Archives the raw material of history

An article from the Daily Yomiuri Online reports on the need in Japan for greater control over National Government records.

The Japanese government has set up a panel to explore the situation. The panel's interim report recommends a more integrated and authoritative approach to the identification, appraisal and transfer or disposal of government records. It calls for better awareness of public (versus private) ownership of government records and better control over their fate to avoid deliberate, accidental or unintentional loss. The journalist, Yuko Mukai, notes that extra government funding directed towards understanding and improving the “administration of official documents and important records” will only be worthwhile if Japanese bureaucrats are educated about their importance and status as public records, and hence the property of the Japanese government and its people. Trust in the government is highlighted as a major issue. The article points to records on people who contracted HIV/AIDS as a result of state-sanctioned medical treatment, denied by the health ministry but located after an enquiry was ordered.

The article gives some alarming figures: the Japanese National Archives employs only 42 people, compared to the 300 employed at the South Korean National Archives. Can this be true? Such as small number. The article also notes the smallish size of the building of the Japanese National Archives (which I took a photo of and posted earlier this year). If this is their main storage building, then it is indeed small for a national repository.

I found this article interesting because of my recent visit to Japan and also because of the ongoing controversy re how, and what, history is taught in Japan. The keeping of government records is not only important for democracy, as the Japanese Prime Minister is quoted as saying, but also for education and those things that are supposed to flow from it such as understanding and tolerance. It is perhaps unfair to single out the Japanese for its censorship of educational textbooks. Other countries have been guilty of editing history to present a favoured view of the past. This is why it’s important that the archives, the raw material of future textbooks, be kept and made available so that histories can be written based on the original documentary evidence, and so that these histories can be questioned and re-written by future historians.

Apart from comparisons with South Korea, the article compares the size and staff of the Japanese National Archives with the United States’ NARA. I hope the panel also take note of the current lawsuit against Dick Cheney and his refusal to treat the records of his vice-presidency as part of the public record when trying to convince government officials that the records they create as part of their jobs are not their own private property.