Since December 2005, thanks to external funding, the Freie Universität Berlin has played host to the Comprehensive Japanese-German Dictionary, the largest-scale Japanese Studies project in Germany since the Japan Handbooks of Martin Ramming (1941) and Horst Hammitzsch (1981). Work on the Dictionary began in 1998 at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in  Tokyo, one of seven humanities-oriented institutes organized in the Foundation German Humanities Institutes Abroad (DGIA). In November 2006, the Freie Universität Berlin assumed full responsibility for the project.

A significant number of German and Japanese scholars are co-operating closely on the compilation of this resource, which both German Japanologists and Japanese Germanists have long been calling for, and whose importance for both fields of study can hardly be overemphasized.

Managing Editors of the project are Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (Freie Universität Berlin), Wolfgang E. Schlecht (Waseda University, Tōkyō), Jürgen Stalph (Senior Editor; DIJ, Tōkyō) and Ueda Kōji (Director of the Japanische Kulturinstitut/Japan Foundation, Cologne). The Comprehensive Japanese-German Dictionary is being published by the Munich publisher Iudicium.

The Dictionary covers a linguistic period from the beginning of Meiji (1868) to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Particular importance is attached to the Japanese-German registration of the contemporary Japanese language, which for the past seventy years has been documented only inadequately, if at all. The basic guideline is to include all words that are not deemed to require an explanation when used in Japanese daily newspapers and non-specialist journals. Also documented are technical terms and special idioms (e.g. baby talk, youth and other slang, etc.), and in particular modern technical and scientific vocabulary, especially from the fields of biology, biochemistry, and information technology. As a broadly conceived general dictionary, which must simultaneously provide a solid foundation for Japan-related scholarship in the decades to come, the Dictionary will also include significant portions of the lexicon of the Japanese language over the last decades of the nineteenth century, which were formative for the modern Japanese language. This is the second point of emphasis of the Dictionary.

This requires a total of ca. 120,000 head words. These are classed alphabetically in Latin (Hepburn) transcription, followed by the standard Japanese orthography, information on word class, inflection, etc., and a definition structure based on the semantic network of the German language. Each lemma is illustrated by examples of usage (compounds, derivatives, typical phrases) and text quotations (newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets, advertising material, literary texts, etc., each with a source citation). Care was taken in each case to capture the largest possible variety of wherever possible living and up-to-date examples. With the exception of text quotations, all usage examples with Sino-Japanese elements are also given in Latin transcription, giving even less experienced users the full benefit of the examples without time-consuming reference to character dictionaries.

The Dictionary will replace all older related reference works, including most specialist dictionaries. It aims to be a reliable, fundamental resource for generations of Japanologists over decades to come, and to assist German-Japanese relations at all levels – in politics, industry, and commerce, in the fields of society and culture, and in the arts and the sciences.

The project is supported primarily by external funding. Sponsors have provided a total of ca. € 2.12 million to date.

The following link yields an excerpt with sample entries beginning with the letter B.