Senshi Sosho

This project, funded and coordinated by The Corts Foundation, aims to translate into English a few volumes of the official Japanese publications of the war history series known as ‘Senshi Sosho’.

This project focuses specifically on the volumes which are relevant to the study of the Japanese attack on and the subsequent occupation of the former Dutch East-Indies in the period of 1941 to 1945. Currently, Volume 3, called The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, is being translated by the project team.

The so-called Japanese Monographs and Studies published in the late nineteen-forties were the first effort by historians (mostly U.S. Army and Navy general staff officers) to record in English the Japanese military history of the war of 1937-45.

The archive material used for these Monographs and Studies was also the foundation for the 102-volume Senshi Sosho history of the war written during the 1960s and 1970s. The Japanese War History Office in Tokyo was able to add more detailed information, including new data that came from Japanese documents returned to Japan in 1958 by the Allies which contained personal diaries and interviews with senior officers, etc. These Senshi Sosho volumes and a few additional volumes, compiled later, were only published in Japanese.

A significant role in this project will be for the Leiden University Office Tokyo (“LUOT”) as we will employ Japanese translators in Japan for translating and editing, while final editing will be executed in The Netherlands.
To guarantee optimal results we will work with close with the members of the Supervisory Board in Japan and two co – readers in the Netherlands

OBJECTIVES
To translate to English and to publish digitally and in print of a selection of volumes of the Japanese Senshi Sosho series.

See also:
National Institute of Defense Studies (Organisation)

Willem Remmelink (Expert)