© 2008 Lynne E. Riggs

Japan Image Use Symposium
Lynne E. Riggs___________________________________________________________________________On June 23, 2008, the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources(http://www.nccjapan.org/) held a symposium in Tokyo (International House of Japan) entitled“Japanese Images: Using Them to Support Japan Studies Internationally.” Bringing together
librarians, publishers, museum staff, editors, Japanese studies professors, and other interested
parties, it was a landmark event in developing good practices for image use relating to Japan.
Lynne E. Riggs is the managing editor of Monumenta Nipponica, the now semi-annual journalof Japanese studies.
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We keep calling the head priest of a temple in Kyoto, attempting to obtain written
permission to publish a photo of a statue in his main hall in an article for our journal by
an American scholar. He sounds agreeable enough, but is apparently too busy running thetemple kindergarten to sign and return the letter of permission we prepare and sent to him.
We keep calling, and finally he sends it.
The page from the manga a scholar wants to include in her article shows a passionate
scene; the author simply wants to compare it with other treatments of the same story as
depicted by other artists. When we file for permission, the publisher wants to know: How
is this to be used? Who are you? Patiently we explain; we summarize the passage inquestion, we explain who we are. Finally it is agreed. There will only be a small charge,
since the journal is non-profit. Please pay to the following account, they instruct, after
which the permission form will be signed. Going back and forth, the process took about
three weeks.
These stories evoke the intimate, complex world of image use and permissions processing, aspecialized appendage of our writing, publishing, and international research and understanding
activities. Visual images of Japanese art works and reproductions of manuscripts, documents,
artifacts, and other material are being used with increasing frequency in books and periodicals,and even in cases where the images are for educational or scholarly publications, express
permission in writing may be required. The often-intricate process of obtaining thesepermissions is a cottage industry that few people have known intimately until now, but as thenumber of permissions needed increases, the process must be more widely understood and04-120-Japan Image Use- 7-8-08

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accessible on both sides of the cultural divide. As museums, publishers, and rights holders inother parts of Asia become more aware of image use ramifications, the lessons learned for Japanare likely to come in handy for other countries with non-Western publishing cultures. The
admirable efforts of the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources(NCC) took this endeavor a major step forward with a conference this June, bringing together
librarians, publishers, museum staff, editors, Japanese studies professors, and other interestedpersons. Roughly, it consisted of a morning session presenting the needs and context of image
use in North America and an afternoon session featuring presentations on the ways museums,
publishers, and other rights holders in Japan view image use. A full report on the conference,
which was held in Japanese, will be published in Japanese. English reports will be published on
the NCC website, in the Association of Asian Studies Asian Studies Newsletter, and in otherprofessional publications; those interested should keep track of future developments bychecking in at the NCC website (above).
The conference, moderated by Koide Izumi of the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation,
began with a review of image use in North America by NCC Chair Tokiko Bazzell (Librarian,University of Hawai‘i, Manoa). Bazzell noted that a Japan Foundation survey in 2005 foundthat some 5,000 courses on Japan are offered in the United States and are taken by some 20,000
students. To gauge the volume and nature of image use in Japanese studies, the NCC set up theImage Use Protocol (IUP) Task Force, which conducted a survey of academics and theproblems they have in gaining permission for image use for educational and publishing
purposes. Robin LeBlanc, professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, followedwith an introduction summarizing the activities of the IUP over the past several months. ReikoYoshimura, head librarian at the Freer and Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Institution, thenreported the results of the survey (some of which are shown at
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ncc/imageuse/flyer.pdf), confirming that greater understanding ofJapan’s publishing culture on the one hand, and the needs of academics in the West on the other,is needed. In an article published in the NCC Newsletter, NCC executive director Victoria Lyon
Bestor explains the problem:
Generally Japanese publishers undertake the responsibility of gaining permissions andpaying fees for image use on behalf of their authors. And, in Japan, there may be a different
understanding of “fair use” for images that accompany scholarly text in Japanesepublications that may exempt those visual materials from permissions requirements thatwould be expected by Western academic publishers.
The greatest demand for Japan image use identified in the IUP survey was for teaching andfor scholarly research and publishing. The presentation by Patricia Crosby of the University ofHawai‘i Press outlined common practices used by the more than 126 small university-affiliatedacademic presses that put out scholarly titles in relatively small print runs (generally between
200 to 750 copies) for the university market. In contrast to the large commercial publishers that04-120-Japan Image Use- 7-8-08

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put out so-called “coffee-table books” for broader readerships in the United States, theuniversity presses do not have staff available to take care of permissions business. As Lyon
Bestor writes in her article:U.S. and foreign academic authors are usually personally responsible for locating andcovering the full costs of image rights for their publications. U.S. academic publishers
require explicit permission to use those images from the Japanese rights holders even incases where the display or reproduction of images might be viewed as “fair use” [i.e.,“in’yo”] in publication or teaching done in Japan.
The scholars and others who attempt to obtain the largest number of permissions may nothave specialized knowledge of the procedures required, and, in the absence of any
well-established guidelines on image use, do not know much about the procedures that should
be followed in communicating with museums, publishers, or other rights owners in Japan.
Crosby stated that editors at academic presses help their authors as much as possible, but legal
issues can still emerge in some cases. All correspondence and negotiations must, in any case, beconducted in Japanese, often in written form.
The afternoon session, moderated by NCC Japan Liaison Yasue Akio, proved especiallyinformative about how the matter of permissions looks from the Japanese vantage point. From
what we can observe, there seems to be no fundamental disagreement on the need for
permissions for image use. University of Tokyo Press editor Fukushima Shôta, along with ÔtaRyûji, veteran editor at the mammoth commercial publisher Shôgakukan, confirmed that
reproductions of photographs, maps, charts, and art work are used relatively freely in academic
and educational (kyôyôteki) publications under the rules of “in’yô” (quotation). This may be thereason that Japanese publishers may initially sound nonplussed by permissions requests comingfrom abroad asking for printed and signed documents to go on record.
From our experience in obtaining permissions for images to be used in the pages ofMonumenta Nipponica (Sophia University), where I have watched this kind of work increase inrecent years, the permissions process is often an adventure that can lead down unpredictablebyways. Starting with whatever information is provided by the author about the image inquestion, one begins phoning, asking what procedures are required, who is authorized to give
permission and what sort of forms, if any, are required. Obtaining one permission may turn out
to be contingent on another, and so on, until the web of rights holders has been completelycovered. At the conference, Shogakukan’s Ôta emphasized that authors are often unaware thatthe copyright holder and the owner of a work may be different, or that the rights to a certain
article are distinct from the rights to the photographs included in it; use of a single image may
entail three to five or more permissions.
Always, one must be ready to provide full information: Who is this person who wants to use
such an image, and for what publication? In what context? How many copies will be printed?
Often the person from whom permission is sought finds the matter bothersome and wonders

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why verbal permission is not enough. Publishers and museums in Japan are generally
well-informed about permissions and rights, but some art works, artifacts, and other materials to
be used are held or administered by individuals, family-run temples, local government bodies,and the like—far away from the world of publishing about Japan, where publishers want tofollow the rules and avoid lawsuits. Care, good letter-writing skills, and tactful and courteous
telephone Japanese are essential tools of successful permissions work.
Those of us for whom permissions-related tasks are part of our editorial duties welcome theefforts of the NCC, and we look forward to the development of the “Best Practices forAccessing Visual Images from Japan” promised as a result of the activities of the IUP task force
and the June conference. The guidelines are to include advice on “locating and requesting
images from Japan for teaching, research and publications; a set of templates for permissions
letters requesting use of images; release forms for publication of photographs, a list of contacts
and links to important sites and organizations providing copyright guidelines and information
about how and where to seek permission.”
The conference was supported by the Toshiba International Foundation, the JapanFoundation, the Harvard University Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Shibusawa
Eiichi Memorial Foundation, and the International House of Japan. For further information on
the guidelines on image use to be developed by the NCC, please visit the IUP website, which ismaintained through the generosity of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard
University: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ncc/imageuse.html.

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