JAPANESE LIBRARY COLLECTIONS in Britain are associated with two major historical events in modern Japan - the Meiji Restoration and World War Two. Their collections originated after these turning-points when Japanese books were at particularly low-prices. Ernest Mason Satow (1843–1929), one of three great pioneers of Japanese studies together with William George Aston (1841–1911) and Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935), was a prominent collector of Japanese books and most of the important early Japanese books in research libraries in Britain derived from Satow's collection including those of Cambridge University Library, the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library), the Bodleian Library, etc.

Satow collected Japanese books enthusiastically in Japan in the early part of the Meiji period and probably the size of his collection reached around several thousand titles, but in the mid-1880s (1883–1886), he started to disperse his books to the British Museum and his friends. He took a post at Bangkok, Siam, in 1884 to move from the consular to the diplomatic services and, in order to finish his ‘Japanese days’ (his youth), he disposed his collection of Japanese books mainly from Bangkok, confirming his determination to make a new career.

Satow's best samples of early printings including early movable type editions found a home in the British Museum in 1884–1885 through sale and donation. Satow also sent his Japanese books to Chamberlain in Tokyo and his Japanese books on Buddhism to James Troup (1840–1925) in Kobe and Thomas Watters (1840– 1901), but the majority of his collection was dispatched to Frederick Victor Dickins (1838–1915) in London and those books were subsequently lent or given to Aston for his Japanese studies in 1892. When Aston died in 1911, his library of 1,978 Japanese books, 82% of which had been Satow's books, ended up in Cambridge University Library. In the same year, Cambridge University Library received a donation of 721 Japanese books which belonged to the former library of Heinrich Philipp von Siebold (1852–1908). Also Satow directly donated 433 Japanese books to Cambridge University Library in the following years (1912 and 1913). In 1991, Early Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library: A Catalogue of the Aston, Satow and von Siebold Collections, edited by Nozomu Hayashi and Peter Kornicki, was published by Cambridge University Press. The catalogue lists 2,474 items of Japanese, Chinese and Korean books at Cambridge University Library.