iii Main Building
The main building of the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies (III) forms one part of a group of contiguous buildings that also includes the University Library. Prior to the institutional reorganization of April 2004, this building housed the Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies (now merged with the III). The Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies has a history going back to 1929 when a Department of Journalism Studies was established in what was then known as the Tokyo Imperial University. From its inception, this was a fundamentally interdisciplinary organization involving the participation of researchers from the three faculties of Law, Letters, and Economics. Despite its small size, it heralded the later formation of a much larger interdisciplinary organization in the III. It also provided a foretaste of the contemporary movement toward the creation of cooperative partnerships between the university and industry, since it was funded by leading contemporary personalities in the newspaper industry.

This organization was expanded and formalized in 1949 with the founding of the Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies, whose stated purpose was to “engage in research on newspaper journalism and publishing, broadcasting, and films about current affairs” and to “supervise and train those wishing to conduct research on such matters”. It therefore became an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the study of all aspects of the mass media. Following reorganization in 1992, it came to be known as the Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies (ISICS).

The Socio-information and Mass Media Archive housed in the III Main Building is testimony to a continuous tradition of research stretching back over the past 75 years. Its valuable collection of historical media material, including back numbers of all Japan’s major newspapers, is in the process of being digitalized and made available for general public release.