A Short History of the Library of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1872-1942

The history of the Asiatic Society of Japan has been well told in Douglas Moore Kendrick's A Century of Western Studies of Japan; the First Hundred Years of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1872-1972. This work, however, makes only scattered references to the Society's library. This paper focuses on the library itself, drawing on Kendrick, the annual reports of the Society as published in Transactions over the years, four published catalogs of the collection (1878, 1902, 1919, and 1935), and other sources. It is concerned with the early difficulties of building a library of publications which, for the most part, originated outside of Asia, and which attempted to serve the widely varied interests of the expatriate community in Japan, along with those of its Japanese membership.