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About this talk

In 1953 construction workers in Changchun, northeast China, unearthed a huge trove of wartime records of the Imperial Japanese Army and Kenpeitai . Buried hurriedly at the end of the War, these several hundred thousand pages later came to be housed at the Jilin Provincial Archives for decades, before beginning to appear in published collections of translations from 2014 onwards. With c.6,000 pages to date presented to the world in several languages as ‘Irrefutable Evidence’ of various Japanese war crimes, complex questions need answering about how such controversial material should be handled. Delivered by the translator of more than 1,100 pages of these archives, this talk will lead participants to consider questions around the treatment of sensitive historical archives in the context of contemporary geo-politics, the positioning of archival material in our understanding of history, and more. Header image credit: Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces in Shanghai, August 1937. Photographer unknown, Ministry of the Navy. Public domain. Source: Brent Jones, Rising Sun in the East 1937, via Wikimedia Commons.

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