An Overview of JACAR and Its Features

What is the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records?

The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) is an electronic resources center operated by the National Archives of Japan that delivers Asian historical records (primary sources, i.e., original documents) held by national institutions over the internet for viewing on users’ computer screens. The “Asian historical records” spoken of here refers to those Japanese public records and other documents that are important as historical records relating to relations in the modern and contemporary eras between Japan and its Asian neighbors.
The aims of JACAR’s work are to move forward on adding Asian historical records of this sort to its database so that the persons who want them can use them at their convenience and with ease, and to promote mutual understanding with neighboring Asian countries.

How JACAR Came to Be

On August 31, 1994, then-Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi released a statement on the government’s “Peace, Friendship, and Exchange Initiative” to commemorate the follow year’s 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Contained in the Outline of the initiative was the statement, “This plan encompasses the already acknowledged necessity for an Asian Historical Document Center .”
Following up, a committee comprising 15 academics and experts was entrusted with engaging in the concrete deliberations over such a center. The committee took into consideration fact-finding studies conducted both in Japan and abroad, the opinions of other experts, and more broadly the requests from the general public. Based on this, on June 30, 1995, the committee recommended that a center be established with the fundamental purpose of “impartially collecting a wide variety of materials and information on the modern and contemporary history of relations between Japan and neighboring Asian countries, and providing these to researchers as well as the general public both at home and abroad.”
Based on the experts’ recommendation, the Government entered into concrete study for establishing the Center. On November 30, 1999, the Cabinet decided, as part of the “Asian historical records development project,” those “Asian historical records” that that various national institutions had been preserving and making available would be made accessible through the internet. After two years of preparation, JACAR was opened on November 30, 2001, as an organization under the National Archives of Japan.
Based on the Cabinet decision, it was determined that JACAR would first build a database by receiving Asia-related historical records dating from the early Meiji period to the end of World War II that have been digitized by the principal holding institutions of prewar public records: the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Defense’s Library (now the Center for Military History) at the National Institute of Defense Studies. JACAR was to make these digitized records accessible over the internet.

Records Available for Viewing through JACAR

Currently, JACAR has been gradually making available those Asian historical records at the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Archives at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Center for Military History at the Ministry of Defense’s National Institute for Defense Studies that those holding institutions, respectively, have digitized. Since fiscal 2017, we have also been moving forward with making available postwar materials (at present, covering up to 1972). As of April 2025, the amount of materials provided by the three institutions has reached approximately 2.2 million items (approximately 33 million images). The source materials remain in the hands of the respective institutions.
JACAR also partners with a set of universities, archives, libraries, and so forth both in Japan and abroad to supply information regarding the Asian historical records those institutions make accessible over the internet. A system is in place that allows users to navigate from the search results of the JACAR database to the databases of those institutions to view the images of the records.
For details, please refer to, “Records Available for Viewing through JACAR.”

Method of use

Users can access to our database using browsers running on either Japanese or English operating systems. To know the searching systems in each language, refer to their respective pages.

Merits of the Japanese-language search system

The entries for the categories of Title, Creator, and Organization in the catalogue to the JACAR database have been translated into English. However, at present some do not yet have translations; work to produce them is gradually moving forward. Furthermore, some catalogue entries such as Summary are in Japanese only. For that reason, it may be possible doing searches with keywords in Japanese rather than in English will yield more results. Accordingly, one approach for doing a search might be to use the browser's automatic translation feature to translate the English search keyword into Japanese, perform the search using that word, and then use the feature again to translate the search results back into English. Please note: the accuracy of such automatic translation features cannot be guaranteed. The search system also has a synonym and related-word function. This function provides for comprehensive search of a historical event or person which has several names such as "Pacific War", "Sino-Japanese War", "Greater East Asia War" and "China Incident," and such terms actually appearing in the documents that were in use at that time.

Merits of the English-language search system

As the titles for a growing number of the documents and the names of their creators and associated organizations are translated into English, English keywords can be used for searching through the titles in English. In cases of terms that have no common English translation, we have romanized the Japanese term. Foreign-language names are spelled with the confirmed spelling in the original language as much as possible, but in cases that confirmation was not possible, we applied romanized notation or common English spelling for the term. For names of persons, places, institutions, and other matters relating to China, we apply the Pinyin system as a general rule, and provide the Wade-Giles system of spelling alongside in case the latter system is used commonly for the particular term. In cases of Japanese katakana syllabic notation, we apply romanized notation. Romanized notation, however, have been applied as an expedient measure and not comprehensively utilized for all terms. Therefore, it is desirable that the user conducts searches with a combination of Pinyin, Wade-Giles systems, and romanized notation when needed.