Kojiruien

The Kojiruien is Japan’s largest lexical encyclopedia of historical documents compiled and edited during the Meiji and Taisho periods.
In 1879 (Meiji 12), following the proposal to compile a corpus of historical records and documents by Nishimura Shigeki (at the time a Ministry of Education bureaucrat), a group of scholars led by Konakamura Kiyonori commenced editing the Kojiruien. After a number of setbacks, work was continued by the Board of Ise Jingu Shrine in 1895 (Meiji 28), and after a total of 35 years was completed in 1914 (Taisho 3).
The content entries are organized into thirty categories ranging from institutions, cultural artifacts, and society of particular historical periods. For each entry passages from relevant documents starting with the Rikkokushi compiled in the early Heian period to 1867 (Keio 3) marking the end of the Edo period are listed and quoted in the original to explain their origin, content and transformation.
The total content is contained in 1000 scrolls, 351 Japanese bound books, or the 51-volume Western book-bound collection (including exhaustive content catalog and index volumes). The total number of pages comprising the Western bound collection is approximately 67,000 pages. Entries totaling 64,246 are arranged according to the Japanese syllabic order. In the content catalog 40,354 entries are listed.
For scholars in various fields of research, this encyclopedic collection of historical materials is still one of the most important sources for understanding pre-modern (Edo period and earlier) Japanese culture.

• International Research Center for Japanese Studies
  The contents of this website are made public with partial changes to the International Research Center for Japanese Studies Kojiruien Search System interface.