Editor’s Postscript

Thank you for reading the JACAR Newsletter.

On August 15, 1945, a radio broadcast by the emperor known as the Gyokuon hōsō [Jewel voice broadcast] informed the Japanese public of the country’s decision to surrender. Including the Second Sino-Japanese War, this brought an end to some eight years of conflict. The two special features in this issue, which is being published exactly eighty years to the date after that broadcast, take up the theme of the war’s end and public records.

In the synopsis of JACAR Director-General Hatano Sumio’s talk, he takes up a number of topics. These include the lessons that politics and government should draw on in the event of any future crises that occur; what experiences a nation should record to hand down for posterity; the process through which Japan decided to surrender; the break up of the Japanese empire as a “multi-ethnic nation”; and the veritable “Sufferings of public records” that occurred around the end of the war that saw the destruction and seizure of those records.

The second special feature focuses on that public records “Sufferings” by delving into into the case of the Japanese army. It presents the variety of circumstances that lay behind the loss or disappearance of many such records, including the loss of records in the fires of war, the deliberate incineration of records at the war’s end, and the seizure of records by the Allied powers.

We will continue in our efforts to improve the material you read on the pages of the JACAR Newsletter. We thank you again for your readership and support.

*Please note: the contents of the by-lined articles are based on the views of the writers themselves and are not official views of JACAR itself. Also, the English version of this newsletter has been translated under the responsibility of the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records.