Abstract
This chapter examines the impact of computing, internet and information technology (IT) on Japanese studies in the last three decades. For better or worse, modern technology has changed the landscape of Japanese studies beyond recognition in many different ways. This study provides a historical overview of the uses of word processing, computers, the Internet and IT technologies to study Japan from the 1980s to the present, and weights the pros and cons of using modern technology in Japanese Studies. Whether technology has improved the quality of research, changed the attitudes and methodology of researchers, promoted international collaboration and created problems in research ethics will be discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
For the transformation of Japanese Studies from an exotic, peripheral subfield into an integral part of area studies, see Ruud Janssens, “Because of Our Commercial Intercourse and Bring about a Better Understanding the Two Peoples: A History of Japanese Studies in the United States,” in Michael Kemper and Artemy Kalinovsky, eds., Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies during the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2015): 120–52.
- 2.
For instance, the Japanese collection at Harvard University (started in 1914 and renamed as the Harvard–Yenching Library in 1965) used a card catalog system until the introduction of the online Hollis catalog HOLLIS in 2002. The Japanese collection at East Asian Library (formerly Gest Library) at Princeton University uses a combination of a card catalog (for books published before 1982) and an online catalog (for books published after 1982).
- 3.
Joy Hendry shares with us the difficulties she encountered in conducting anthropological fieldwork in Kyushu in the 1970s. Although she shows a picture of her “writing fieldnotes in the pre–laptop era,” she does not seem to see primitive equipment as the main obstacle to her fieldwork–based research. See Joy Hendry, “From Scrambled Messages to an Impromptu Dip: Serendipity in Finding a Field Location,” in Theodore C. Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Victoria Lyon Bestor, eds., Doing Fieldwork in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003): 55–70.
- 4.
On the input of kanji by machine. See Nishioka Tsuneo, "Japanese typewriter", Information Management (In Japanese), 18(6), pp. 448–457 (1975).
- 5.
See Orville Vernon Burton, “Introduction: The Renaissance,” in Orville Vernon Burton, ed., Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 1–18.
- 6.
For the historical transformation from “analog humanities” to “digital humanities,” see Jonathan Sterne, “The Example: Some Historical Considerations,” in Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, eds., Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015): 17–34.
- 7.
See Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xvii.
- 8.
“Mediascape” is a term coined by Arjun Appadurai to refer to the role of digital media in promoting global cultural flows. See Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, culture & society, 7(2–3), pp. 295–310 (1990).
- 9.
For example, I have been writing short articles about Japan on my own blog (http://www.cuhkacs.org/~benng/Bo-Blog/) since 2005 and selected articles from my blog were published into three books.
- 10.
Katsuya Masuda, Makoto Tanji, and Hideki Mima, “Revealing the Modern History of Japanese Philosophy Using Digitization, Natural Language Processing, and Visualization,” in Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities , vol. 1 (2015): 37–43.
- 11.
GIS uses a computer program to analyze geographical and spatial data on a map. Examples are Philip C. Brown, “Corporate Land Tenure in Nineteenth–Century Japan: A GIS Assessment,” Historical Geography, vol. 33 (May 2005): 99–117, L. J. Siebert, Creating a GIS Spatial History of Tokyo (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1997) and Y. Ishikawa, “Population Geography with GIS in Japan,” GeoJournal, vol. 52 (2000):189–94.
- 12.
See John W. Hall, “Japanese Studies in the 1980s: An Interpretative Report,” Journal of East Asian Libraries, no. 76 (1985): 28–32.
- 13.
Komatsu Kazuhiko, the director–general of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, has identified this trend. See Komatsu Kazuhiko, “Keynote Address 2,” in P.A. George, ed., Japanese Studies: Changing Global Profile (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2010), pp. 13–15.
- 14.
The Japan Foundation has been publishing An Introductory Bibliography for Japanese Studies (with two parts on the humanities and social sciences, respectively) since 1974. It is obvious that the number of researchers and publications has been increasing.
- 15.
Academic dishonesty is a major concern in science and medicine. Retraction of articles in these fields is not uncommon. Japanese Studies conducts studies mainly in the domains of humanities and social science studies and the problem in research ethics is therefore less serious. Many of these offenses are unintentional as plagiarism and copyright infringement have become a large grey area. For instance, reworking and publishing an article posted in one’s own blog or Facebook can be seen as self–plagiarism in some countries and the use of audio–visual materials in teaching can sometime violate copyrights.
- 16.
Gunther Eysenbach and James E Till, “Ethical Issues in Qualitative Research on Internet Communities,” British Medical Journal, vol. 323, no. 7321 (November 2001): 1103–05.
References
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Sterne J (2015) The example: some historical considerations. In: Svensson P, Goldberg DT (eds) Between humanities and the digital. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 17–34
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Ng, Bm. (2019). The Impact of Modern Technology on Japanese Studies. In: Japan Study as a Public Good in Asia. SpringerBriefs in Economics(). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6336-8_3
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