On Wednesday I visited the Showa National Memorial Museum and collected various reference information about the museum and its libraries which I added to my reference wiki. The 6th and 7th floor are fixed exhibitions of life in the Showa period, particularly wartime Japan and caused a bit of a stir when it was opened since the exhibit talks about everything except the war itself. Of course, you can walk just down the street to Yasukuni shrine and the revisionist Yushukan museum if you want to learn about Japan’s valiant but ultimately failed attempt to “liberate Asia” in the the “Great East Asian War”.
I was most interested in the libraries on the 4th and 5th floor which has an excellent collection of materials and audio/visual. They have several digitized wartime journals, lots of books and periodicals from throughout the Showa period (corresponding to the reign of emperor Hirohito from 1926-1989) and a fantastic collection of movies and records. I found no less than three records with songs connected to Kawashima Yoshiko (see my earlier entry). Two with lyrics she wrote, and a third Manchurian folk song which she actually sings herself. I had heard mention of this in a biography of her, but never expected to find and hear the actually records. Now, if I can only get them onto mp3…