Morrison Library at the Toyo Bunko have photogenic bookshelves

The Toyo Bunko in Komagome has stacks with bookshelves that make you drool. 2-story high walls are covered with bookshelves. As a book lover, this is a space I long to visit.

The Toyo Bunko is a library specializing in oriental studies that collects literary materials related to oriental history and culture, and the Morrison Library is located in the museum part of the library. The library display about 24,000 books, paintings, pamphlets, and other materials related to East Asia that Hisaya Iwasaki, the founder of Toyo Bunko, purchased in 1917 from Dr. Morrison, who was stationed in Beijing.

Visitors are not allowed to touch the books in the stacks, which are lined with valuable books. What attracted me was a book called "Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa," which was published in London in 1704 and is a fake book about Taiwan. The author, George Psalmanazar, was born in France and had never even been to Taiwan, but he pretended to be Taiwanese and wrote a book about Taiwan.

The book is a masterpiece of Psalmanazar's own creation, with detailed descriptions of clothing, diet, rituals, customs, political systems, and lifestyles. Psalmanazar's fame as an expert on Taiwan in spite of his bullshit is so great that at one time he even gave lectures to students at Oxford University. I wonder if he could have written a novel that would go down in history if he had used his imagination.

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