General Resources

1. Online Resources

  • Birth of the Constitution of Japan (Online Exhibition)
    This online exhibition project, sponsored by the National Diet Library, focuses exclusively on the origin of the current constitution. It features brief descriptions and profiles of people and institutions that contributed to the establishment of the Constitution of Japan. The website has many high-resolution images of documents related to the birth of the current constitution as well. 
  • CONSTITUTE
    The Comparative Constitutions Project maintains this website. Users can access texts of constitutions all over the world in English with this website. One of the noticeable functions that this website provides is keyword search over multiple constitutions. For example, you can easily find descriptions about a specific concept, such as “human rights”, in several different constitutions.  
  • Constitutional Change in Japan
    This site, presented by the Japan studies program of the Council on Foreign Relations, provides comprehensive information related to Japan’s constitutional debate. It contains descriptions of the current constitution’s legislative process, graphics of public opinion polls, and proposals for constitutional revision. The site also includes essays on the constitution by politicians, scholars, and citizen activists.
  • Japan Center for Asian Historical Records
    This website has digitized documents from the collections of the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and the National Institute for Defense Studies. Aiming to develop mutual understanding in Asia, the collection primarily focuses on the historical relationship between Japan and its neighbouring counties in the region. 
  • Ministry of Justice, Japanese Law Translation
    This website is operated by the Ministry of Justice and provides a database of English translations of Japanese laws. According to the website, the translation is for the sake of convenience, and some of the translations are not officially approved.
  • National Archives of Japan Digital Archive
    Operated by the National Archives of Japan, this website contains an archive of official government documents as well as books/ancient documents owned by the Cabinet Library (内閣文庫). The website presents many digitized images of large-sized or colorful materials, including some images of Important Cultural Properties (重要文化財). It also contains a large number of documents in English.
  • National Diet Library: WARP (Web Archiving Project)
    The Web Archiving Project (WARP) by the National Diet Library (NDL), Japan, have captured and saved Japanese official institutions' websites, including the government, the Diet, and local governments.
  • Other related online materials

2. Onsite Archival Resources