INQUIRY · LIVEv2026.08
Overseas Records

Records of offices
across the sea

In the five regions Japan administered until 1945, records equivalent to today’s municipal histories remain: surveys, statistics and photographs compiled by the governments-general and agencies, and the official documents themselves. Many are now published digitally by institutions in Japan, Taiwan and Korea.

Two different things sit side by side here

Both are records of regions Japan administered until 1945. Neither ranks above the other; they are simply different in kind.

Office histories

Books in which a government-general or agency wrote its own administration as a continuous history. They correspond to municipal histories in Japan proper.

For example: Ten-Year History of the South Seas Agency; History of Taitō Prefecture

Yearbooks, statistics, official documents

Annual surveys, statistics, gazettes, staff lists, photograph albums. They may be about a place, but they are not histories written through. They correspond to local material in Japan proper.

For example: Karafuto Agency Administration Yearbook; Tainan Prefecture Statistical Report

Related content · Local HistoryFind Municipal Histories and Local Materials→

Choose an office to open its collection below.

Government-General Building, Taihoku · Period photograph · public domain

Loading the survey records…

The survey records themselves — archive names, book titles, quoted wording and findings — remain in Japanese. Book titles are proper nouns: “函館市史” is the name you would ask for at a library, and an English rendering would name a book that does not exist. Quoted wording is evidence; translating it would stop it being the wording actually found. The pages you reach through these links are in Japanese too. Labels, categories and explanations are translated; the records are not.