The following is a guest post by Shuhan Suzuki, a conservator from Taiwan, specializing in paper and Asian painting. She moved to the United States in 2015, where she focused on Asian painting and paper conservation at a private studio in Washington, D.C. She is a Library Technician in the General Collections Conservation Section for the Library of Congress. Her work includes treatments for general collection items, such as books and paper, as well as conservation projects involving rare books.
In March 2024, a researcher visited the Asian Division Reading Room to look at three Japanese military documents. The Asian Division determined that the condition of these documents would not allow for safe handling by the researcher and requested that I perform conservation treatment to facilitate safe access.
These documents are titled “Soren chōhō no tokuisei ni tsuite” (On the peculiarity of Soviet espionage), and “Soren no shihō seido ni tsuita : tsuketari, Hafu Kangoku no genjō” (The judicial system of Soviet Union, with addendum on current prison conditions in Khabarovsk), and were produced in 1941, while the third, “Tokujō gun gokuhi” (Military intelligence secrets) is from 1945.
These three Japanese military documents are Asian Division collection items. Following World War II, nearly 300,000 volumes were added to the collections. The documents they contain were initially requisitioned by the Allied forces in Japan and sent to the Washington Document Center (WDC) between 1945 and 1952. Both of “Soren chōhō no tokuisei ni tsuite” and “Soren no shihō seido ni tsuita : tsuketari, Hafu Kangoku no genjō” were catalogued to note the individual WDC number on the front cover.
These military documents were designated gokuhi (top secret). Both “Soren chōhō no tokuisei ni tsuite” and “Soren no shihō seido ni tsuita : tsuketari, Hafu Kangoku no genjō” have red 極秘 (top secret) stamped on the top right cover. In contrast, “Tokujō gun gokuhi” has each page bordered in red with 特情軍極密 (Military intelligence secret) at the top and a caution advising to burn the document upon reading and to use with extreme caution.
As I worked on these three documents, I gained an understanding of their content. Both “Soren chōhō no tokuisei ni tsuite” and “Soren no shihō seido ni tsuita : Tsuketari, Hafu Kangoku no genjō” were published by the Military Intelligence Department of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Manchuria Special Unit 3036 in 1941, the same year the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed. These publications were primarily circulated among high-ranking military generals to provide them with the latest intelligence reports.
Both of “Soren chōhō no tokuisei ni tsuite” and “Soren no shihō seido ni tsuita : tsuketari, Hafu Kangoku no genjō” are single folded folios bound with staples at the side. “Tokujō gun gokuhi” is printed on typewriter paper and stapled at the top left. The pages are brittle and prone to breaking due to the acid and lignin in the wood pulp used to make the paper. The folded pages cannot be opened freely as they tend to break along the fold lines.
Given the time sensitivity, the conservation focused on non-aqueous treatments to stabilize the pages. This included removing rusted staples and cotton cords for disbinding, removing degraded cellophane tapes from the cover, flattening cockled pages with tacking irons, filling large losses of paper with heat-set tissues, and mending tears and splits with thin Japanese heat-set tissues.
After treatment was completed, the foldout was carefully refolded into its original format. The pages were then labeled in their original order and housed in custom polyester film enclosures, allowing researchers to move and inspect the fragile pages without causing further loss. The polyester-sleeved pages were stored in a four-flap enclosure in a portfolio binding.
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