Exhibition

The Kritter Collection lies at the centre of this exhibition, a selection of first editions (and a few facsimiles) representing the importance and developments of book illustrations since the 1850s. The exhibition presents subjects such as the development of Japanese book illustrations, Japan’s longing for the foreign, translating the foreign, and the traumatizing events of the first atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It consists of twelve out of the 57 beautifully illustrated editions collected by Ulrich von Kritter (1910-1999), an affluent businessman from Frankfurt, and the first head librarian of the Japanese Studies Library, the art historian Misako Wakabayashi-Oh 若林操子.

The actual focus of the exhibition, however, lies on the holdings of the Japanese Studies Library and their contextualization within the East Asian Library as a whole, with its East Asian Art History and Chinese Studies holdings. Spotlights will be put on some of the special collections within these three libraries that in a few years’ time will be physically merged in a new library building, together with the South Asia Institute's library, to form a large Asian Studies collection. This will make it even easier to look beyond the confines of the reader’s own academic background, be it in Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies or East Asian Art History.