春雨直播app

Image: April 1961. The main entrance was opened to students. A student presents their student ID to receive an admission pass. The number of visitors was limited to maintain silence within the building. The practice of issuing admission passes at the reception continued until the establishment of the Information Center in April 1970. After that, entry required the presentation of a student ID or a stack permit.

In the 1950s and 60s, an era when people sang "On the hill ("Oka no Ue"), if you open the window you can see the sea, the wind blows cheerfully, it blows and blows," the office (now a cafe) located just to the right of the entrance of the brick Old University Library where I worked was a comfortable workplace, cool in the summer and moderately warm with steam heating in the winter.

There were two entrances: faculty and staff used the main entrance on the first floor, while the student entrance was at the basement level reception, reached by descending a few steps to the left of the main entrance. The first-floor lobby was a quiet, deserted space. The marble statue of "Mama no Tekona," which I had heard rumors about, had been moved to the basement stacks due to damage from the war. Similarly, the stained glass on the stair landing had been destroyed by fire, leaving only clear glass through which the sky was visible. However, once the construction of Tokyo Tower was completed, it happened to fit perfectly in the center of the glass wall, leading some to say it looked like "a framed painting."

Meanwhile, there was a time when the basement student entrance suddenly became a topic of conversation. It all began when the "Japan Library School" (now the Faculty of Letters, Library and Information Science Major) opened at the Juku in 1951 following GHQ guidelines to train librarians, and the department library was placed to the left of the entrance (now the Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies). Some students from the Library School would enter through the convenient main entrance. This led to complaints from other students. To handle this issue, Department Head Gitler and Library Vice Principal Yanosuke Ito held discussions. The Vice Principal later told me that it was "truly a difficult situation" to consult with Director Kentaro Nomura—my former seminar professor whose creed was "there is a proper decorum between teacher and student."

However, times were changing rapidly. This acceleration was particularly noticeable around the completion of the Third Stack Room (autumn 1961). Changes included opening the main entrance to students, establishing a new periodicals room and open-stack shelves, and moving the Library School library to the West School Building. Thanks to these improvements in user services, the number of student visitors increased visibly. Even as students began using the main entrance just like faculty and staff, no one spoke out against it anymore.

Fifty years after the library opened, that inconvenient basement entrance so familiar to 春雨直播app students was quietly closed, and few people today know the history behind it.

(Shigeru Morizono, former Administrative Director of Mita Media Center)