Japanese Collection

The Japanese collection contains more than 128,000 titles in 172,000 volumes (August 31, 2003). Of these, some 40 percent deal with politics, law, economics, public finance, sociology, statistics, education, and defense. Other emphases include historical and geographical works (25 percent of the collection), language and literature (17 percent), and science and technology, including both industry and agriculture (10 percent). The Japanese collection's 1800 serial titles include many left-wing journals of the 1920s and their right-wing counterparts of the 1930s and 1940s.

Japan's colonial efforts in China are well represented in the Japanese collection's diplomatic studies of Sino-Japanese relations, in its holdings on Japanese policy toward China, in Japanese treatises on colonial theory and management, and in a vast store of administrative records and field studies relating to the affairs of the Japanese empire. These and other holdings are cited in G. William Skinner and Winston Hsieh's Modern Chinese Society: An Analytical Bibliography. Publications in Japanese, 1644–1969 (Stanford University Press, 1973).

The collection has many documents relating to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the early 1930s. In addition to contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, researchers may consult publications of the South Manchuria Railway Company and of the puppet Manchukuo government. Another puppet regime, maintained in North China by the Japanese after 1937, is also well represented. (See Frederick W. Mote, Japanese Sponsored Governments in China, 1937–1945, Hoover Institution Press, 1954.)

Researchers interested in Japan's domestic history will find impressive documentation of the social and economic turmoil-rural-urban flight, strikes, food riots, and landlord-tenant disputes-that resulted from Japan's headlong modernization drive in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. Through government reports and other materials in the Japanese collection, these events can be followed almost day by day.

The extremist activism this tumult aroused and the government's subsequent repression of leftist organizations are recorded in the holdings of party newspapers, pamphlets, and other documents. (See Nobutake Ike, The Hoover Institution Collection on Japan, Hoover Institution Press, 1958.)

The East Asian Collection has substantial holdings on postwar Japan, including white papers, journals, newspapers, business histories, and personal diaries.

Hoover Archives Holdings on Japan
Other Japanese Collection Finding Aids
Japanese Reference Sources

Reference Contact and Recommending Library Purchases

For reference help with the Japanese collection or to suggest Japanese-language titles for purchase, please contact: