Research Guides: Japanese Studies Resource: Newspapers & Archive

Current News and Newspapers Online

Access World News Research Collection This link opens in a new window
Access World News: Research Collection includes thousands of U.S. and global news sources. Content includes newspapers, magazines, broadcast transcripts, newswires, news videos and journalist-written blogs.
Factiva [Selected Articles in Full Text] This link opens in a new window
Factiva provides access to global new content covering nearly 8,000 sources, including Dow Jones and Reuters Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. Coverage includes multilingual content and the option to limit keywords searches to particular regions, publications, or with reference to a particular industry. One can also access company profiles that show all the news associated with a particular company. Limit of five simultaneous users.
PressDisplay This link opens in a new window
Offers current issues of newspapers in the original form from all over the world.

Asahi Shimbun English website
The Asahi Shimbun is a major Japanese daily newspaper. And this is the free platform for their English website.
Global Voices Online
Global news
Japanese Newspapers (OnlineNewspapers.com)
Links to homepages of major Japanese newspapers (Individual Japanese newspaper homepages are in Japanese)
Japan Today
Homepage for the English newspaper Japan Today.
NDL HINAGIKU
The National Diet Library (NDL) Great East Japan Earthquake Archive is a portal site which enables integrated search of records and reports of the earthquake disaster by public institutions, private organizations and media, and of research projects by universities, academic societies and research institutes. The archive includes news stories, reports, photos, sound and video recordings, and maps. Interface in multiple languages including English and Japanese
NDL Digital Collections - Newspapers 新聞
With the cooperation of the Ishinomaki newspaper publishing company, the picture of the wall newspaper, published six days after the Great East Japan Earthquake is exhibited.
NDL Digital Collections - Official Gazettes 官報
The Official Gazettes, from its first issue of July 2, Meiji 16 (1883) up to the issue of April 30, Showa 27 (1952), are available here. OFFICIAL GAZETTE; ENGLISH EDITION, which was published only during the occupation period by the GHQ (1946-1952) is also available online, but under the category of "Periodicals".
NDL Search
National Diet Library's search system for books, articles, theses, news, and digitized materials within its holdings as well as throughout Japan, aggregating access to many databases and web sites.
Kobe University Newspaper Clippings Collection
This collection, created by Kobe University's Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration, contains data from late Meiji to Showa 45.
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Please cite as follows: 山本泰督「神戸大学経済経営研究所新聞切抜文庫（上・下）」（『同朋』96-97号, 1986.6-7). Details about the cite in English can be found at: https://lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/en/np/#

Online Newspapers w/ Furigana

毎日小学生新聞
Newspaper articles for grade school students published by Mainichi Shinbun.
NHK News Web EASY
Simplified news published by NHK. The site includes audio recordings for each article and pop-up Japanese dictionary for difficult words. Click on the "普通のニュースを読む" button to read the original full article from the NHK news web site.

Newspaper Archive Database

Japan Times Historical Archives
is Japan’s oldest English-language newspaper and remains the only independent English-language newspaper in Japan today. The entire run from March 1897 (Meiji 30) to 2014 is available in full-text and fully searchable.

Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search This link opens in a new window
Kikuzo II Visual, from the Asahi Shimbun Company, is an online article database that allows for an easy investigation of past events. The contents span the newspaper’s 141-year history, from its first edition in 1879 (Meiji 12) to today, making it the largest newspaper article database in Japan, and allowing searches of 16 million articles and advertisements.
Maisaku This link opens in a new window
The Mainichi Shimbun Online Database Maisaku provides access to over 6 million articles from the newspaler Mainichi Shibun from 1872 to present. The Mainichi Daily New is the oldest Japanese daily newspaper. Access also includes the Mainichi Weekly Economist with articles dating back to 1989.

Mainichi Photobank
Mainichi Newspaper photo archive

Yomidas Rekishikan This link opens in a new window
Search interfaces in Japanese and English. Includes Yomiuri shinbun 1874 to the present: image format from 1874 to 1989 full text 1986 to the present, along with the English edition: the Daily Yomiuri (Sept. 1989- the the present), both searchable by article, keyword, subject, category, and issue. Charts and photographs are not included. Also includes biographical information on 26,000 people.

Zasshi kiji sakuin shūsei dētabēsu
雑誌記事索引集成データベース : 明治から現在まで総合雑誌から地誌まで The complete database for Japanese magazines and periodicals from the Meiji era to the present

Newspaper Photographs

Mainichi Photobank
Mainichi Newspaper photo archive
Yomiuri Shashinkan
Yomiuri Newspaper's photographs

News Communities

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ) 日本外国特派員協会
Founded in 1945 by newspaper, wire service, magazine, radio journalists and photographers who arrived
in Japan following the end of the Pacific War.
Pressnet
Run by 日本新聞協会 Nihon Shinbun Kyokai (NSK) (The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association)

Japan Weekly Mail

Japan Weekly Mail - HathiTrust (link 1)

Dates available via this link: 1871-1873; 1875 ; 1876; 1878; 1879; 1880; 1882; 1894:July-Dec.; 1895:Jan.-June; 1896:Jan.-June; 1896:July-Dec.; 1897:Jan.-June; 1897:July-Dec.; 1898:Jan.-June; 1898:July-Dec.; 1899:Jan.-June; 1899:July-Dec. ; 1900:Jan.-June ; 1900:July-Dec. ; 1903; 1905.

Japan Weekly Mail - HathiTrust (link 2)

Dates available via this link: 1874; 1875; 1877; 1878

Japan Weekly Mail - HathiTrust (link 3)

volumes 11-35

Japanese Diaspora

Hoji Shinbun digital collections 邦字新聞デジタル・コレクション
Currently the world’s largest online archive of free-access, full-image newspapers published by overseas Japanese and their descendants. All content reproduced in this collection is full-image with enhancements added where possible and render the text maximally searchable.
Yuta Nippō
The Yuta Nippō is a Japanese American newspaper published in Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1914 to 1991. It was founded by Issei Uneo Terasawa (1881–1939). Terasawa began the Nippō as a Japanese language daily with a Buddhist orientation, since the existing Japanese language newspaper in Salt Lake City, the Rocky Mountain Times, had a Christian orientation.
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Building a circulation of over 800 within a year of its 1914 founding, it later acquired and merged with the Times in 1927 and went from a daily to publishing three times a week in 1932. It is notable for being one of just three Japanese American newspapers in the continental United States that published through the World War II years, since it was located outside the West Coast restricted area. This database is part of the larger Utah Digital Newspapers collection and can also be access from: https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/search?facet_paper=%22Yuta+Nipp%C5%8D%22&q=nippo
The Nikkei Newspapers Digital Archive (NNDA) 日系新聞デジタル化は北米報知（ノースアメリカンポスト）
The Nikkei Newspapers Digital Archive (NNDA) is a project of the Hokubei Hochi (North American Post) Foundation and the University of Washington Libraries. It aims to make accessible two significant newspapers which tell the story of Japanese immigration and Japanese American community life in Seattle and beyond, from 1902 to 1950, and continuing to the present day.
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The newspapers, North American Times (1902-1942) and North American Post (1946-1950), were published primarily in Japanese, with occasional, and then regularly appearing, pages published in English. Translation summaries (English) are provided for some front page stories (see “Translated Front Pages”). You may search by browsing the individual issues.

Japanese Calendrical Systems

Two number systems for years are commonly used in Japan:

Gregorian Calendar - the western calendar year system commonly used in US. e.g. 2015
Nengō 年号 - calendar year system based on the reigns of emperors.e.g. Heisei 27 or 平成二十七年

Japanese year converter

Japanese Romanization Standards

Most North American academic libraries follow the Library of Congress' Japanese romanization rules. Many Japanese libraries use either Modified Hepburn or Kunreishiki romanization. Please see the following links for more information on various romanization standards.

Library of Congress Romanization

Searching Japanese Materials in Library Catalogs (video)