Message from JACAR

JACAR was delighted to agree to the British Library’s proposal of a joint exhibition. JACAR’s mission is to make available to people both within Japan and overseas as many historical documents as possible relating to Japan’s relations with neighbouring Asian countries in order to promote a deeper understanding of history and to improve international relationsips. Since its foundation 10 years ago JACAR has succeeded in becoming an internationally recognised digital archive of historical documents. To encourage use of its services outside Japan, JACAR has maintained regular contact with the EAJRS (European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists), an organisation for specialists working wih Japanese materials in universities, libraries, museums and archives across Europe. The present project to make the British Library’s important material available to the world on JACAR’s website is a direct result of these contacts with the Library’s Japanese Section.

It may come as something of a surprise that a collection of Japanese and Chinese prints depicting the Sino-Japanese War is preserved in the British Library – an explanation of how this came about can be found on this site in the introduction to the Gallery– but it is natural that the Library wishes to make them widely available to anyone who is interested. JACAR and the British Library, as an archive and a library respectively, have different characteristics, but we share the goal of making accessible to a large audience materials which are the common property of humanity. With this aim in mind, each of us has brought to this project our respective materials, information and expertise. Cooperation between museums, libraries and archives is becoming increasingly widespread nowadays but this project might be said to be a pioneering example of such international cooperation using the internet.

At the time of the Sino-Japanese War, prints, not photographs, were the news media. They also had a role as propaganda. Nowadays, however, they should be the object of dispassionate historical study. In recent years the field of history has seen the growth in the study of iconography and the use of visual materials. I believe it is of great significance that through the present project researchers in Japan will be made aware of the important visual materials which the British Library’s collection of Sino-Japanese War prints surely are. JACAR is contributing archival documents which record the same events from a different angle. Through this joint project JACAR and the British Library seek to offer the resources, whether prints or documents, as much as possible in their original form. It is left up to the users to decide how to interpret the character and content of this material.

For JACAR this is the first experience of producing and publishing an internet exhibition with another institution and also its first collaborative endeavour with a foreign organisation. I would like to extend my gratitude to the British Library for providing us with this wonderful opportunity. I hope that many people will visit this online exhibition and see how the Sino-Japanese War was depicted, recorded and viewed by the people of its own time.

Director-General of the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records