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The Toyo Bunko &the Morrison Collection

By Takeshi Hamashita

AuthorTakeshi Hamashita

Introduction: The Toyo Bunko Morrison Collection& the “China Problem”
Just over 100 years have passed since the Asiatic Library that had
been housed in Wangfujing, Beijing, was transferred to Tokyo in
1917, through the auspices of Baron Hisaya Iwasaki (third presidentof the Mitsubishi Corporation). With the Morrison Collection,
comprising 23,000 books, forming its core, the Toyo Bunko (or“Oriental Library”) was established in 1924; currently Minoru
Makihara, special consultant for the Mitsubishi Corporation and a
relative of the Iwasaki family, is serving as chair of the board. TheToyo Bunko is Japan’s only private-sector, comprehensive Asia
Research Facility, and is comparable to any of the West’s
representative research libraries, being renowned both within Japanand domestically. The collection exceeds one million books,including 300,000 works in Western languages and 400,000 inChinese, with the remainder covered by works in other languages ofthe Asian region. In 2011 a new building incorporating a bookmuseum was completed, and through public exhibitions of thecollection, the library has received a great deal of attention.
Looking back 100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century,

Photo 1: The Toyo Bunko

The Toyo Bunko building

https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/G. E. Morrison faced the so-called “China Problem”. Amidst anenvironment where there was major discussion domestically andinternationally in regard to issues related to China, he involved
himself in China, Japan and other parts of Asia. In particular,
Morrison had the objective of amassing intellectual studies on Asia
in the Asian region, and collected materials and works in Western
languages to build up the Asiatic Library over a period of 20 years.
Today, at the start of the 21st century, a new “China Problem” hasmade a dramatic appearance. It can be said that the Toyo Bunko,
which was developed by Morrison as a result of discussions on the“China Problem” in the last century, is a perfect repository ofmaterials for understanding the genesis and future of today’s “ChinaProblem”. In order to reflect on the spirit of Morrison’s era and theenvironment of the times, I would like to consider here thecharacteristics of the Toyo Bunko, centered on the Morrison
Collection.

G. E. Morrison: His Career & Personality
George Ernest Morrison was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1862,and served as the China correspondent for The Times of London. At
the time of the Occupation by the armed forces of eight countries
after the Boxer Rebellion (1900), he was a commissioned officer inthe British army, took part in actual battles, and was wounded. In theRusso-Japanese War, he transmitted information from the Japanesemilitary, and was present at many different negotiation situations.
Morrison travelled widely throughout China, such as to Hubei,Szechuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan. During his stays in Thailand andCambodia, he travelled from Kunming in Yunnan to the Shan plateau.
In 1912, when the Republic of China was established as a result ofthe Xinhai Revolution, Morrison became a political advisor to Yuan
Shikai, first president of the republic, and to Li Yuanhong (laterpresident), and played a role in China’s negotiations for loans fromEurope. At the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, he took
part as an advisor for the Chinese delegation. Morrison died in
Sidmouth, England, in 1920 at the age of 58. He was known as“Chinese Morrison” and was a leader of Britain’s China policies.
Eiko Woodhouse, who compiled archives of Morrison’s letters andother documents, focusing on his personality and work, wrote in1988 in her Nichiro Sensou o Enshutsu Shita Otoko: Morrison(“Morrison: The Man Who Choreographed the Russo-JapaneseWar”) as follows: “Morrison was a typical British imperialist. BritishJapan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 201953

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people of the time felt pride and faith in their belief that the BritishEmpire controlled the seven seas, and never saw the sun go down,
and it was truly Britain, proud of its Pax Britannica, that was theleader of the development of the world’s civilization, and also bore
responsibility for it. The British felt pride in the unshakeable positionof the British Empire.” Certainly, Morrison played an essential role in
the global economy and was an important ingredient of the BritishEmpire. As a special correspondent for The Times, “ChineseMorrison” was intimitately involved in diplomacy, from southeast
Asia to east and central Asia; indeed, in his diplomatic activity, hisstyle of argument constantly stressed the strategic viewpoint ofBritain’s global management, such as the interests of the British
Empire, or in what form to build up the influence of Britain on
various regions of the world, or how to resist Russia in the course of
doing so, or how to relate to Japan. All his activities seemed to be
based on this mindset. The fact that Morrison carried out hisactivities from 1902 to 1918, at the same time as the AngloJapanese Alliance (1902-1923), and also at the same period that
China transformed itself from Qing rule to a republic, is also
remarkable.

The Composition & Contents of the Morrison
Collection
Morrison’s Asiatic Library was the result of his avid collecting ofmaterials. This tenacity led him to stipulate four conditions when
Baron Iwasaki acquired the collection: along with maintaining andcontinuing the Asiatic Library, he requested that his existing
subscriptions to over 100 kinds of periodical publications wouldcontinue and their materials be collected, and the Toyo Bunko has
followed this stipulation even up until the present day.
The Morrison Collection, as well as the main collection of written
works in the Toyo Bunko, papers and so on, and the Morrison
Pamphlets, also includes Morrison’s archive diaries, letters and otherwritten materials, such as notebooks, name cards, and various items
that he used in everyday life, which are stored in the New South
Wales State Library in Sydney, Australia (Mitchell Library).

a. Types of publications (history, travel records, Christianityrelated, diplomacy)
All the materials in European languages in the Morrison Collection
have a kangaroo bookplate attached, and through the kangaroo,
eucalyptus, lakes and water bird symbols, it is obvious that Morrison
was an Australian.
The classical European works that form the core of the Morrison
Collection include many publications related to travel records such
54 Japan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 2019

Photo 2: The Toyo Bunko

The Morrison Collection (exhibition room)

as “Toyo Henrekiki” (Peregrinação, 1614) by the Portuguese explorerFernão Mendes Pinto, which records the spread of global awarenessof Asia in 16th century Europe and later; and “Toho Kenbunroku”(The Travels of Marco Polo, 1299), as well as collections of maps ofvalue to the world, such as all nine volumes of Joan Blaeu’s largesize Grooten Atlas, 1664-1665, and all 11 volumes of Johannes
Jansonnius’s Atlas Novus, 1658.
At the same time, the collection also includes regular publications
that Morrison personally collected, and other works; these include
valuable materials of the times related to Southeast Asia, East Asia,
China and Japan, as seen in the modern history of the period.
Among them, in Morrison’s lifetime when attention was being paid toRussia’s appearance on the international stage, including theincreasing seriousness of Russia’s policy of pushing steadily
southward, the fact that, of the materials collected by Morrison,
works written in Russian comprise the third-largest language
grouping, after those written in English or French, is surely areflection of the period during which Morrison lived.

b. Periodicals (Chinese Maritime Customs materials, consularreports, trade reports)
The collection of periodicals was something stressed by Morrison
himself in the Asiatic Library, and is extremely well represented. Even
today, over 100 years since Morrison’s era, the Toyo Bunko
continues to maintain and collect these periodicals, and they are avaluable part of its inventory. For example, Morrison collectedvirtually almost all of the periodicals published related to China in
English up to 1917; in regard to the Chinese Maritime Customs

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Photo 3: The Toyo Bunko

G.E. Morrison and the Asiatic Library at Peking in August 1917
Front row (from left): Masunosuke Odagiri (1868-1934),
diplomat, banker and first auditor of the Toyo Bunko; G.E.
Morrison (1862-1920); Mikinosuke Ishida (1891-1974), East
Asian historian and director of the Morrison Collection until 1934.

materials, these include not only trade statistics, but also medicalsurveys and special reports on tea, opium and raw silk, and they
comprise systemic and massive materials on the society, politics,economics and culture of China as a whole.
Moreover, although in present times documents related to GreatBritain’s parliamentary reports can be easily read in online formats,the fact that materials related to China are extremely prolific in thiscollection reminds us of Morrison’s sense of mission as a China
correspondent. In spite of differences in scale, the Toyo Bunko
collection of European periodicals, in addition to the Morrison
Collection and the Iwasaki Collection’s European-language section,
can be considered comparable to the libraries and material
collections of the West’s major universities and research institutes.

c. Pamphlets, papers, etc. (The Morrison Pamphlets)
The Morrison Pamphlets are items that Morrison assiduously
pursued on the numerous topics that interested him, and comprise
papers published in magazines – he would cut out only the items
that interested him from these magazines, add cover pages to them,and file them together, by specific region. We can clearly understandhow extremely practically the papers were put to use. Both themagazines that he continuously collected, and specialised papers,
are included. In particular, apart from the periodicals, there are morethan 6,000 items that are here classified as pamphlets.
Perusing the pamphlets, we find among them letters between
Morrison and publishers requesting remittances, receipts, and so on,
and can see that Morrison himself carried out the work of clippingout papers in which he was interested and compiling them together
in files on particular regions. In a sense, they can be considered
compilations of papers that Morrison himself edited. The contents
are extremely broad-ranging, and include issues covering almost allareas of politics, diplomacy, economics, history, and culture thatwere occurring in the world during Morrison’s day. Accordingly, wehave the sense that these pamphlets, rather than being compiled
based on investigation into some specific topic, reveal the characterof Morrison himself, with his presence seeping out in the way that
his era is portrayed. Although European languages form the core, thepamphlet collection includes newspapers and magazines in Chinese,and we can keenly sense that Morrison had put considerable thought
into the collection, as shown by the combinations of a wide range ofmaterials on which we placed a special emphasis.

d. Other items (copperplate prints, maps, sketches)
In addition to written materials, there are also copperplate prints,
such as those of the Battle of Canton during the first Opium War(1839-1842) by the British painter Edward Duncan, who had
sketched details of the British warship Nemesis bombarding a Qing
junk. Moreover, the several hundred sketches of Macao by the Britishpainter George Chinnery (1774-1852) are valuable materials forfuture research into art history.
As can be seen in Morrison’s Asiatic Library, the central focus of
the Toyo Bunko is materials from the Asian region, especially China.
However, included in the Hisaya Iwasaki Collection are many
materials related to Japan, in particular Japanese-language materials
from the medieval period, works in classical Japanese such as The
Tale of Genji, and ukiyoe. The materials related to modern history
that were gathered by the China research team include many ofJapan’s survey and research materials on Asia. There are alsoabundant materials regarding research on China and Asia, andresearch exchanges between Japan and Asia, and Japan and theWest, among the Japanese-language materials. Furthermore,Morrison’s second son, Alastair Morrison, worked for thegovernment of Sarawak, and his collection is also housed in the ToyoBunko.
Prof. Takeshi Hamashita specializes in East Asian regional history, inparticular the economic and financial history of China, Hong Kong and East Asia.

Japan SPOTLIGHT • May / June 201955