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Mikun MA, Gang LI & Jianhua WU / A review on the studies of Japan’s plundering of books and literatures from China 205

materials. Researchers should undertake a comprehensive consideration of both advantages and
disadvantages of each kind of historical material. Quality research requires that investigators
evaluate the reliability of sources and learn how to use them appropriately.

2.2 The discovery and arrangement of “new historical materials”

Japanese historical records, photographs and oral archives belong to “new historical materials”.
They are “new” not because they are newly produced, but because they are seldom used. It is
not enough to use domestic materials alone. Japanese historical materials are really needed for
recent research. Zhao (2001) has mentioned that the Receiving Committee for Chinese books
and documents once produced a special report after they received those looted books in Nanjing.
The fifth part of this report called A report on the arrangement of books clearly documented the
whole process of their activities of plundering, transportation, arrangement and classification.
After the war, a book named A general catalogue of cultural properties plundered from China was
compiled by Japanese Special Property Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and published
by Fuji-shuppana Press, which is a general catalogue of all cultural property robbed from China.
Meng (2007b) has proved it was exactly translated from a Chinese official document named
The number and estimate of Chinese public and private cultural properties losses during the
war used for making a claim for compensation. In 1970, Ngasawa Kikuya, a famous Japanese
bibliographer, wrote The detailed introduction of Chinese ancient books of Jing’an. And Zhao
(2010) demonstrated that those rare Chinese books listed once belonged to the National Central
Library and were deposited in Hong Kong for safety before they got robbed by Japan. On Aug.
17, 1986, Aoki Minoru, a former librarian of the Dalian Library of South Manchurian Railway
Company (SMR), wrote an article in Shimbun Akahata (a Japanese newspaper)—Japanese
invaders’ behavior during the “cultural massacre” in Nanjing. He witnessed and described
Japanese soldiers’ activities of plundering books in Nanjing (Meng, 2007b). To a certain extent,
these Japanese publications represent an admission of guilt by Japan. If we take full advantage
of this kind of materials, it will be hard for Japan to deny its crime, but there is more to be done.
Chinese scholars have not collected Japanese papers and historical materials enough yet. Even
when we have access to some of those materials, we can not assimilate them into our research
because of language problems.
Photographs and oral testimony by witnesses are two other new types of historical materials.
For example, Chen Chao, a professor of Fudan University interviewed librarians who worked
in Shanghai Libraries during the war. The interviewees included Gu Tinglong and Li Fangfu,
both of whom were honorary curators of Shanghai Library, and Deng Baoguang who worked at
the Commercial Press and facilitated the establishment of the library of the Institute of Oriental
Economic Research. The Shanghai Library’s online exhibition also includes rare photographs of