Trip to Japan
(December 2001)
Rob Britt
Library Associate
Gallahger Law Library East Asian Law Department

I recently spent three weeks in Japan (December 1st-22nd, 2001) on a trip funded by the Japan Foundation (JF), with supplemental funding provided by the Law School and Law Library (my sincere thanks to all of the above). While there, I attended a JF-hosted conference, visited book dealers and libraries, and re-acquainted myself with Japanese language and culture. The highlights of the stay outside of the conference itself included visits with two major book distributors, a legal publisher, and some acquaintances in the law section of the National Diet Library who produce an important index to English translations of Japanese laws. I also visited the law faculty and law library staff at two major universities, Tokyo University (where I met Prof. Dan Foote, who introduced me to the law library there), and Waseda University (where I was shown their very advanced access to online Japanese legal databases). The hospitality was outstanding everywhere I went. One example was a very enjoyable visit with a recent Asian Law Program LLM graduate who now works for the Bank of Japan.

Also, the JF arranged for me to visit the Japan Supreme Court Library. I was introduced there to the director and his assistant, who graciously gave me a detailed tour of the collection. We discussed our long-standing exchange agreement with their library, whereby we send them copies of the Washington Law Review and the Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP), and they send us a number of Japanese legal periodicals in return. We both continue to be very satisfied with this arrangement, and plan to continue it. This visit and most of the others during my stay helped me put faces to the names of our partners in Japan, and should prove very useful in our future dealings with them.

In addition to these visits, when I was in Kyoto near the end of my stay, I met UW Asian Law LLM program alum Judge Masahiro Iseki (who was here as a visiting scholar this past Fall Quarter). Judge Iseki accompanied me to the Kyoto Comparative Law Center, and introduced me to its very well-known director (and a former visiting scholar here) Prof. Zentaro Kitagawa. I also met two other members of the Law Center's staff, and we discussed the future of Prof. Kitagawa's major loose-leaf publication, "Doing Business in Japan." Judge Iseki also took me to his alma mater in Japan, Kyoto University, where the friendly staff gave me an informative tour of their Law Library collection and operations.

The conference I attended had the somewhat unwieldy title "The Japan Foundation Invitation Program 2001 for an International Conference on the Enhancement of Information Availability for Scholarly Resources in Japanese Studies." It went for eight days, from Thursday, December 13th through Thursday, December 20th, and was held in Japanese. There were 18 invited participants, each of whom made a presentation. Twelve of these were invited from outside Japan; six were from Japan. Six of the twelve from outside Japan were academics, and the other six were librarians. The academics included John Campbell, a political scientist from the University of Michigan, Phillip Brown, a Japanese historian at Ohio State, one Australian, and three European scholars. The library participants included three from the United States, one from Australia, and two from Europe. The six participants from Japan included scholars, an archivist, librarians, and museum directors. The text of the Conference presentations will be published soon (in Japanese). Themes included "The Globalization and Deepening of the Use of Academic Materials" and "Imagining the Most Desirable Libraries and Archives for the 21st Century." My talk concerned access to Japanese statutes and cases in the United States.

All-in-all, the trip was a success on several levels. First, I was very pleased to be able to meet in person many of the book suppliers I have dealt with over the years, and establish a closer relationship with them. I was also very lucky to meet and make connections with the other participants in the conference who constitute a valuable world-wide network of knowledgeable Japan-studies contacts. My visits to academic and government law libraries in Japan deepened my understanding of the way Japanese legal materials are handled in the country of their origin, and third, it was a great pleasure to meet old and new friends in the law, library, and publishing worlds in Japan.