I am often asked about Chinese and Korean cinema materials in the Makino Collection. Since processing began with the prewar Japanese materials in the collection, I usually explain that I haven’t gotten to the Chinese and Korean materials yet. This past December, I decided to start going through the boxes that my guide to the collection suggests may be East Asian related. This rough guide was compiled when the materials were packed and shipped to the U.S. from Tokyo. It divides the entire collection into 9 sections.  It indicates there are cinema resources for East Asia, items from South and North Korea (pre and postwar), China (former Manchuria, Manchurian cinema related, Shanghai cinema studio in the 1930s and programs from the 1940s), Taiwan (pre and postwar), and Hong Kong (pre and postwar) related materials. These boxes are located in the 1st of the 9 sections for the collection and it contains 166 boxes in all. Of these 166 boxes, I have processed 7 and seen the contents of an additional 12 (related to Charlie Chaplin, the Soviet Union, and various other Western cinema topics). In case you are wondering, each box is 40cm×34cm×27cm in size and contains somewhere between 10 to 40 items.

The guide also indicates there are materials related to East Asia in the section on materials from 1940 through the 1970s (the 5th section). Since I have a box number range for these, I decided to start with these 15 boxes first. Of these, 13 contain books about East Asia, some cover history or literature, some are cinema related, and some are written in Korean and Chinese. Most, however, are written in Japanese about Korea, Manchuria, China, and elsewhere in Asia. There are journals in 1 ½ boxes in Japanese about South Korea like Gendai koria/現代コリア(which Columbia already has from 1984, call number: DS901 .C451), and Kikan Sanzenri /季刊 三千里 (title Romanized in Korean as Kyegan samchoʻŏlli, of which Columbia also already has all 50 issues, call number: DS901 .K53). To give you an idea of what books are here, I made a rough list of the box contents for 11 of them.

EAST ASIAN RELATED MONOGRAPHS IN THE MAKINO MAMORU COLLECTION – BOXES 5-23 TO 5-32.

ADDITIONAL MONOGRAPHS IN KOREAN (added 1/30/2012)

I will send these boxes back to ReCAP for the monographs to be cataloged at a later date. That said, they can be recalled in advance and hopefully the above list of books will be useful to you. Now, I move on to the remaining 147 boxes that may contain East Asian cinema archival materials…