Japanese Libraries Assess Damage, Begin Recovery

Order begins to return to the Tōhoku University Library

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Some three weeks after the March 11 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami that has taken the lives of tens of thousands and damaged or destroyed at least 125,000 buildings in the Tōhoku (northern) region of Honshu, Japan’s main island, the Japanese library and cultural-heritage communities are utilizing email and social media to alert each other, as well as foreign colleagues and friends elsewhere, of their status.

“We can expect to encounter many problems during the recovery process. For now, we are making all possible efforts to collect information and to analyze it,” wrote Toshikazu Hanazato, Japanese representative to the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in a March 27 report (PDF file). “Damage to around 296 designated sites were reported, but this number will increase as the site surveys continue.”

“Unfortunately, we members of the Japanese library community cannot quantify the loss of library materials, etc. yet, because we cannot communicate with many libraries in the Tōhoku area,” Ryuichiro Takahashi, chief of reference and ILL services officer at the Tokyo Gakugei University Library, said in an April 4 email to the discussion list of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. “On the other hand, ‘story hour’ activity in the evacuation center in Higashi-Matsushima City (Miyagi Prefecture, one of seriously damaged areas in Tōhoku) was reported by the Higashi-matsushima City Library. I think the first step for recovery progress begins just now.”

Steven Bell, who shared on the ACRLog what colleague Tomoe Hanzawa of the Tōhoku University Science and Engineering Library had emailed him about how the library and its staff had fared: The staff “survived the earthquake and were safe—and she was thankful that American academic librarians were seeking news about their fellow librarians in Japan.” On March 30, Bell posted an encouraging update from Hanzawa “She and her colleagues are already hard at work putting the library back to normal.”

Togetter, a Japanese social media site, has some photos of libraries affected by the quake, many of them involving toppled shelves or fallen books. Save the Library, a Japanese-language website, is compiling information on library damage nationwide, as are similar sites for archives and museums.