Ishin Shiryо̄ Database Project
維新史料綱要データベース国際ハブ拠点プロジェクト
The
Ishin Shiryō 維新史料 (“Restoration Documents”) are a large collection of Japanese historical documents pertaining to events leading up to and immediately following the 1868 Meiji Restoration (or Meiji Revolution), collected by the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute 東京大学史料編纂所 ( Tōkyō Daigaku
Shiryōhensanjo).
Scholars at the Institute used these materials to compile a chronology of the period from 1846 to 1871, summarizing the key events day-by-day in volumes such as those pictured at left, some 4,200 volumes collectively entitled the Dai Nihon Ishin Shiryō Kōhon 大日本維新史料稿本.
In the 1930s-40s, scholars at the Institute then produced a modern-type printed version of these
Kōhon summaries, published as the ten-volume
Ishin Shiryō Kōyō 維新史料綱要.
Since 1994, these entries have been available and searchable online, through the Institute’s website. Click here to access the database in Japanese, or here for English. There, you can search by a variety of keywords, read the summaries in searchable, copy-and-pasteable text, and click through for images (イメージ) of the corresponding page from the handwritten
Kōhon volume.
As a Postdoctoral Researcher (特任研究員) at the Institute from 2019 to 2023, I worked as a member of a team working to produce an English-language version of this database. We hope that this can become a valuable resource not only to English-speaking scholars of Japanese history, but to others as well.
The above text was written by Travis Seifman for this website and is not a reflection of official wording or description authorized or approved by the Historiographical Institute.
(Photo of Ishin Shiryō Kōyō volumes held at the Institute is my own.)