Wrote a Wikipedia article about Chinese ceramic at the Tokyo National Museum Editathon

by , Japanese Wikimedian and Librarian, real name is Yuriko Kadokura; Author of "A 70-year-old Wikipedian talks about the charm of libraries" in 2023; Wikimedians of Japan User Group
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I contributed in the Editathon held at the Tokyo National Museum on August 19, 2025. Last year, I wrote an article about the “Yoshinoyama Makie Kendai,” but this time I decided to try my hand at the Yokogawa Tamisuke Collection, which I had been interested in for a while.

The Tokyo National Museum collection is introduced in Yokogawa Tamisuke’s Wikipedia article as an art commentary, and the first item mentioned is the “Hakuji houshu hei” (Phoenix-Head Ewer). “Hakuji” refers to white porcelain, “houshu” refers to the neck of a large bird, and “hei” refers to a water bottle, but despite being an Important Cultural Property, there is no corresponding Wikipedia article. So, I first searched Colbase (Integrated Collections Database of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan) and found an immediate hit, so I drafted a rough outline of the Wikipedia article.

Phoenix-Head Ewer（Collection of Tokyo National Museum）Created by editing information on ColBase（https://colbase.nich.go.jp/）

On the day of the Edita-thon, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum in the morning, so I headed straight to the Asian Gallery and took my time to look at the Chinese ceramics exhibit on the third floor. Although the Phoenix-Head Ewer was not there, I was able to see several pieces from the Yokogawa Collection.

Asian Gallery of the Tokyo National Museum（Kakidai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons）

I began writing at the Research and Information Center of the Museum in the afternoon. First, I checked the institutional control number (TG-645, the Tokyo National Museum’s item number) listed in the relevant data in Colbase. I searched for that number in the Tokyo National Museum OPAC‘s simple search, selecting “Articles,” and got 45 hits. Among them, I picked up several Tokyo National Museum catalogs and two copies of the Tokyo National Museum research journal “Museum” from the open stacks. There was also a catalog specifically dedicated to the Yokogawa Collection, and I used those to write the overview article. It’s a very simple article, but I decided it was important to get it out there, so I published “Hakuji houshu hei.” I then linked to several related articles and created a Wikidata entry.

I became interested in the Yokogawa Collection about 10 years ago when I discovered that the 54 chapters of The Tale of Genji were listed as part of the Yokogawa Collection in the company history, “The 80-Year History of Yokogawa Bridges” (1987). Since these were donated to the Tokyo National Museum, I thought I want to write about them on Wikipedia someday. I would like to continue writing about the Yokogawa Collection little by little from next year onwards.

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