Goethe Archive Tokyo
Goethe Archive Tokyo ( Japanese 東京 ゲ ー テ 記念 館 , Tōkyō Gēte kinenkan ) is a private, non-profit archive in the Japanese capital Tokyo with the task of collecting documents and information about the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . The archive is currently based in Nishigahara , Kita district, and is supported by the “Goethe Archive Tokyo” foundation of the same name.
Overview
On the occasion of the Goethe year 1949, the businessman and Goethe lover Tadashi Kogawa (1907–1989) from Ibaraki founded the legal foundation “Goethe Society Tokyo” ( 東京 ゲ ー テ 協会 , Tōkyō Gēte kyōkai ) in Ōji, Kita-ku . In 1964 the Goethe Archive Tokyo was set up in Shinsen-chō, Shibuya . The institution saw itself primarily as a library that was supposed to systematically record materials related to Goethe. It was based on the approximately 150,000 books from around the world that Kogawa has collected. The entrepreneur sought advice from Japan's leading Goethe researcher in the 1930s and 1940s, Kinji Kimura (1889–1948) from the University of Tokyo .
In 1988 the archive was moved to its current location, Nishigahara, Kita, and the foundation itself was renamed the “Goethe Archive Tokyo”. On the one hand, exhibitions with a thematic reference to Goethe are held here on a regular basis, and on the other hand, the archives can be viewed. Since the death of the founder Kogawa in 1989, his son, the media philosopher Tetsuo Kogawa, has been the director of the archive.
Beginnings
The first location of the archive was on National Road 246 in Shinsen, a suburb of Shibuya. The six-story building with a basement was completed in 1964 and housed the magazine for the Goethe collection on the fourth and fifth floors. The first floor comprised an office and a reception room, the second a conference room. Exhibitions were held on the third floor and the Kogawa family lived on the sixth.
While Kogawa mainly collected Japanese Goethe literature before the Second World War, he focused on foreign language publications in the post-war period. By cooperating with foreign book and newspaper publishers, relevant books and articles were sent to him on an ongoing basis. The media spectrum ranged from 78 different complete editions to rare collector's items, scientific magazines, brochures, exhibition flyers and postage stamps to the documentation of radio and television programs. Last but not least, the collection also includes comics. In an epilogue (1979) to his first adaptation of Faust (1950) , the manga artist Osamu Tezuka states that at Kogawa's request he had made a copy of this manga available to the archive.
The facility was not open to the public at the time. One could only be invited personally through Kogawa. To improve the spatial conditions, the archive moved to Kita, Tokyo, in 1988.
The archive since 1988
The building in which the current archive is located was completed in 1988 and houses the entire collection. Exhibitions continue to be held regularly (April to June and August to December). The collection is now open to the public by prior arrangement.
Since 1989 the street in front of the archive has been called “Goethe-Weg” ( ゲ ー テ の 小径 , Gēte shōkei ). There are two panels each with a poem (the original and the Japanese translation by the Germanist Shin'ichi Hoshino ) ("Above all peaks" and "God greet you, brothers" from the Tame Xenien V). In addition, the "Goethe Park" ( ゲ ー テ パ ー ク , Gēte pāku ), in which a relief with Goethe's portrait can be seen, was laid out on the small property opposite the archive building .
Web links
- Website of the Goethe Archive Tokyo (Japanese)
literature
- Shin'ichi Hoshino: Goethe. Tokyo: Shimizu-shoin, 1986 (only in Japanese).