The Graduate School of Education, University of Tokyo
Abstract
In the Edo period, among Japanese people who went abroad there were some who were keen about the difference between Western and Japanese libraries. Okataro Morita created the word "Shojaku-kwan (or Shoseki-kwan)" in order to express huge scale of the Western library. Then Seiryu Ichikawa used the word to give expression to a new library which would be open to the public and overcome the limit of the previous Japanese governmental library, Momijiyama Bunko, whose use had been restricted to the tycoon as a rule. The idea "Open to the public" was realized in 1875 when the Tokyo Shoseki-kwan was established as a free public library
