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Paper short abstract:

KU-ORCAS is in the process of digitally archiving texts in the Kansai University collection and is making them available to the public in turn. This part describes the digital archiving of Chinese language materials in Japan and the possibilities for DH research.

Paper long abstract:

The Nagasawa Bunko in the Kansai University Library holds Chinese materials from the Edo period by Japanese people and Chinese materials from the Ryukyu, including valuable manuscripts, which is one of the special features of the Nagasawa Bunko.

This paper will focus on the materials of Okajima Kanzan(1674-1728, Tōwa Sanyō“唐話纂要”(1718), Tōwa Ben’yo and Tōyaku Binran), which were representative of the middle layer of material. The Okajima Kanzan material is characterized by the fact that it consists of three elements: the Chinese language, pronunciation and Japanese language. Okajima Kanzan’s Tōwa materials changed the view of the Chinese language among Japanese people in the Edo period, and are considered to have had a significant influence on the subsequent study and acceptance of Chinese language. In addition, the Chinese vocabulary and Japanese language of the Okajima Kanzan material can be positioned as the starting point of the transition in understanding the Chinese language, and is an essential part of clarifying this aspect.

The majority of previous research on the Okajima Kanzan material has focused on the vocabulary of the Chinese part, while research on the pronunciation and Japanese parts has been almost exclusively limited to “Tōwa San’yō”. In addition, conventional research has dealt with these separately and has not made progress in organically linking three elements. One of the reasons for this seems to be the complexity and difficulty of organizing, categorizing and visualizing the Chinese and Japanese texts in correspondence with each other.

This paper will report on the correspondence between Chinese words and Japanese words across multiple Okajima Kanzan sources, showing an example of using TEI to tag the Japanese part of text data with the Chinese part input.

Although several organizations are making digital images of Chinese-language materials in Japan available to the public, there is still a long way to go in terms of building the foundations for sharing text databases, and it will be up to us to see how the Okajima Kanzan material can be linked to other materials.