IMAZAWA Jikai and his Thoughts of a Children's Library

Abstract

IMAZAWA Jikai (1882-1968) was one of the leaders of early Japanese public libraries. He had been the librarian and the director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, from 1908 to 1931. He is also well known as one of the pioneers who introduced the ideas and practices of English and American children's librarianship to our country, through many writings and translations, as well as by the activities in his own library.
The purpose of this paper is, to find the influences of the Anglo-American children's librarianship on his ideas, by examining his writings and comparing them to the original foreign texts.
Among his writings on the library service for children, we found many common principles with Anglo-American ideas, that were written in the books by Arthur Bostwick and W.C. Berwick Sayers etc. But he selected what is necessary according to his own thought and adapted them to fullfill the needs of the contemporary Japanese socio-cultural background of his time. On some points, he was more liberal than his Anglo-American forerunners in the field, for instance, in respect to children's spontaniety in the library and, lower age children's admission to the public library. It is hard to find the differences between his ideas and today's ideal library services for children, except for the education and the training of children's librarians, on which he had hardly discussed his philosophy. If his ideas had been developped and realized continuously up to now, without being interrupted by World War II, the present situation of children's librarianship in Japan might be more favorable in many ways.