The digitized, transcribed, and translated postcards offer an intimate glimpse into the aftermath of WWII in Japan
The Pacific War Postcards digital collection, a new addition to the East Asia Image Collection, is now available in the Lafayette Digital Repository. These 415 postcards were sent by family and friends of Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) in camps and warzones of the Philippines in the immediate postwar period, but they were never delivered. This intimate correspondence—fully transcribed in Japanese and translated into English—offers a glimpse into the everyday life, hopes, and cares of people on the Japanese home front after the war. Some of the postcards also contain printed imagery, including artwork by Nakahara Junichi 中原淳一, whose style is widely considered to have contributed to the development of shōjo manga character art.
Making this digital collection available was a highly collaborative project. Lafayette College Special Collections holds the physical collection of postcards, which was previously profiled in a segment on the Japanese public television broadcasting system, NHK. A Lafayette News article in Spring 2024 shared a descriptive profile of the collection and its surprising provenance, as well as an interview with Professor of History Paul Barclay, general editor of the East Asia Image Collection, who was instrumental in coordinating the donation of the collection to Special Collections by the Doyle family. Using digital images of the postcards which were captured by now-retired Visual Resources Curator Paul Miller, the National Showa Memorial Museum in Tokyo performed significant background research including transcription and translation of the correspondence. The mission of this institution, also known as the Showakan, is to commemorate the lives of ordinary Japanese people during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Showakan then shared this metadata with Dr. Barclay and Nora Zimmerman, Digital Archivist & Repository Librarian, who adapted it into the descriptive metadata that now accompanies the digital collection.
In addition to their scholarly and affective value, the Pacific War Postcards and indeed much of the more than 7500 digital records in the East Asia Image Collection are regularly used as teaching aids within and beyond the Lafayette community. As one history professor from the University of British Columbia shared with Professor Barclay, “[My students] really enjoy being able to look through all of the postcards and I am very grateful as an instructor that we can all access these materials to help them have a fresh angle on learning Japanese history from a visual and material culture perspective.”