In 1872, the Bureau of Museum, Ministry of Education, established the Shojakukan in Yushima, Tokyo. It was the first national library open to the public in Japan. The holdings of the library consisted of a hundred and forty thousand volumes of J apanese and classical Chinese books. <br> The Meiji Government was eager to hold a Conference of Prefectural Governors but could not fined any place except the Library in Yushima. <br> In 1874, the Library had to move on the Sumida River near the Asakusa Temple where there had been rice granaries in the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the Library changed its name to the Asakusa Bunko or the Asakusa Library. <br> The origin of the name of Asakusa Bunko was that it was the name of the private library which was set up by Itasaka Bokusai, a medical man, in the middle of seventeenth century, and also the one set up by the Hotta samurai family almost at the same time. <br> Now the Asakusa Bunko was open to the public on May 19, 1875 and the entrance fee was one sen a day. However, readers were not very many, it had less than 30 readers a day because at that time disturbances and epidemics broke out pretty often in Japan. <br> In April 1881, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce was established, and the Bureau of Museum and the Asakusa Bunko was transfered to the new jurisdiction. In May，Asakusa Bunko was closed and the name of Asakusa disappeared. The Ministry of Home Affairs finished up by constructing the new buildings of the Museum in Ueno Park, and the Library moved to Ueno Park. <br> The Museum opened on March 20, 1882. There was a small wooden reading room in the garden of the Museum for the former Asakusa Bunko and it opened on September 20 in the same year. All the holdings were kept in the building of the Museum. <br> In 1874, the Bureau of Books, Ministry of Home Affairs was established and took responsiblility for “keeping every record in the country”. The Bureau of Books claimed to be the owner of the holdings of the Asakusa Bunko. The Museum had to divide up with the Bureau some part of the holdings and also had to hand in the bond of the loan on the holdings left in the Museum to the Bureau of Books. <br> The Reading Room of the National Museum was closed January, 1886, because of the retrenchment in the budget for personnel expenses, and all the holdings moved to Naikaku Bunko, the Cabinet Library, which was founded as the central government library in 1884. And the collection which had been sent to the Bureau of Books, also moved to the Cabinet Library. <br> The Cabinet Library has been incorporated into the National Archives since 1971.