The Imperial Library of Japan was established as the under the jurisdiction of the
Ministry of Education on September 3, 1872. The library was housed within the
Yushima Seidō and combined the functions of both a library and a museum, and inherited the surviving documents held by the
Tokugawa shogunate prior to the
Meiji Restoration. This collection evolved into the in 1875, which was made a
deposit library for all publications in Japan and was renamed the
Tokyo Prefectural Library in 1877 and the
Tokyo Library in 1880. It was relocated to
Ueno in 1885. Its first director was . In 1890, then director Tanaka Inagi visited the
Library of Congress in the United States and major national libraries in Europe with the aim of creating a similar facility in Japan. As a result, in April 1897, the Tokyo Library was renamed the Imperial Library, and began to assume the functions of a national library. A new building to house the Imperial Library was completed on March 20, 1906 in
Ueno Park. At the time of the transfer, the collection contained approximately 470,000 volumes. This grew to over 1 million volumes by the end of World War II. However, from the start, the library was plagued by the lack of adequate budgets, and by lack of space to accommodate all volumes necessary. The collection escaped major damage in the
1923 Great Kantō earthquake, and was evacuated to the countryside during
World War II and thus escaped destruction in the
Tokyo air raids. , it held 244,483 books, of which 194,500 were Japanese and Chinese-language books. Due to
censorship requirements, the
Home Ministry operated a review office in the basement of the Imperial Library. Following the end of World War II, the Imperial Library was renamed the
National Library in December 1947, and was again renamed the
National Diet Library in 1948. The former building of the Imperial Library of Japan now houses the '''International Library of Children's Literature'''. ==Publications==