Reprints of Japanese Colonial Documents

The Japanese librarian of my university sometimes asks me to take a look at the catalogues that she receives from Japanese publishers, and to pick the stuff I need for my research. She does this because she knows that I am working on colonialism and youth mobilization. I cannot exaggerate how much I love this collaboration between us! In fact, there have been a lot of reprints (復刻版) of colonial documents published by a number of Japanese publishers. Columbia seems to own a lot already, and is trying to keep up with new purchase as more students are working on Japanese imperialism now. These reprints are really useful since they are usually compiled in an organized way by specialists, and will save us A LOT of time to go through many different archives. It will certainly make it easier for Japan historians to step into the colonialist aspect of Japanese modern history, which probably intimidated many scholars who have no Korean and/or Chinese language ability in the past.

Unfortunately, these great resources are scattered around the library web catalogue, and there is no easy way to know the existence of these reprints unless you already know the title. I am thinking of making an annotated bibliography of the reprints of primary documents on Japanese colonialism that our library owns (as my final project for the Japanese bibliography class that I am taking this semester).

In the meantime, I would suggest that you take a look at 6 publishers to get a sense of what’s been reprinted. If it is reprinted, there is a high possibility that it is available through interlibrary loans in the US, so there is no need for you to spend hours to make a copy of them in Asia.

不二出版: The most prominent publisher famous for lots of important reprints. You can see the complete list of their publications here.

近現代資料刊行会：It mainly publishes reprints of social welfare related documents and journals. 朝鮮社会事業 etc.

ゆまに書房：Most famously they sell the digital version of 台湾日々新報. Their website does not have the complete list of 復刻版 for some reason, but they have reprinted a lot of interesting things. To find their publications, I would go to ジュンク堂書店’s database and search ゆまに書房, and then 絞込 with keywords like “台湾” or “朝鮮.”

緑蔭書房: I cannot find their website. Again, I would use ジュンク堂書店’s database and narrow down with keywords. They have reprinted 近代朝鮮文学日本語作品集、日本統治期台湾文学集成, and a lot of other interesting journals from the colonial period.

龍渓書舎: Search in ジュンク堂 again. It has lots of reprints of single volume publications from the colonial period, as well as massive 資料集 like 日本植民地教育政策史料集成.

三一書房: Not so much on Japanese colonies but it has lots of reprints on modern Japan. Their 資料集 titles are here.