%0 Journal Article
%T Japonica of the Archives left after Bronisław Piłsudski in the Scientific
	Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences. (7.)
	Four pieces of Correspondence of Ms Koko Somiya to Bronisław Piłsudski
%A Majewicz, Alfred F.
%J The Annual of the Scientific Library of the PAAS and the PAS in Cracow
%V 2016
%R 10.4467/25440500RBN.16.011.6622
%N 2016
%P 161-182

%@ 1642-2503
%D 2017
%U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/rbn-pau-pan/article/japonica-w-archiwaliach-po-bronislawie-pilsudskim-w-bibliotece-naukowej-pau-i-pan-w-krakowie-7-korespondencja-panny-k-do-bronislawa-pilsudskiego
%X 
	The present installment in the series aiming at the identification, reconstruction, and presentation of Japanese documents preserved with Bronisław Piłsudski’s archives in the Academic Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Lettres (PAU) and Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in Cracow focuses on three letters and one picture post card written and sent respectively in February, March, April, and July 1906 to Piłsudski by Ms. Kōko Sōmiya, a sister of charity in the Japanese Red Cross Society, a resident of Yokohama who had served Russian POW camps following the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war. The letters are written in Cyrillic characters in sort of a Russo-Japanese pidgin with the proportion between Russian and Japanese language material gradually (and chronologically) changing with each item in favor of the latter: while the lexicon of the first item is almost entirely Russian and quasiRussian, the lexicon of the fourth item is almost entirely Japanese. The ppc comes from the famous (now especially among collectors) firm Kamigataya of Ginza, Tokyo, and depicts a doll arrangement for the annual March 3 “doll (or girls’) festival (hinamatsuri). As a principle, the original manuscript text has been retransliterated into print fonts, Japanese-language fragments provided with the standard Hepburn transliteration and with a reconstruction in current Japanese characters (kanji-kana majiribun). Actually, the correspondence remained incomprehensible without its situational context until a lucky instance of discovering Piłsudski’s own 1908 newspaper article describing his personal contacts with Ms. Somiya centering round the problems of emancipation of women in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century and mixed Japanese-foreign marriage perspectives. The present paper (a by-product of  research project The fifth volume of The Collected Works of Bronisław Piłsudski (CWBP-5) – Mate- rials for the Study of the Nivhgu Language and Folklore – preparation for publication and completion of the five(-six)-volume edition financially supported by the National Center of Academic Research (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) in Cracow grant 2012/07/B/HS2/00461) republishes the article in question and ends with commented translations of the four pieces of correspondence into Polish.