The National Diet Library has assembled an amazing online collection of rare Japanese books, scrolls, maps, and other publications going back to almost prehistory. The exhibit also includes some rare works from Europe. Unfortunately the site is entirely in Japanese, and since the subjects and authors are in very archaic language, it can be pretty hard to navigate. But give it a try, almost every click is sure to yield an amazing work of art, with very high resolution images. In a few pokes around at random, I found ancient buddhist scrolls written in gold ink, handpainted maps of the entire coastline of Japan, the first printed book in Japanese history (the million buddhas scroll), poems in delicate calligraphy ornamented with beautiful watercolor paintings of seashells and beaches, and on and on. Includes some huge lengthy scrolls with a Flash-based navigator to move through it and zoom in on high resolution closeups of the text (yeah like there are more than about 5 people on earth who can read them, and they all work at the Diet Library anyway).
For the less linguistically daring, you might start with this awful Babelfish translation of the main index, or perhaps this not-as-bad babelfish translation of highlights of the exhibit. But be daring and explore around, there is so much stuff here, it's amazing.
Via BibliOdyssey via Mefi
