Bibliography of Japanese Biographies

── To conduct biographical research, you must first understand the subject’s family environment, and then broaden your perspective outward to the subject’s social and historical milieu. In order to accomplish this, you need do everything to exhaustively unearth research literature and historical materials related to the subject. You must, therefore, have at least knowledge of research done by predecessors and previously published historical materials about the subject. However, even finding this information is not easy. A well-organized volume of bibliography, such as the Bibliography of Japanese Biographies, is, above all, an expedient resource for quickly locating such information. ── (From the Preface)

When you want to get deeper knowledge about a biographical subject, or when you want to investigate what has been written about him or her, bibliographies are powerful tools. The Bibliography of Japanese Biographies, which contains comprehensive lists of references on biographies of Japanese persons, is a groundbreaking resource. It consists of over 30,000 historical figures from ancient to contemporary times, and lists more than 120,000 related works (books and magazine articles with names of authors and editors and date of publication) published from 1868, the first year of the Meiji period, until 1966.
In the JapanKnowledge edition, besides searching for the name of a biographical subject, the user can also perform full text search on the Bibliography, for example looking for titles of related reference. Also, as a supplement, an at-a-glance list of all the references itemized for each biographical subject in the Bibliography is provided.