The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) is a research center for ethnology and cultural anthropology.

Cataloguing Umesao Tadao's Archived Materials on Inner Mongolia for Academic Research

Joint Research Coordinator　KONAGAYA Yuki

Reserch Theme List

Objectives

The Umesao Archive is a collection of materials left to Minpaku by its founder and first director, Umesao Tadao. Of these materials, only the 35,000 photographs had been catalogued. Work was begun in fiscal 2011 on digitizing and cataloguing the remaining materials. The objective of this research is to establish, using scholarly methods, a concrete precedent for organizing the archive’s materials in a way that supports academic research.

The largest single group of materials comprises those collected by Umesao Tadao during his research in Inner Mongolia Region between 1944 and 1946. During this current project, materials related to Umesao’s research on Mongols will be analyzed, digitized and catalogued using appropriate scholarly methods. 

The analysis will be conducted in accordance with international agreements on scientific and scholarly exchange, in cooperation with research organizations in China, and will be used to implement an international joint research project. The results will be made public andshared with local scholars.