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Gutenberg in Tokio

The Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed with movable letter type, which was introduced by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455. The world’s most precious incunabula (early print), it is regarded as the origin of today’s mass communication culture, born from the paradigm shift from manuscript to print culture back in Gutenberg’s time. Taking advantage of the book’s symbolic value, Keiō University acquired a copy in 1996, using it to launch a digitization initiative called The HUMI Project. Since its inauguration, the project has also digitized major European incunabula from overseas, amongst them the Gutenberg Bible copy owned by the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. This paper describes the current scope of the project as well as how it was created, and contrasts it to a German digitization initiative (gutenbergdigital, run by the Digitization Center of Göttingen). By focusing on this example of German cultural heritage and its perception in Japan, the article wants to demonstrate the high potential for German-Japanese interaction in this field of research, which at the present is only minimal.