1916 · SB-13568 — Tokyo, Kobunsha, 1916. 15, (546) pp. Green clothbound (original) volume with gold-embossed title along spine and blind-tooled publisher's mark on front. Illustrated endpaper with floral ornamentation. Famous study of Russian Orientalist, Sinologist and scholar of Japanese Studies Otto Julius Rosenberg (1888 - 1919) on a system of classification of Chinese characters. Rosenberg studied from 1906 to 1911 at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the University of St. Petersburg, lectured by, among others, the founder of the Russian school of Indology, Sergei Oldenburg (1863 - 1934). During a study stay in Bonn in 1909, Rosenberg befriended Hermann Jacobi (1850-1937), the greatest Indologist and Sanskrit scholar of that time. As part of an internship at the Department of Oriental Languages (SOS) at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität two years later, he also befriended the German linguist and scholar of Japanese studies, Rudolf Lange (1850 - 1933). From 1912 to 1916 he studied Buddhist Literature and Tradition at the University of Tokyo. Here Rosenberg became acquainted with the then leading Buddhist Scholars of Japan. In the course of this stay, he explored the school of Zen Buddhism as one of the first Western scientists and also became an expert for Japanese and Chinese characters used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese. In 1924, his work "The problems of Buddhist philosophy" was published in German. Based on ideas of Russian Sinologist and Buddhologist Vasily Vasilyev (1818 - 1900), Rosenberg developed a method of classification of Chinese and Japanese characters. He published the results of his research in a dictionary which was published in English and Japanese and which formed the basis of the so-called "Four Corner Method", which is still employed today in the creation of Chinese and Japanese dictionaries. This volume is extremely rare and, according to the world's largest bibliographic database, WorldCat, it is only found in six libraries worldwide. The copy offered here was purchased from a Japanese private collection.
