East Asia: Japan

This collection of over 6,000 Topical Budget newsreels produced from 1911 to 1931 offers fascinating insights into twentieth-century life, culture and society. The subjects covered include international events and personalities as well as domestic life and news. Japan features in newsreels such as 'Japan Wrecked by World's Greatest Earthquake' (1923), and 'Little Buddhists' (1925), showing a procession of robed schoolgirls filing past the Emperor of Japan's brother.

This single archive source includes the rare and distinctive Wason pamphlet collection held by Cornell University Library, published between c1750 and 1929. It offers a variety of English language sources on a wide range of research interests and topics relating to Chinese history, religion, culture and everyday life. Japan-related content includes: documents on Sino-Japanese commerce and treaties, sources on Japanese art, and Japanese emigration to China.

This collection features a series of titles published by the Church Missionary Society, a major Anglican evangelical movement. It is organised into two modules documenting missionary work from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. An essay by Phillip Cantrell II of Longwood University, ‘Discovering the Work of the Church Missionary Society in China, Japan and India through the Region-specific Periodicals’ details the region-specific work of the CMS, which can be explored in titles such as the Tokyo Newsletter and Japan Quarterly.

From 16th century origins as a trading venture to the East Indies, through to its rise as the worlds most powerful company and de facto ruler of India, to its demise amid allegations of greed and corruption the East India Company was an extraordinary force in global history for three centuries. This resource details its operations in Japan from the seventeenth century onwards.

This collection comprises almost every play submitted for licence in Britain between 1737 and 1824. Japan is represented in works such as the pantomime ‘Harlequin Harmonist; or, A Trip to Japan’ (1813).

This multi-archive title brings together collections of rare journals published across Britain and its colonies between c1635 and 1835. They demonstrate a wide-ranging British interest in topics relating to the history, culture and day-to-day lives of countries within the East Asian region.
'Memoirs of Literature' (published 1710-22), looks at Japanese writers, philosophers and architecture, while articles in The Tatler demonstrate the British appetite at the time for Chinese and Japanese silks, satins and furniture.

This collection features thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational content, film footage, notebooks, correspondence and slides from locations worldwide. The extensive collections of musicologist Robert Garfias contain recordings from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea.

This multi-archive collection offers diverse sources, from personal papers to military files, ephemera and artwork, to highlight the experiences of soldiers, civilians and governments during the First World War. It looks at all theatres of the war, including the Asia Pacific region: a thematic section on A Global Conflict links to key documents on Japan and its military interventions in Shandong.

The primary sources in this multi-archive collection illustrate the history of food and drink across a period of five centuries. An image gallery of Global and Ethnic Cuisines includes cookbooks from China and Japan; and a gallery on Food, Race and Ethnicity showcases depictions of Japanese tempura restaurants, and Japanese sushi and utensils.
The interactive Chronology highlights milestones such as the creation of MSG by Japanese biochemist Kikunae Ikeda, and the invention of instant noodles in 1958.

Global Commodities explores the history of trade and consumption worldwide through the story of fifteen key commodities. East Asia played an especially important role in commerce in opium, tea, porcelain and silver.
There are reports on the production of tea in Japan, and the export of porcelain from Japan to Britain is seen in sources including documents and physical objects.

This collection charts the development of leisure travel through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Destinations throughout East Asia were among the many areas visited by tourists from Europe and North America, as seen in the travel journals, brochures, guidebooks, correspondence, maps and postcards in this resource. A survey of Historical, Cultural and Religious Tourism highlights western tourist travel to temples in Japan, while travel was also associated with International Relations, as seen where US troops stationed in Japan were advised to acknowledge local customs and represent the US favourably.

This multi-archive resource looks at the history of illness and the development of medical practice on front lines from 1850 to 1949. Visual sources include Second World War summaries of mortality and casualty rates in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as maps of the whole Pacific Theatre of Operations. There is also material on the Mukden Incident, which gave the pretext for Japan to invade Manchuria (1931-37).

This multi-archive title looks at the movement of peoples from Europe and Asia to North America and Australasia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A Migration map gives figures for migration from Asia to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand from the 1880s onwards.
The twentieth-century experience of Japanese prisoners interned in the US during World War Two can be seen in the Shigezo and Sonogo Iwata Papers (1942-91).

This multi-archive resource covers the development of the modern Olympic Games from 1896 to 1992, telling the story of the world’s biggest sporting event through primary sources while shining a light on key social and political phenomena throughout the twentieth century. The Case Study Games section of the site includes information on the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, with links to relevant documents. The Biographies section features the Japanese politician Ryōtarō Azuma, President of the Japanese Olympic Committee from 1947-1958.

Over 300 newspaper titles in this resource, including both rare and well-known publications, give a wide-ranging view of the Second World War and the experiences of those on its front lines. Newspapers in theatres of action such as the Asia-Pacific region kept units informed on the progress of the war, and also provided news local to where units were stationed. The Interactive map shows that the US Army publication Outfit was distributed to units serving in China. The Chronology can be filtered by the theme ‘Sino-Japanese War’, and gives background on events such as the Battle of Shanghai and the Nanjing Massacre.

This unique collection of communist-produced films and newsreels on the world events and current affairs of the twentieth century includes some notable content from and about the countries of East Asia. The interactive Map indicates places of interest featured in individual films, and shows that 50 films relate to Japan.

The world’s fairs showcased in this collection include some major events held in East Asia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Japan in particular showed enthusiasm for staging large-scale expositions: Osaka hosted events in 1903 and 1970, as well as Expo '90, a horticultural exposition. The Tokyo Industrial Exposition was staged in 1907, although two subsequent events for the city, planned for 1917 and 1940 were both cancelled due to the intervention of the world wars. Further events were held in Okinawa in 1975, Tsukuba in 1985 and Aichi in 2005. An essay included in this resource by Sarah Louise Coletta, ‘(Not) One for the History Books: The Stories of Fairs that Didn’t Happen’ looks at the opportunity that world’s fairs offered Japan to showcase its classical civilisation and technological expertise, and to position itself as a cultural equal to Europe and North America.

An AM Archives Direct title, featuring formerly restricted British Foreign Office files relating to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The constant exchange of information between the British government and its embassies and consulates overseas is seen here in diplomatic dispatches, correspondence, newspaper cuttings, maps, biographies, and diverse other materials. A series of documents on 'Japan and China' examine relations between the countries during this period.