Page 212 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Mikun MA, Gang LI & Jianhua WU / A review on the studies of Japan’s plundering of books and literatures from China 211

organization set up a special subordinate office named “the office of arranging books and
samples of east China” which was responsible for the arrangement of books robbed from
Nanjing. In 1939, the committee was revised as “the committee of collecting and preparing
materials for the construction of Japanese colonies in east China”. This committee played a
very important role in the Nanjing “cultural massacre”, and it attracted much more attention of
researchers. Relevant materials can be found at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records and
on its website.
What is more, investigation groups and culture spies were dispatched to search for books
throughout China. Surprisingly, the people who provided guidance for book plundering turned out
to be Japanese experts on China studies. Yan (1992) believes that this behavior was an abnormal
phenomenon when Japanese ideology was coopted by Japanese militarism thought. In most
cases, Japanese soldiers were well-organized while plundering of books. Nonetheless, there were
still individual actions of stealing Chinese books or relics instead of handing them to Japanese
government. For example, Baigyo Mizuno, a Japanese monk and ronin, looted Hsuan-tsang’s sarira
and some valuable literatures which were found in his residence after the war (Omata Yukio, 1985).
As the war went on, organizations to assist or to carry out the plundering were established one
after another, which demonstrated that activities of plundering of books were consistent with
Japanese military aggression. Because the activities of plundering were well-organized and goal-
directed rather than individual and casual actions, we can conclude that the organizations were
essentially used to help Japanese aggression (Zhao, 2013). What’s more, the utilization of robbed
books can also prove Japanese aggressive nature. Japan also created Institutes which used Chinese
book resources to conduct research on East Asia endemic disease, culture, economy, and other
aspects. Those organizations had expanded their functions. In a word, Japan had built a complete
system including searching for, collecting, arranging, translating, and utilizing Chinese books.

3.3 Methods of plundering

Japan used a variety of methods to expropriate and destroy books from China. Japanese were
active in searching for valuable Chinese books when Japan rose as a new imperial power. It used its
hegemonic status to force down book prices. In 1907, Mitsubishi Zaibatsu only paid 100 000 silver
dollars to buy Lu Xinyuan’s private book collections, which included Bisong Building (books and
celebrity manuscripts of Song and Yuan Dynasty), Building of a hundred of thousand books (books
of Ming Dynasty), Shou Xian Building (reprint books and hand-written copies since Ming Dynasty).
Now those books are kept in Seikado Bunko (P. Y. Li, 2005). In the early 20th century, Naito Konan
took the opportunity to search for Chinese historical materials when performing official business in
northeast China. His greatest “achievements” were taking approximately 4 300 photographs of Qing
Dynasty old records written in Manchu (Man Wen Lao Dang), and secretly took 5 300 photographs