Search Results Page — Contemporary Who's Who
Personal Details — Contemporary Who's Who
Yomiuri Shimbun Mini Definitions
Glossary and Reference Handbook
About Yomidas Rekishikan
Multiple views of Japan
The archive has several sections. The Meiji, Taisho & Showa Eras section contains high-quality scans of the articles as they appeared during these periods. The Heisei & Reiwa Eras section provides articles in a convenient text view, as well as a clipping view of the original article. The Japan News catalogs articles which appeared in our English publication. Contemporary Who's Who allows searching of individuals to retrieve their biological data as well as pertinent articles. And finally, regional articles and pages from the Showa era can be found in the optional Regional Sections (Showa Era) feature.
We've worked hard so you don't have to
Yomidas Rekishikan stands out as Japan's premiere online newspaper database for a variety of reasons. Our editors have spent countless hours cataloguing articles, writing headlines for articles which originally had none, and tagging articles with keywords for easy retrieval of pertinent stories. In cases where language usage has changed, we've tagged articles with the modern readings and characters in addition to the original usages, all to assist you in finding the articles you want.
A face you'll quickly grow accustomed to
Once you've found an article, the quality of scanned images from historic eras is unsurpassed, and our viewer software allows you to pan about the page with ease, zoom in on an area of interest, and select an individual region for printing. To help you find your article from the full newspaper page, we highlight your search result with a handy red thumbtack. Navigation arrows allow you to browse through a newspaper issue page by page, or to the same page from one edition to the next. There's even a slideshow-style scanning feature to turn through the pages of an issue one by one.
More recent articles, both in the Japanese and the English editions, are saved and displayed in a full-text format which makes for easy display. For articles in the Heisei & Reiwa Eras section since December 2008, there's a link to a clipping to view the article as it originally appeared in the print edition. There's another link to easily switch between the English and Japanese versions of the article.
Watch the news unfold
In addition to news articles, Yomidas Rekishikan contains the photos, illustrations and diagrams which accompanied the news stories of the day. We've even included the comics and advertisements to give the flavor of life in Japan throughout the eras we've been in publication.
Additional helpful features include the Glossary and Reference section, both Japanese/English and English/Japanese lexicons, a Japanese dictionary and Imidas, a current terminology dictionary/encyclopedia. We've also included a Top News by Year feature for the Meiji, Taisho & Showa Eras, allowing you to see which topics were hot. Simply clicking on one of the terms from the Top News section adds it to your search terms.
140 years of news -- for the digital era
Yomidas Rekishikan was honored in 2010 by a special prize at the First Annual Asian Digital Media Awards. Thomas Jacob, vice president of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), called Yomidas Rekishikan "a remarkable achievement ... with a series of absolutely outstanding features." We firmly believe that you'll find it remarkable, too.