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Japanese Studies: Getting Started

Free Electronic resources for the Study of Japan

Key Databases for Books and Articles

Searching in Japanese

Japanese has a built in adjacency function; characters placed together without a space will be searched as a compound phrase (e.g. 戦争責任). Words separated by a space can be combined by "AND", or used as alternate search terms.

Browser add-on for Japanese look-up:  
     Furigana Injector from Akira Kurogane is an extension to Chrome that (on a click) looks up the readings for kanji words and inserts them inline as furigana. It also provides quick dictionary lookup (mousable), supports kanji levels (based on "most common kanji" count.

You can find Google Chrome at http://google.com/chrome
Once you install Chrome, you can add the extension by visiting the Google Chrome Web Store
 - search for "furigana";
 - look under the extensions tab
 - install Furigana Injector from (Akira Kurogane)
 - the Injector waits for a Japanese Language page before "volunteering" to help