In 1982, the Frankfurt Japanologist Prof. Dr. Ekkehard May (*1937) discovered a treasure in the basement of the former institute building in Dantestraße: dusty, hidden under piles of old newspapers, he found around 70 yellowed and worm-eaten booklets. These turned out to be Japanese woodblock prints from the mid to late Edo period (1600-1868). The origin of the documents can no longer be reconstructed. May assumes that they were acquired by collectors and art lovers from the end of the 19th century until the 1950s and sold or given to the former China Institute.
This find forms the basis of the collection of pre-modern Japanese texts at Goethe University, which May expanded over time to around 100 works and fragments of works through acquisitions. This selection was given the name Edo bunko 江 戸文庫, “Edo Library”, a catalog of the same name from 2003 provides an overview of the collection. Some of May’s students made individual titles the subject of their master’s theses or dissertations in the form of annotated translations and text-critical studies.
The mixture of literary works, academic treatises and non-fiction books is now used in Japanese studies as material for the study of pre-modern language and literature. In summer 2014, in collaboration with the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach, an exhibition on the subject of “Japan on Journeys” was also shown with selected illustrated texts.
Literature
Ekkehard May: 江戸文庫 Edo bunko The Edo Library. Extensively annotated bibliography of the block-printed books in the possession of the Japanese Studies Department of the J. W. Goethe University Frankfurt am Main as a short book study and introduction to the publishing culture of the Edo period, Wiesbaden 2003.