Open Access in Japan: After a long silence

The status quo in Japan as regards access to scholarly information and development of institutionaly repositories is outlined with special attention to the country's history and productivity in science. Based on opinion surveys and actions thus far taken, it is obvious that most stakeholders are not particularly conscious of open access, while almost 100 institutional repositories have launched by university libraries in the last couple of years. This apparently incoherent situation can be attributed to Japan's role in the contemporary world wide scientific communication and its history of "use" of science in higher education since the late 19th century. To illustrate this perspective, problems in the publishing of "domestic" journals and their digitization are discussed from the perspective of open access.