Behind the Images - Rare Japanese manuscripts

Rare Japanese manuscripts at UC Berkeley's C.V. Starr East Asian Library

UC Berkeley is one of the premier institutions for the study of East Asia in the United States. The Institute of East Asian Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures are at the center of a lively campus-wide community devoted to the study of East Asia. The Institute of East Asian Studies serves as the administrative umbrella for UC Berkeley’s Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies and Center for Korean Studies. Berkeley students can draw on the expertise of over fifty Berkeley faculty members conducting research on China, Japan, and Korea in disciplines such as Anthropology, Architecture, Art History, Comparative Literature, Economics, Film, Geography, History, Journalism, Music, Political Science, and Sociology.

UC Berkeley’s C. V. Starr East Asian Library contains one of the most comprehensive collections of materials in East Asian languages in the United States. Its combined holdings, totaling over 900,000 volumes in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other East Asian languages, make it one of the top two such collections in the United States outside of the Library of Congress. Construction of the Starr Library, the first freestanding structure built to house an academic East Asian collection on an American university campus, was completed in the fall of 2007. The library opened to the public in the spring of 2008.