Local archives in Japan*
Shuichi Yasuzawa**
In pre-modern Japan, Ieyasu (1542-1616), the founder of the Tokugawa
government, was succesful in the political unification of the country, organi
zing the local political powers of the Daimyos (feudal lords) under the shogu-
nate control. There was formed the strong system of an administrative gov
ernment network to exercise control over the country. With the shogunate at
the top of the political hierarchy, next came the Daimyos as local rulers of
their domains. And under a Daimyo, middle management was performed by
officials of his men, and those of native people down to the lowest rank at vil
lage level, a village being the smallest unit of the administrative organization.
There were about 70.000 villages.
The system worked well in notifying government laws and ordinances, levy
ing taxes and taking census of the population. Enormous amounts of records
were created by officials at each level, even in a small village, because they had
excellent abilities in reading, writing and calculating. Apart from those archi
ves, there have survived plenty of records of private family enterprises such as
farms, light industries and commercial businesses.
Japanese archives, as far as history since the seventeenth century is concer
ned, have faced two major crises of dispersion. The first one was when the
Tokugawa regime collapsed at the Meiji Restoration (1868). The records kept
by the officials of the Tokugawa government were not taken over by the new
Meiji government, but became the private property of those officials. These
documents included voluminous records relating to the administration of the
Daimyo (feudal lord), records created at the level of Daikan (local admin
istrator of a lower rank), and of O joy a or Syoya (local administrator of the
lowest rank) during the Tokugawa period of 270 years (1603 - 1868).
The second major crisis was when the Ministry of Home Affairs was abol
ished during the occupation immediately after World War II. This caused a
radical weakening of the powers of the central authority which had exerted its
influence upon documents control at the local level. This, together with the fi
nancial problems of local autonomous government, brought about a weaken
ing of the function of accumulating and preserving archives at the local level.
Moreover, the abolition of Mura (the smallest unit of local community), toge
ther with the successive reorganizations of the local governing system, chan
ged records creation and maintenance which had long been stable and well
exercised. In addition, the social status of people who had possessed the
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Tokugawa documents since the Meiji Restoration, degraded due to the War
and related causes. As a result, they found it not easy to preserve the docu
ments any longer, and began to dispose of them.
The above mentioned phenomena occurred simply because the administra
tive authorities at various levels had neglected their duty to preserve the rec
ords. This lays bare the fact that modern Japan lacked an archive preserva
tion system.
There is another reason why Japanese archives have not been well pre
served. The historiography of Japan under the state program of the Meiji new
gouvernment was undertaken as early as 1873, with the aim to write a political
history of Japan justifying the new government. Strange to say, the Toku
gawa regime which was denied politically by the Meiji new leaders, was dis
regarded as an object of historiography, although historical documents of
that period were abundant. In addition to the prejudiced selection of docu
ments, the method of collecting them was rather peculiar. In most cases
Eishabon (professionals' handwritten copies of archives) were produced at
each locality, while the original documents were left as they were.
It was not until the present century that historians (more precisely, econo
mic and social historians) began to adopt a different European method so as
to analyse old documents of the seventeenth century and thereafter. Those
scholars were not so many in number, but played a very important role in the
development of archives studies, particularly in the turbulent period during
and after World War II, when the possessors of invaluable documents from
the Tokugawa period found it difficult to keep them any longer. This gave
historians an opportunity to establish public facilities, under the auspices of
central authorities, to preserve these documents.
In 1951, Shiryokan, of which I am a staff member, was established by the
Ministry of Education which had tried since 1947 to collect historical docu
ments which were about to be dispersed. Shiryokan is not an institute to meet
the archival needs of state administration, but it provides researchers with do
cuments on local history. In 1971for the first time in Japan, the National Ar
chives were established. In 1972 Shiryokan was annexed to the National Insti
tute of Japanese Literature; it is now called the Department of Historical
Documents of the Institute. The objectives of Shiryokan are
1 to collect, arrange, preserve and study historical documents relating to local
authorities, enterprises, families and folk and culture in the Tokugawa and
early Meiji periods
2 to make the documents available to researchers. The Department now pre
serves about 500,000 items of original sources, 1238 reels of microfilm and
5,000 items of folk material.
Twice a year the department offers a training course for the arrangement,
management and conservation of archival materials, one course in Tokyo, the
other elsewhere.
There are reading rooms for scholars making use of the Department's col
lections. The finding aids exist in the form of card catalogues and printed cat
alogues. The latter are made of each provenance (37 volumes produced since
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