Digital Collection: Stanford’s Hoji Shinbun Project Digitizes Prewar Japanese American Newspapers

From Nichei Bei:

Persons interested in preserving Japanese American history from the late 19th century to 1945 will have the opportunity to do the research, thanks to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Their Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection project is an ambitious effort to digitize all prewar Japanese newspapers in America, as well as other collections. This will make data available to researchers and scholars.
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Funded by an anonymous $9 million gift — one of the largest in the Library & Archives’ history — the initiative has begun by focusing on Japan’s modern diaspora, with particular attention to both Japanese Americans and other overseas Japanese communities, especially during the rise and fall of the Empire of Japan, Ueda pointed out.
The project has so far collected, digitized and provided free access to more than half a million pages of rare Japanese newspapers (Hoji Shinbun), [Kaoru “Kay”] Ueda [the first-ever curator at Hoover Institution’s Japanese Diaspora Initiative] stated. The total number of titles exceeds 60. As an archive, the project’s primary focus is historical newspapers from the initial issues of papers in the late 19th century to 1945.
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection is currently the world’s largest online archive of open-access, full-image Japanese American and other overseas Japanese newspapers, Ueda stated. All image content in this collection has enhancements added where possible, rendering the text maximally searchable.

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