The wartime destruction of the Japanese diplomatic record in historical perspective

Historical documents, the lifeblood of academic inquiry, are always of great scholarly interest, so it is surprising how little has been published on the historical condition and accessibility of Japan’s diplomatic record. Hamai and Mauch fill this lacuna by chronicling the status of these collected documents over the last 150 years, a fitful history culminating in contemporary digitization initiatives. Japan’s modern history of record keeping and records disclosures, they show, was surprisingly transparent, the notable exceptions being the second Konoe administration’s 1940 suspension of foreign policy document publications and then the Foreign Ministry’s destruction of records at the end of the war.