Washington and Lee University Research Guides: East Asian Languages & Literatures: Japanese Literature, Film, & Culture

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Finding Materials in Japanese in the Library Catalog

The Library Catalog, accessible through the library's website at library.wlu.edu, serves as a portal to the books, ebooks, journals, and multimedia content.

To limit search results to only Japanese language materials:

Look to the limiters/filters on the left side of the screen.
Under Language, check Japanese.
Click Apply Filters.

Relevant Databases

The below databases (database = buckets of content) are useful when looking for scholarly articles concerning Japanese language and literature topics.

The best database for your individual project will depend on your topic. For example, if researching gendered depictions of within modern manga, you might want to also search Women's Studies International.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Excellent starting point. Multidisciplinary article database offers access to more than 16,000 journals, magazines, and newspapers, including over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals.
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window Coverage of over 2,000 journals in history, film studies, religion, philosophy, and other fields within the humanities.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window A digital archive of over 1,100 important scholarly journals. All issues of each journal are included in full-text except for the most recent 2-to-5 years, based on JSTOR's agreement with the journal's publisher.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window The MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature.
The electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2.2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers. It is compiled by the staff of the MLA Department of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad. Such international coverage is represented by literature from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, and while the majority of records are from English-language publications, at least sixty other languages are represented including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish.
The database also has an identifiable subset of more than 100,000 records that constitute the JSTOR subfile. This consists of citation records for documents in JSTOR's Language and Literature Collection as well as relevant articles from their Asian Studies collection. The documents date back as far as 1881 and contain direct links to the full-text articles on the JSTOR website.
Our subscription to the MLA International Bibliography also includes access to the MLA Directory of Periodicals database. Full text links to Project Muse journal and ProQuest Digital Dissertations are also included in this database. Subject coverage: Modern literatures, Literary theory and criticism, Linguistics, Teaching of language, Film, television and theater, Rhetoric and composition, History of the book, Folklore.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window Full-text access to about 600 journals from academic publishers.

Accessing the Japan Times

The Japan Times, founded in 1897, is an English-language newspaper in Tokyo.

Important: The following links are only accessible on W&L's campus.

To access current content from the Japan Times (content published this year), use this link.
To access archival content (content published over 1 year ago), use this link.

Finding Japanese Films

Click here to see all films in Japanese (streaming and DVDs)

Looking for something specific? Use the Library's Catalog's Advanced Search. Try limiting by "Item Type" = "Video/Film" and "Language" = "Japanese."

DVDs in Leyburn Library: The University Library holds close to one hundred Japanese language feature films in DVD form.

Interlibrary Loan

The Library can't own or subscribe to every piece of research ever created...that's why we have interlibrary loan!

If you need to use an article or book not in the library's collection, place an interlibrary loan request. The University Library can borrow materials from libraries across the globe.