Altjaponica

The Bochumer Altjaponica, or BAJ for short, are a collection of Japanese prints and manuscripts from the 17th to 19th centuries in the Faculty of East Asian Studies’ possession. Formerly known as the “Kraft Collection”, named after the author of the first German-language catalogue Eva Kraft, it comprises 320 titles in 943 volumes (including 32 manuscripts in 99 volumes), with the oldest work dating back to 1622. In terms of subject matter, the collection is very diverse: in addition to literary classics such as the Genji monogatari, there are war stories (gunki monogatari), poems and fairy tales, texts on theater (especially nagauta), history and religion, but also painting and cookbooks, instructions on the art of flower arranging, encyclopedias, etiquette guides and much more. Particularly noteworthy is a small collection of the Ise monogatari, which is available in 13 different editions.
The Altjaponica were in the possession of the former Japan Institute Berlin before the Second World War and were given to the East Asia Institute of the newly founded Ruhr University in 1966 as a contribution to its establishment.

In September 2020, the BAJ were included in the Global Consortium for Japanese Textual Scholarship of the National Institute of Japanese Literature (Kokubungaku kenkyū shiryōkan 国文学研究資料館), where the collection has been available in the form of microfilms for some time. It is also listed in the “Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe”, which is also hosted by the NIJL: https://kokubunken.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/4745