Someone mentioned to me today that a lot of Japanese government documents that relate to Asian history are available online through a web page managed by the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, or JACAR.
To view the documents, you need to download a DjVu plug-in, but there is a link to do so on the JACAR homepage.
I searched in English with terms like “Vietnam” and “Annam” and I came across some information on the Paracel Islands (Quần Đảo Hoàng Sa), which are listed on this page by the Chinese name of Xisha Qundao.
What caught my attention was a heading which read, “Xisha Qundao is territories and possessions of the Kingdom of Annam.”
I then did a search for “Xisha Qundao” and got several results. Unfortunately, my knowledge of Japanese is weak. The information is also written in a kind of documentary style which is a little different from ordinary Japanese. So I’m not quite sure what these documents are talking about.
It appears, however, that some documents date from the late 1930s and some from after WW II. After the war started, it looks like the Japanese attempted to figure out who the Paracel Islands belonged to, and these documents appear to contain information from the French perspective claiming that in the nineteenth century, before the French took over, the islands belonged to the Kingdom of Annam.
I know that people are searching the world for “evidence” about stuff like this. I don’t know if anyone has looked in the Japanese archives yet, but if they haven’t, then this post is to let them know that there is something there on this topic.
がんばって!
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I am confident in my Japanese skills, so I think I can help you out. Please send me the link to the document concerned and include your translation demand in detail.
Thank you. Personally I’m not all that interested in this issue, so it doesn’t really matter to me, but if you want to help out other readers, just giving people a sense of what is written in the sample page in this blog post would be good. The second paragraph is talking about 前世紀初頭安南國王. That seems important.
It’s disappointing not to see many replies to this important piece of information yet. I think if someone could compile evidence like this across multiple sources, it would shed more light to the current tension over the issues concerning the Paracel islands. I only know English and Vietnamese and so I can only gather information from these two languages and the rest has to rely on translations from other sources, and thus sometimes can’t be sure of the reliability of such translations.
A Japanese friend took a look at the sample document on the blog yesterday, and he had quite a bit of difficulty reading it. It is written in an older kind of documentary style which is a bit different from the way Japanese is commonly written today.
This document doesn’t really “prove” anything, but it’s interesting. I think what happened is that there were reports in French newspapers in the late 1930s in which French government officials said that the Hoang Sa belonged to the Kingdom of An Nam [An Nam Vuong Quoc], and had been occupied by the the Kingdom of An Nam in the early 19th century.
In the late 1930s, the French controlled the Kingdom of An Nam, so what they were probably really doing here was making a public statement that was probably directed to the Japanese, as they had started WW II in Asia, in which they were saying “these islands are our territory, so stay away.”
It’s just interesting that the French claimed that the Kingdom of An Nam had occupied the Hoang Sa in the early 19th century. I don’t know why they thought that way, but this is what people have been trying to demonstrate. However, the sources that people have found to date (from the Minh Mang era) have not been very clear about this.
How about the map found in China recently that shows clearly that the Paracel islands were not part of the Qing dynasty? I understand that this map doesn’t necessarily mean that those islands could have belonged to any other countries and territories in the region by then, but at least I’m curious to know if there might be any relation between the Japanese sources above and the map and the complicated relationship among the French, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Malaya region at that time. Understanding the dynamic of these inter-relationships might be helpful in explaining the current situation from a more holistic perspective. Just a thought.