Two Bibliographies on Japan
Making a bibliography is a painstaking and time-consuming job. It is also an unrewarding task, because from the very outset the bibliographer knows he or she will be criticized; there are always some 'important' books missing from the list and since editing, printing, and publishing the book take time, the most recent titles are never to be found there. Of course, the latter cannot be helped, at least not in printed form.
By PAUL WIJSMAN
The first biliography to be reviewed is the Area Bibliography of Japan by Ria Koopmans-De Bruijn, who is the East Asian Studies librarian at the C.V. Starr East Asian Libray of Columbia University. As she writes in the preface '... this bibliography provides a general overview of literature relating to Japan, in as broad a range of subjects as possible. The main focus is on recent literature'. 'Recent' is, one can read in the introduction, from 1980 to the present (the introduction is dated January 1997). What is included and excluded in the bibliography is also explained in the introduction. One of the most important considerations for inclusion is the accessibility of the material. Since there could be all kinds of reasons for inaccessibility of even recent publications obscure sources, unresponsive foreign publishers, or titles that are out of print before you know they are there Koopmans' measure of accessibility is whether a title is available in a library. Let us hope the international library loan system works well, because readers living in small countries with a modest Japanese collection will encounter many titles in this bibliography that are out of print and not available in a library in their own country.In total there are 2676 entries classed under subject headings, starting with Abortion and ending with Zen (with a reference back to Religion-Buddhism-Zen). Compared to Shulman's bibliography Japan (1989), this book has many more entries, but the number of pages is far fewer, since there are no annotations. And that is a pity, because sometimes I would really like to have more information about a book, not just the subject heading and a title.
I did some random tests, and as I mentioned above, there are always titles missing. For example, under the subject heading 'Library Catalogs' there are three catalogues on early Japanese books (of one American and two British libraries), but the monumental 5-volume catalogue on early Japanese books and prints in the German libraries by Eva Kraft is not there. And under 'Minorities-Okinawans' only the 1985 reprint of Lebra's Okinawan Religion is there, but why not Hateruma: socio-religious aspects of a south-Ryukyuan island culture by Ouwehand (1985) or the German publication by Gert Anhalt Okinawa zwischen Washington und Tokyo (1991)? Well, you can't have it all.
More annoying was the fact that some publications by authors I picked out of the author index like Alvin D. Coox 1300, Thomas Crump 1342, and Kurt W. Radtke 1428 could not be found under these numbers. Maybe the publications of these three authors are somewhere in the book, but I could not find them since there is no title index.
And then there are the subject headings; one can be justifiably puzzled about the fact some titles are classed under a specific subject heading, and not under another. For example there are two subject headings 'Bushido' and 'Samurai', but why is John Newman's book Bushido: the way of the warrior placed under heading 'Samurai' and not under 'Bushido'? Under 'Bushido', by the way, one can read 'see also: 2088; 2089'. These two numbers refer to two books about photography with no, as far as I know, relation to bushido at all. And looking for books under 'Martial Arts', the reader is sent back to the heading 'Bushido', but she or he could find much more under 'Sports' with sub-headings like 'Aikido', Iaido', 'Kendo' or 'Ninjutsu'.
This bibliography is a mix of scholarly, popular, and even obscure books. Most of them are in English, but there are some books in other languages, because these were too important to ignore or because English materials were not available for certain subject. I really think this bibliography 'can serve the general public as a starting point that can help focus a newly developing interest', as Koopmans has written in her introduction, but I wonder whether it is of much use for the 'advanced scholar', since the specialist will have probably more titles in his head, than he can find under the headings of this bibliography.
Australasian studies
The second book under review is a totally different kind of bibliography. Australasian Studies of Japan: essays and annotated bibliography (1989-1996) edited by Purnendra Jain, professor of Japanese Studies in the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide.
This annotated bibliography is, according to the editor, complementary to the Directory of Japanese Studies in Australia and New Zealand, published in 1997. If I counted right, it has 1332 entries, divided into nine sections. The type of publications in this bibliography are books, book chapters, research articles, and all kinds of other scholarly publications in the disciplinary areas of the Social Sciences and Humanities with the exception of language and linguistics. The authors are those who have produced publications on Japan while based in Australia and New Zealand while conducting their research or its publication. Every section or area is divided into sub-areas, for instance the 'Japanese economy' is subdivided into areas like 'Agriculture', ' Domestic economy', 'Domestic political economy' etc. Each sub-area is organized chronologically beginning with 1996 and ending with 1989. Every area is preceded by an essay in which a specialist discusses the state of affairs within that specific area. There are also two general essays by J.J.A. Stockwin and Takamichi Mito about Japanese scholarship in Australia and New Zealand from 'an international perspective' and 'a Japanese view' respectively. Reading these essays and browsing through the bibliography entries it is apparent that some areas in the Social Sciences and Humanities get more attention from scholars in these two countries than others. For example 'Japanese economy' has 270 entries, 'Japanese literature' 70!
It is difficult to say whether articles or books are missing in the list, since the criteria are fairly wide: all kind of scholarly materials by all kind of people, like visiting scholars living in Australia for even a short period, are included. The editors used various techniques to collect the materials, like database search using CD-Roms and on-line information catalogues, contacting researchers directly, and a general call for submissions on the Internet.
What I can do is to give you the results of my at random test: I encountered only one (as a matter of fact, two) misprinted reference (both Loos and Osanai can be found under JS24, and not under JS23 as printed in the author index).
With such a wide variety of scholarly materials, spanning voluminous books to 3-page articles, surrounded by essays one-third of the total text this volume is not a typical bibliography. You can call it a very informative book about the 'state of affairs' of the academic world of Japanese Studies in Australia and New Zealand accompanied by a exhaustive publication list, which is, of course, also very useful as reference for librarians and scholars. *
Ria Koopmans-De Bruijn
AREA BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JAPAN
Scarecrow Area Bibliographies, No. 14. Lanham, Md. & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1998
Purnendra Jain (ed.)
AUSTRALASIAN STUDIES OF JAPAN
ESSAYS AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (1989-96)
Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998
Paul Wijsman is Librarian of the Centre for Japanese Studies, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands.
E-mail:
wijsman@let.leidenuniv.nl