National Diet Library: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:27, 16 November 2005

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In 1946, after Japan's defeat in [[World War Two]], reform of the Diet library system became an official part of the American vision for democratizing Japan. According to an official report by the U.S. Occupation, the previous Diet library system had been inadequate: "Both Houses of the National Diet of Japan have had their separate libraries since 1890. But because the Diet, prior to 1946, had no final responsibilities, its requirements for exact and extensive information were correspondingly small. . . . The Diet libraries never developed either the collections or the services which might have made them vital adjuncts of genuinely responsible legislative activity." One American scholar argues, however, that Japanese progressives found precisely the opposite causal relationship: "It was precisely because the executive branch controlled access to crucial documentary information that the legislature was rendered powerless. With this assessment, progressives on the Japanese side underscored the conflict and contention that marked the prewar political process as well as the mechanisms by which informed deliberation and dissent had been purposefully restricted and ultimately suppressed." Until Japan’s defeat, the government had assumed exclusive control of all political documents, depriving the people and the Diet itself of access to vital information. "'The true revolutionary significance of the NDL,'" therefore, was "that the Diet 'as the legislative organ of popular sovereignty would now exert control over any and all political documents relevant to the legislative function.'"

In 1946, National Diet Library Standing Committees were newly formed in each house of the Diet. Hani Gorô, a Marxist historian who had been imprisoned during the war for thought crimes and had been elected to the [[House of Councillors]] (the successor to the abolished House of Peers) after the war, spearheaded the reform effort. "For Hani, the National Diet Library would serve as the instrument by which 'the tyranny over knowledge, on which all tyranny is based' is wrested from the hands of the bureaucracy and monopoly capital. It was to be both a 'citadel of popular sovereignty,” and the means of realizing a “peaceful revolution.'" The Occupation officers responsible for overseeing the reform of the Diet library system would report to General [[Douglas MacArthur]] that, although the Occupation served as a catalyst for reform, the initiative existed in Japan before the Occupation began, and the success of the reform was due entirely to the efforts of the Japanese politicians and bureaucrats responsiblelike Hani.

In 1947, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the [[House of Councillors]] (the successor to the abolished House of Peers), invited a commission of librarians from the United States to assist in establishing a new library of the Diet. In 1948, Occupation officials and American librarians drafted the National Diet Library Law, establishing the NDL, which was translated into Japanese and enacted by the Diet, though not without conflict and negotiation between Americans and Japanese reformers on the one hand and conservative politicians in control of the Diet on the other. The new National Diet Library opened in June 1948 in the present-day [[State Guest-House]] (former Akasaka Detached Palace) with an initial collection of 100,000 volumes. In 1949, the NDL merged with the National Library (renamed from the Imperial Library in 1947) and became the only national library in Japan. In this time an additional one million volumes housed in the former National Library in [[Ueno]] was added to the collection.

In 1961, the NDL opened at its present present ___location in [[Nagatacho]], adjacent to the National Diet. The current building was completed in 1968. In 1986, the NDL's Annex was completed to accommodate a combined total of 12 million books and periodicals. In October 2002, a second NDL facility, the [[#The Kansai-Kan|Kansai-kan]] (the [[Kansai]] Library), was opened in October 2002 in the [[Kansai Science City]] ([[Seika, Kyoto|Seika]] Town, [[Soraku District, Kyoto|Soraku County]], [[Kyoto Prefecture]]), and has a collection of 6 million items. In May 2002, the NDL opened new branch, the [[International Library of Children's Literature]], in the former building of the Imperial Library in Ueno. This branch contains some 400,000 items of children's literature from around the world.