JACAR Newsletter

Introducing Newly Released Content on the JACAR Site

The year 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. On August 15th, known as the “Day of the War Ended” in Japan, the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records released a special exhibition and video to commemorate this historic anniversary.

The on-line special exhibition “Japan’s Withering Empire: Surrender, Demobilization, and Repatriation” explores the themes of surrender and the subsequent demobilization of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, both at home and abroad. It also examines the repatriation of Japanese nationals overseas through an introduction to related historical materials.

We have also produced a YouTube video “【JACAR Remembers】The Road to the End of the War as Seen Through Publicly Available Internet Materials,” which showcases relevant publicly-available historical documents concerning the process leading up to the end of the war, during an approximately month-long period surrounding August 15, 1945. (You can view the video with English-language subtitles by turning them on in the “settings” menu, located along the bottom-right side of the viewing window.)

In November, we opened the online special exhibition “The Battle of Peleliu as Seen in JACAR Materials.” Peleliu Island in the Micronesian nation of Palau is known for having been a fierce battleground of the Pacific War. This exhibition introduces various JACAR resources related to this battle, including telegrams reporting the situation, maps used by units, and postwar reports on the efforts to collect the remains of those who died in battle.

※This exhibition is made possible with the cooperation of Toei Company, Ltd., the distributor of the film “Peleliu: Paradise’s Guernica.”

We hope that you will find these offerings to be of interest!

Japan Center for Asian Historical Records