Overview

The Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology/Faculty of Letters Library at the University of Tokyo has a collection of over 1.1 million volumes. As one of the oldest and largest libraries in Japan, it has a fine collection of educational and research materials. These materials are available in the Building 3 Library, the Building 2 Library, the Chinese Classics Section, and individual departments.

The Building 3 Library is located in the basement of the building, which was constructed in 1987. In the general reception counter of the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology/Faculty of Letters Library, various services are available, including user registration, various application forms, requests for photocopying and book loans, issuance of letters of introduction to other institutions, and reference services.

The Building 3 Library primarily houses books from individual departments. The second basement floor contains books from the departments of Linguistics, English Language and Literature, German Language and Literature, French Language and Literature, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Italian Language and Literature Studies, Greek and Latin Classics, and Contemporary Literary Studies. The first basement floor contains books from other departments and collection of books. All the books are registered in the Online Public Access Catalog(OPAC) to facilitate location identification within the library. The second basement floor contains stack space only, and the first basement floor contains reading space in addition to stack space, part of which is called Fubunkan. It is named after Dr. Fuse Ikuzo (1905–1995), a graduate of the university’s School of Medicine. Dr. Fuse was fascinated by Buddhism and Eastern thought as a young man. While a student at the University of Tokyo, he attended lectures at the Faculty of Letters, and was so impressed by these lectures that, in his later years, he made a large donation for education and research at the faculty. The Fuse Memorial Collection holds basic reference graphic documents. From the comfortable reading space you can enjoy a view of the Sanshiro Pond.

One microfilm reader is located in the first basement floor. Microfilms held in the library, as well as microfilms and other materials from the department collections, are available for viewing here.

The Building 2 Library mainly contains periodicals and back issues of periodicals, as well as reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, catalogs, etc.), doctoral dissertations, microfilms, and books by faculty members.

The reception counter is on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Laws & Letters Building 2. The high ceiling of the reading room in Building 2 gives it a more spacious feeling compared to the Building 3 Library. There is a carrel corner with individual reading seats.

There are over 13,000 periodicals in the collection. All but a few of the bound periodicals are stored in the stacks of the Building 2 Library, which serves as a center for back issues. The stacks are divided across four floors: Japanese periodicals are on the first and second floors and Western periodicals are on the third and fourth floors. Users have access to the stacks.

In addition to the stacking space for bound periodicals, there are new stacks that house rare and semi-precious books from the departments of Indian Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Religious Studies, Aesthetics, Japanese History, Occidental History, Oriental History, Linguistics, Japanese Linguistics, Japanese Literature, and Psychology, among others.