The Study of Japanese Modern Literature from the Construction of bibliotheca

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to detail the contents of the l’Ècole Français d’Èxtrême-Orient (EFEO) Collection at the Institute of Social Sciences Information Library at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. The Japanese items of the EFEO collection consist of 5,642 books bound in the Western style (NBC1-5642), and 4,083 books bound in the traditional Japanese style (NBC5643-9725). Research on the collection was conducted in 2014, with detailed bibliographic information provided on the database. In 2018, all Japanese items of the EFEO collection were cataloged and the data opened to the public. In this paper, I analyze the characteristic of the collection’s Western-style Japanese books that use the Nippon Decimal Classification (NDC). In the literature classification, the collection of the Japanese modern literature is less voluminous compared to that of Japanese classical literature. That is one of the reasons prompting the creation of this collection of books for Japan studies in France.

Keywords

• Japan studies
• Japanology
• Vietnam
• France
• Modern Japanese literature