Alison Raab Labonte's List: Japan

A progressive, independent quarterly on modern and contemporary Asia and on Asia's regional and global relations, published since 1968.

The DCJ collects materials on postwar Japan, weighted heavily toward the social sciences. Particular emphasis is placed on resources related to political science, diplomacy, economics and labor, and social-cultural phenomena. In addition to its selection of mainstream studies, the DCJ collects non-trade publications, journals, newsletters, scholarly papers, and reports issued by government ministries and institutions, private sector think tanks, and university affiliated research and policy institutions.

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I’m sitting in the Taiwanese National Library here in Taipei and just finished looking through an unusual publication put out in December, 1946 by 臺灣新生報社, the publisher of an important newspaper going by that name. It is entitled, 『民主とは何ぞや』(What is Democracy?)

What is immediately striking about the pamphlet is the fact that is is published in the Japanese language over a year after the end of the Japanese colonial period in August 1945. The general editor of the 臺灣新生報, Wu Jinlian (吳金煉) discusses the reason for this choice of language in a special explanatory preface: