A comparison viewer for images of the British Library's Amakusa edition (2019)
The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics released the public domain color JPEG images of the British Library’s Amakusa edition of 'Feiqe no monogatari', 'Esopo no fabulas' and 'Qincuxu' in March, 2019.
The Amakusa edition of Heike monogatari, Isoho monogatari and Kinkushū are one of the so-called Christian editions, published in 1592-1593. The British Library’s copy is only surviving copy in the world. Written in a Portuguese version of romanization, we can estimate how Japanese was pronounced at that time.
Furthermore, for the use of Japanese language history class, we developed a viewer that displays the Amakusa edition’s images and transliterated texts side-by-side. This viewer has three type transliterated texts; kanji and hiragana text, katakana text, Kunrei-shiki romanization text.