Introduction
(Updated March 14, 2011)

• The East Asian Law Department (EALD)
• Information about the Japanese Law Collections
• Viewing and Inputting Japanese Text in the Marian Catalog, on the Web, and in Email
• Notes about Romanization (Transliteration) of Japanese

Information about the Japanese Law Collections

• Objectives of this Guide
  • To introduce some of the most useful resources for finding Japanese legal information in English, Japanese, and other languages, and to provide some useful hints about the best ways to make use of them.
  • To provide an introduction to the University of Washington East Asian Law Department of the Marian Gould Gallagher Law Library and the kinds of services we provide.
• History
  The Japanese law collection had its beginnings in the 1930's with gifts to the library of Japanese legal materials, including a substantial donation of books by the Ministry of Justice in Japan. Statistics for library expenditures stretching back to the 1940's show a sustained commitment to building on these early foundations. A substantial Ford Foundation grant to the Law School in 1961 provided the initial impetus for the Asian Law Program, setting aside funds for library development and enabling the appointment in 1962 of the first full-time faculty member in Asian law. The library has continued to add to its Japanese law collection ever since. It keeps long runs of periodicals, and also continues to add to its fine collection of treatises in Japanese on a wide range of subjects related to Japanese law.
• Statistics
  There are about 22,630 Japanese volumes in the collection. The collection includes roughly 11,000 monographic titles and 250 periodical titles in Japanese.
• Collection Development Policy
  The overall goal of the Gallagher Law Library's Collection Development Policy is to "support the curricular and research needs of the University of Washington School of Law." With this in mind, the collection development policy for Japanese law stresses the collection of legal materials of an academic nature on a wide variety of topics concerning law in Japan. Materials on Japanese law are collected in any language, but the primary emphasis is for materials in English and Japanese. Primary materials (Statutes and Cases) and legal periodicals, including law reviews and commercial publications are given a high priority, and academic treatises on the law of Japan are also collected intensely. Subjects of particular interest to faculty members are given special attention.

Viewing and Inputting Japanese Text in the Marian Catalog, on the Web, and in Email

• Since June 2000 the Marian Catalog has been "Unicode enabled." Follow the steps below to view Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Russian scripts and also diacritics in romanized fields
  • Connect to the Marian catalog at http://marian.law.washington.edu/
  • Make sure you have Japanese fonts on your computer (one of the following should apply):
    • You have Windows 2000, XP, or Vista with the Japanese IME installed
    • You have a Japanese operating system
    • You have another Japanese IME installed (such as Twinbridge, see below)
• In Internet Explorer, select view, encoding, more, UTF-8
• Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
  Offer great convenience and flexibility in viewing and inputting Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Comes with CJK support available (it must be installed as an option from the installation disk.) Go to Start, Settings, Control Panel, Regional Options and set the software for Japanese viewing and editing.  For more information on setting up Windows 2000, XP or Vista for Japanese and other East Asian languages, see:
  A Quick and Dirty Guide to Installing and Using East Asian Languages Under Microsoft Windows
  http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Programs/AsianStudiesDept/Language/index.html

Notes about Romanization (Transliteration) of Japanese

• In the Library Catalog
  Outside Japan, Japanese text is often written using the roman alphabet (ABCs). Converting Japanese text to the roman alphabet is referred to as "Transliteration" or "Romanization."
  
  There are various standardized schemes for romanization. The scheme approved for use in North American Library catalogs is based on the Hepburn romanization system used in Kenkusha's new Japanese-English dictionary (see chart, page xiii of Kenkyusha's new Japanese-English Dictionary.) Examples:
  

  Kanji	Romanization in Library Catalog	Notes
  知的財産	chiteki zaisan	NOT titekizaisan or titeki zaisan
  憲法	Kenpō	NOT Kempo, or Kempou, or kempoh
  加藤正治	Katō, Masaharu	NOT Katoh, Masaharu (Names in the library cataloged are all indexed by the family name.)
  私法研究	Shihō kenkyū	NOT Sihō kenkyū or shihou kenkyuu

Note that when searching the library catalog, diacritics (such as the "macron" or long mark used in Japanese romanization) should not be input.

Word division Used In Library catalogs
(Based on rules established by the U.S. Library of Congress)

• Romanization used in other Indexes and Catalogs
  (And sometimes the Library catalog) Is not always consistent. In some cases, romanization schemes are inconsistently applied within one index or catalog. So when searching for romanized Japanese text, it is a good practice to use the browse function if it is available, and/or try different romanization and word division possibilities.

Overview of the Japanese Legal System
(See Also Court System on the Web Resources page)

• Comparison of Types of Legal Workers in Japan and the US

• Comparing the U.S. and Japanese Court Systems