Multiple views of Japan
The archive has several sections.
Articles from 1874 to 1989 are contained as high-quality scans of the pages, as they originally appeared. Articles after 1986 onward are contained in a convenient text view, as well as a clipping view of the original article. The Japan News catalogs articles that appeared in our English publication. Contemporary Who’s Who offers the ability to search for individuals to retrieve their biographical data as well as pertinent articles. And finally, regional articles and pages from the period of 1933 to 2001 can be found as page images in the optional Regional Sections (Showa Era) feature.
We’ve worked hard so you don’t have to
Yomidas stands out as Japan’s premiere online newspaper database for a variety of reasons. Our editors have spent countless hours cataloging articles, writing headlines for articles that originally had none and tagging articles with keywords to make retrieving pertinent stories easy. In cases where language usage has changed, we’ve tagged articles with the modern readings and characters in addition to the original usages, all to assist you in finding the articles you want.
An interface you’ll quickly love
Once you’ve found an article, enjoy the unsurpassed quality of the scanned images from historic eras. Our viewer software allows you to peruse the page with ease, zoom in on an area of interest and select an individual region for printing. To help you find your article from the full newspaper page, we highlight your search results with a blue thumbtack. Navigation buttons allow you to browse through a newspaper issue page by page, or to see the same page from one edition to the next.
More recent articles, both in the Japanese and the English editions, are saved and displayed in a full-text format for easy display. For articles since December 2008, there’s also a link to a clipping to view the article as it originally appeared in the print edition. There’s another link to easily switch between the English and Japanese versions of the article.
Watch the news unfold
In addition to news articles, Yomidas contains the photos, illustrations and diagrams that accompanied the news stories. We’ve even included comics and advertisements to give the flavor of life in Japan throughout the eras we’ve been in publication.
Additional helpful features include the Glossary and Reference section, both Japanese/English and English/Japanese lexicons and a Japanese dictionary. We’ve also included a “Chronological Search” feature for between 1874 and 1989, allowing you to see which topics were on the public’s mind at any given time. Instead of copying and pasting, simply clicking on one of the terms from the section adds it to your search terms.
150 years of news -- for the digital era
Yomidas was honored in 2010 in receiving a special prize at the First Annual Asian Digital Media Awards. Thomas Jacob, vice president of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), called Yomidas “a remarkable achievement ... with a series of absolutely outstanding features.”
We firmly believe you’ll find it remarkable, too.