International Research Center for Japanese Studies

Prominent Kyoto academics Umesao Nobuo and Kuwabara Takeo also played key roles in the founding of the center.

In 1995 Kawai Hayao, a Jungian analyst of Japanese psychology and religion, was inaugurated as the second director-general of Nichibunken.

The cultural-anthropologist Ueno Chizuko sharply criticized the center as a calculated attempt at national branding.

Ian Buruma caused considerable outrage at the time for arguing in influential newspapers abroad that the establishment of the center was part of a project designed to revamp the kind of nationalist ideology present in pre-war Japan.

Japan Review, which is published annually, accepts outstanding essays on Japanese culture from scholars across the globe, as well as research notes.

It primarily consists of books treating Japan in Western languages published before the opening of the country to foreign commerce in the 1850s.

This online catalogue is a database of the bibliographical details of pre-1900 European books housed in Nichibunken's library which contain references to Japan.

A total of 1,057 items are listed here Nichibunken's collection of 51,805 photographs, illustrations, and other visual images of Japan or Japan-related subjects from around the world.

For some poems in the database (those originally written in Chinese, or kanshi), annotated English translations are included.

The Miyako nenjū gyōji gajō is a two-volume album of hand painted pictures on silk by Nakajima Sōyō.

These paintings are accompanied by explanatory texts written by the folklorist and Kyoto scholar Ema Tsutomu.

This contains the digitized full text and prints of the Kinsei kijinden, a collection of biographies of eccentrics from the Edo period.