Japanese corpus linguistics will soon come of age. The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), which is being built in a five-year project of the National Institute for Japanese Language at present, will be completed and published in 2011. As the long-awaited first ever balanced corpus of Japanese, BCCWJ is expected to open up a new era of corpus linguistic studies of the Japanese language, which admittedly have been far behind the times on international standards. In this editorial essay to the special issue devoted to Japanese corpus linguistics, we briefly sketch the history of the use of electronic corpora in the study of Japanese, discuss some of the issues which will need to be borne in mind when we use corpora, as well as summarize each of the papers included in the special issue.