the Waseda University Library’s collection of Japanese and Chinese classics, in the form of bibliographical information, related scholarly materials as well as full-text images. Includes approximately 300,000 items, including two National Treasures and five Important Cultural Properties.
Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB)
IRDB (Academic Institutional Repository Database: Institutional Repositories DataBase) is a database service that collects and provides metadata of contents registered in academic institutional repositories in Japan.
J-STAGE
J-STAGE is a platform for scholarly publications in Japan, developed and managed by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). J-STAGE aims to rapidly circulate research in science, technology, humanities and social sciences in Japan; strengthen the international dissemination of information from Japan to the rest of the world; promote the publication of open access content from Japan's academic societies and research organizations.
International Research Center for Japanese Studies
The International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) was founded in 1987. Devoted to interdisciplinary and comprehensive research on Japanese culture from an international perspective, it is an inter-university research institute supported by government funds.

Highlighted Books from the Collection

Japan: History and Culture from Classical to Cool by Nancy K. Stalker
ISBN: 9780520287778
Publication Date: 2018-08-14
This text surveys highlights in Japanese history, culture, and society from prehistoric to contemporary times, devoting significant attention to the visual and literary arts and to everyday material culture in each period. It provides relatively equal coverage of the premodern and modern eras, describing important historical events, personages, and cultural developments. In addition, it traces gender ideals and the emergence of religious, intellectual, and social protest movements across time.
Manga and the Representation of Japanese History by Roman Rosenbaum (Editor)
ISBN: 1136224246
Publication Date: 2012-10-02
This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. Each of the articles in this book investigates the authorship of history by looking at various different attempts to render Japanese history through the popular cultural media of the story-manga.
Japanese Mythology in Film by Yoshiko Okuyama
ISBN: 1498514332
Publication Date: 2016-11-14
Japanese Mythology in Film takes a semiotic approach to uncovering such religious and folkloric tropes and subtexts embedded in popular Japanese movies and anime. Part I introduces film semiotics with plain definitions of terminology. Through familiar cinematic examples, it emphasizes the myth-making nature of modern-day film and argues that semiotics can be used as a theoretical tool for reading film. Part II presents case studies of eight popular Japanese films as models of semiotic analysis. While discussing each film’s use of common mythological motifs such as death and rebirth, its case study also unveils more covert cultural signifiers and folktale motifs, including jizo (a savior of sentient beings) and kori (bewitching foxes and raccoon dogs), hidden in the Japanese filmic text.
The Japanese sense of beauty by Takashina Shūji, translated by Matt Treyvaud.
ISBN: 4866580208
Publication Date: 3-27-2018
In The Japanese Sense of Beauty, art critic and historian Takashina Shūji reflects on the aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities underlying Japanese art throughout its history, from the earliest calligraphy and painted screens to modern masters like Hishida Shunsō and Yokoyama Taikan. Along the way, Takashina explores themes such as the relationship between subjective perspective and "flat" composition and the playful intermingling of word and image throughout the plastic arts of Japan. He also offers fresh critical perspectives on many individual artists, including Takeuchi Seihō, one of the first to fuse traditional techniques with Western realism, and Takahashi Yuichi, who combined a vivid mastery of texture with deceptively traditionalist compositions.
The Japanese Cinema Book by Hideaki Fujiki (Editor); Alastair Phillips (Editor)
ISBN: 9781844576791
Publication Date: 2020-04-16
The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: Theories and Approaches, Institutions and Industry, Film Style, Genre, Times and Spaces of Representation, Social Contexts, Flows and Interactions
Japanese Fashion Cultures: dress and gender in contemporary Japan by Masafumi Monden
ISBN: 1472586727
Publication Date: 2014-11-20
From Rococo to Edwardian fashions, Japanese street style has reinvented many western dress styles, reinterpreting and altering their meanings and messages in a different cultural and historical context. This wide ranging and original study reveals the complex exchange of styles and what they represent in Japan and beyond, contesting common perceptions of gender in Japanese dress and the notion that non-western fashions simply imitate western styles.Through case studies focussing on fashion image consumption in style tribes such as Kamikaze Girls, Lolita, Edwardian, Ivy Style, Victorian, Romantic and Kawaii, this ground-breaking book investigates the complexities of dress and gender and demonstrates the flexible nature of contemporary fashion and style exchange in a global context.
Japanese Visual Culture: explorations in the world of manga and anime by Mark W. MacWilliams
ISBN: 0765622351
Publication Date: 2015
Born of Japan's cultural encounter with Western entertainment media, manga (comic books or graphic novels) and anime (animated films) are two of the most universally recognized forms of contemporary mass culture. Because they tell stories through visual imagery, they vault over language barriers. Well suited to electronic transmission and distributed by Japan's globalized culture industry, they have become a powerful force in both the mediascape and the marketplace.This volume brings together an international group of scholars from many specialties to probe the richness and subtleties of these deceptively simple cultural forms. The contributors explore the historical, cultural, sociological, and religious dimensions of manga and anime, and examine specific sub-genres, artists, and stylistics. The book also addresses such topics as spirituality, the use of visual culture by Japanese new religious movements, Japanese Goth, nostalgia and Japanese pop, "cute" (kawali) subculture and comics for girls, and more. With illustrations throughout, it is a rich source for all scholars and fans of manga and anime as well as students of contemporary mass culture or Japanese culture and civilization.