The idea began in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Education commissioned a study on "methods of comprehensive research on Japanese culture." The timing was deliberate. Japan's postwar economic miracle had made the country a global powerhouse, but its cultural identity was being debated fiercely at home. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro championed the project, and in 1987 the center opened in Kyoto with philosopher Umehara Takeshi as its first Director-General. Prominent Kyoto intellectuals Umesao Nobuo and Kuwabara Takeo helped shape its mission. By choosing Kyoto over Tokyo, the founders made a statement: understanding Japanese culture meant returning to the old capital, the city that had defined Japanese aesthetics for over a thousand years.

The center's leadership tells its own story about how Japan sees itself. Umehara Takeshi, the founding director, was a philosopher who argued that Japanese civilization drew from deep Jomon-era roots predating Chinese influence. His successor in 1995 was Kawai Hayao, a Jungian analyst who explored Japanese psychology and religion through the lens of myth and fairy tale. When Katakura Motoko became the fourth director in 2005, she broke two precedents at once: the first woman to lead Nichibunken, and the first director whose expertise lay outside Japanese studies entirely. A cultural anthropologist specializing in the Middle East, Katakura brought the perspective of someone who had studied other civilizations and could see Japan from the outside looking in.

The real treasure of Nichibunken is its databases, many freely accessible online. The Early Photographs collection contains 5,431 hand-colored images from the end of the Edo period through the beginning of the Meiji era -- samurai in formal dress, geisha at work, harbor scenes from a Japan that was opening to the world for the first time. The Foreign Images of Japan database holds 51,805 photographs and illustrations from collections worldwide. The Heian Jinbutsushi database digitizes nine editions of an Edo-period directory of Kyoto's cultural figures, published between 1768 and 1867 -- a Who's Who that tracked the city's literati, artists, and connoisseurs of arts for a century. There are databases of old Nagasaki maps, folklore about yokai, biographies of Edo-period eccentrics, and the illustrated journal of the Iwakura Mission that toured America and Europe in the 1870s.

Nichibunken publishes two peer-reviewed journals: Japan Review, in English, available on JSTOR and accepting essays from scholars worldwide; and the biannual Nihon Kenkyu, in Japanese. The library's rare books collection focuses on pre-1850s Western-language works about Japan -- books published before Commodore Perry's ships arrived, when European knowledge of the archipelago was fragmentary and often fantastical. Over a thousand such volumes sit in the stacks, each one a window into how the outside world imagined Japan before it could see the country clearly. In 1990, the center moved from its original location to its current campus in Oeyama-cho, Nishikyo-ku, settling into the hillside district where the urban grid of Kyoto gives way to forested slopes and temple precincts.