Collections : [C.V. Starr East Asian Library]

Original books, pamphlets, journals, magazines, manuscripts, and ephemera produced, published and collected by Abe Kōbō. Also includes photocopied newspaper, magazine, and journal articles as well as book excerpts from Abe Kōbō's study.

This collection contains letters, postcards, manuscripts, published papers, photographs, and other ephemera from Japanese literary authors, critics, artists, and architects such as Abe Kōbo, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō. These materials were sent to, or otherwise acquired by, Professor Donald Keene between 1952 and 2004.

The images in this collection were assembled by Anne S. Goodrich (1895–2005) in 1931, when as a Christian missionary in Peking she became interested in local folk religious practices. She studied the paper gods in this collection for much of her life. After publishing her research conclusions in 1991, she donated these prints to the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University.

The Chinese Diary Collection contains 850 volumes of hardbound and softbound diaries, dating from 1930s to 1980s. Some volumes are filled with writing from cover to cover; some, partially filled; and some, with brief inscriptions. It includes 81 volumes by different individuals of Republican Period (1912-1949) and 95 small volumes penned by an engineer, with scientific data and personal contents. The contents recorded in the dairies are significant, for instance, a set of 20 work diaries by a mid-rank public security cadre member during and after the Cultural Revolution offers detailed history of public security operations for two decades. A set of 10 work diaries by an officer working in a ministry of the State Council in the 1980s documented the political and daily lives before and after the Tiananmen Massacre in association with the students' pro-democracy movement.

This Japanese photograph and postcard collection is composed of five different groups: photographs and postcards collected by Samuel McCune Lindsay (Series 1); photographs and postcards collected by J. W. T. Mason (Series 2); photographs donated by Katharine Becke (Series 3); Japanese Subjugation of Rehe Sheng (China) "Public Relations Photographs" (Series 4); and other postcards and photographs (Series 5). The majority of items were created and/or collected during the 1930s in Japan; however, the collection includes items created throughout the twentieth century as well as originating in neighboring countries such as China and Korea.

The collection consists of published works and writings, including drafts, articles and reprints, drafts for "Halls of the Ancestors", field notes and research, lectures, papers presented and miscellaneous reports as well as correspondence and reports from his travels.