Subject guides: Japanese Studies: Databases

What is a database?

Databases provide access to high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, dissertations and other sources.

These databases have been especially chosen for this subject area.

When carrying out your research for a piece of work, you will need to search more than one database to find all of the journal articles relevant to your topic, as each database covers different journals.

Databases-Japanese Studies

The boxes below list a collection of databases that the University Library provides to help you identify key literature in all the areas of Japanese Studies.

Most of these tools are available only to University of Manchester staff and students. Many require you to enter your Central username and password when off-campus. You can obtain your username and password from the Library's computer cluster machines. Alternatively you can use the IT Account Manager.

Full text databases-Japanese Studies

Archives Unbound
Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of primary source historical documents. It covers a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history.
Gale Primary Sources
It provides an interactive research environment that allows researchers to cross-search Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) and to discover and analyze content in new ways.
Japan Chronicle
The English-language Japan Chronicle Weekly (1900–1940) is the newspaper of record for Japan’s engagement with modernity and its emergence, through war, political and social upheaval and seismic social change in East Asia, onto the world stage in the first half of the twentieth century.
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This well-informed, controversial but always readable source of news and opinion on Japan and East Asia offers an intriguing and lively Japanese complement to the North China Herald Online. This collection includes the Kobe Weekly Chronicle (1900-1901), the predecessor of the Japan Chronicle Weekly.
JapanKnowledge+NK
is the largest and most resourceful site about Japan. It provides access to various reference sources, including Encyclopaedia Nipponica and Kodansha Encyclopaedia of Japan, It also contains full-text of books in the Toyo Bunko collection, recent issues of the Economist Japanese edition, NNA world news. Furthermore, JapanKnowledge+NK includes the following databases as well: Jitsu / Great Dictionary
JSTOR (Journal Storage)
Used by millions for research, teaching, and learning. With more than a thousand academic journals and over one million images, letters, and other primary sources, JSTOR is one of the world's most trusted sources for academic content.
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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that includes full-text content of more than 1,300 academic journals. This includes scholarship published in over one thousand of the highest-quality academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
Kikuzo II Visual Library
Kikuzo II Visual is a database of the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's oldest and largest national daily newspapers, with full text searching from 1985 to the present.
Periodicals Archive Online
Providing access to full-text articles from over 550 journals published between 1665 and 2000, this major online periodical archive can be searched by author, keyword and/or subject.

My Learning Essentials

This set of online resources provides you with a range of online resources to help you search effectively and locate high quality information for your studies.

Start to Finish: Searching

View all workshops and online resources in this area on the
My Learning Essentials webpages .

Bibliographic databases-Japanese Studies

British humanities index (BHI)
Indexes 400 English-language periodicals in fields including history, language and literature, film, performing arts, philosophy, and related subjects. It also includes reviews of books, TV and radio programmes and films.
Kenkyusha online dictionary
First published in 1918, Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary has long been the largest and most authoritative Japanese-English dictionary.
MLA International Bibliography
(1963 to date) is produced by the Modern Language Association of America and indexes 'critical materials on modern language, literature, linguistics and folklore', giving access to over 3000 international journal titles and series and monographs, working papers, bibliographies and other sources.
ProQuest
A useful database covering a wide range of Arts and Humanities subjects
Web of Science
Providing access to the Arts and Humanities Index (1975 to date) and the Social Sciences Index (1956 to date) this citation index groups together all newly published items that have cited (i.e. referred to) the same earlier work. This allows you to retrieve new material, rather than tracing older references on a subject.