Public Access to the Notebooks of Mr. KUNO Takeshi
The Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (TOBUNKEN) houses a vast amount of materials, including photographs and research records related to cultural properties, some of which were created and collected by the researchers themselves. The valuable collection of materials left by Mr. KUNO Takeshi (1920-2007), a leading authority on the history of Buddhist sculpture and a member of TOBUKEN, which was donated to the Institute by his bereaved family after his death, is among such materials (https://www.tobunken.go.jp/materials/ekatudo/217654.html).
Some examples of this collection, mainly photographs, are already available in the TOBUNKEN library, and now a list of his handwritten notebooks (312 volumes, 13422 entries), which were KUNO’s favorite item throughout his life, has been sorted and the works are now available to the public. These notebooks contain records of his research on Buddhist sculpture in Japan and abroad, notes on the exhibitions he saw, and the research lectures he attended, and are truly a record of KUNO’s trajectory as a researcher. We have published a list of the contents of the notebooks on our website (https://www.tobunken.go.jp/materials/kuno_note), and the actual notebooks are available in the TOBUNKEN library. We hope that these notebooks will be useful for your research.