We are delighted to announce the following recipients of the 20th Century Japan Research Awards for 2026. Congratulations!
Dr. Amanda Kennell (Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame). Her project title is “Pitiful Elephants and Postwar Zoo Animal Media.”
Ms. Eleanor Eriko Tsuchiya Lenoe-Williams (Ph.D. student in History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick). Her project title is “Militarized Boyhood: Japanese Child Army Followers in the Allied Occupation and Korean War.”
Each year these partners accept applications for grants to support research in the Gordon W. Prange and East Asia Collections on topics related to the period of the Allied Occupation of Japan and its aftermath, 1945-1960.
As a graduate student studying Human-Computer Interaction, Daniel Yeom has a deep interest in user-experience design, built on his prior knowledge in Library Science. At the Prange Collection he worked on projects to improve researchers’ experience of understanding and requesting sources. In this guest post he offers reflections on his time as student assistant.
As a child, I enjoyed watching Korean historical dramas because the rich stories helped me understand actual events that shaped my cultural heritage. During my undergraduate studies at the University of Maryland College Park, I took classes that emphasized Korea’s relations with Japan and China to further explored the country’s history. In early July of 2025 I began to work as a Student Assistant at the Gordon W. Prange Collection.
Updating user guide documents and the digital catalog of Korean-language print materials
My first project was re-designing and updating the Prange Collection’s user guide documents in order to provide researchers with step-by-step directions for how to request print documents from UMD Special Collections. Having last been updated in 2015, the user guides felt quite outdated and not as user-friendly. Hence, I provided my input by limiting the amount of text, incorporating more visual aids and color contrast, and writing explicit directions for how to properly request print materials. In total, I have updated user guides for the Prange Collection’s magazines, newspaper microfilm, photographs, and gift collections from donors.
Additionally, I was tasked with updating the digital catalog of Korean-language print materials in the Prange Collection. First, I reviewed several Korean books by taking detailed notes to keep track of crucial themes and data. Using my notes, I wrote 1-2 paragraph summary annotations that described the background context and main points of each book. I also edited some of the metadata fields by providing more Korean and English translations of book titles and providing updated versions of book cover images.
Organizing the Imperial Japanese Navy photo albums
As the Fall semester began in September, my next task was organizing the Imperial Japanese Navy photo albums, which were created during the early 20th Century (before World War 2).
Firstly, I printed “Navy Album” call slips with specific numbers ranging from #1 to #187, which I used to replace the previous hand-written call slips for each album. After replacing the call slips, I organized the albums neatly according to their number, size and weight on the Prange Collection’s storage shelves.
Image below shows the magazine Sekai no Kaigun (Naval fleets of the world) which contains photos of other militarized nations’ modern battleships and describes how they compare to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fleets.
Imperial Japanese Navy sailors, image below, are docked at Cape Town and loading coal onto their ship before continuing their journey overseas.
Image below shows students from a secondary school for girls on a class excursion to visit an Imperial Japanese Navy ship. They are seen enjoying their lunch with sailors aboard.
Updating access copy spreadsheets
During the later half of the fall semester, one of my primary duties involved updating the access copy spreadsheets for different categories of book collections including anthropology, music, fine arts, law, science and medicine. Specifically, I thoroughly analyzed and organized Excel spreadsheets for the various book collections by deleting unnecessary columns, using bolded text and lines to organize sub-categories, and including translations in English and Japanese.
Improving accessibility of the Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories of Interviewees catalog
In December, my final project was improving the accessibility of the Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories of Interviewees catalog. Ultimately, I chose to organize all 102 interviewees based on alphabetical order by their last name, and provided ample amount of blank space between sections in order to promote better readability for all researchers. Lastly, I embedded URL links within each interviewee’s name so that researchers just need to simply click the specific name to access the interviewee’s personal information and transcript.
Throughout my work within the Prange Collection, I have been blessed with the opportunity to further explore Japanese history during the post-World War 2 period. In particular, I’m grateful to Kana Jenkins and Motoko Lezec for providing me with tasks relevant to my field of interests in user experience design, library science and history. Additionally, I am thankful to my other colleagues (Grant Takeuchi, Noriaki Yao and Kirsten Gaffke) for their advice and assistance with my various tasks. I look forward to potentially seeking more UX design and IT support opportunities at the University of Maryland Libraries!
Daniel Yeom’s position as Student Assistant at the Prange Collection was supported by the Marlene J. Mayo Endowed Program Fund. More information about the fund and support for the Libraries can be found here.
Grant Takeuchi, while a senior undergraduate student studying for his bachelor’s degree in Information Science and pursuing a minor in Japanese at the University of Maryland College Park, spent the fall semester of 2025 working in the Prange Collection. In this guest post he offers reflections on his experience as student assistant.
From the summer through the fall of 2025, I had the opportunity to work as a student assistant at the Gordon W. Prange Collection. Throughout the course of my time there, I was given various opportunities to work on smaller projects, though my primary assignment was to collect metadata for unprocessed law books.
As I read, handled and contextualized the various materials that I encountered, I came to better understand the nuanced history of wartime Japan. Each document, hand-processed and subjected to intense scrutiny, reminded me of the strict repercussions that Japan faced following its violent participation in World War II. I felt these restrictions most strongly in my experience with war-time literary works. Many of these texts bore handwritten marks revealing the harsh pressure imposed by the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD).
It was through this exposure that I became particularly interested in the author Ishikawa Tatsuzō, a prominent writer during wartime Japan who remains largely unknown in the West. Ishikawa is best known for the novel Soldiers Alive, which is also the only one of his major works to have been translated into English. He wrote this novel after being commissioned by a liberal Tokyo magazine to act as a wartime journalist and to document the cruel behavior of Japanese soldiers deployed in China. The narrative follows a single unit of Imperial soldiers as they marched toward Nanjing and focuses heavily on the psychological trauma and internal violence that they endured.
In modern scholarship, Ishikawa is often considered a liberal figure for his honest depiction of Japanese brutality toward Chinese civilians. My own prior understanding of Ishikawa was driven by his widely known imprisonment following the publication of Soldiers Alive. Because Imperial Japan deemed Ishikawa’s writing so dangerous and unpatriotic to the extent that he faced legal punishment, I assumed that he was unquestionably on the “good” side of history. However, personal archival research complicated this understanding.
While examining literary journals, essays and novels held in the Prange Collection, I encountered multiple direct and indirect references to Ishikawa. One specific article on the topic of French Indochina, having received heavy censorship, contrasted his critical stance toward Japanese military conduct in China. Luckily, this article was accompanied by an in-depth CCD document that explained each proposed censorship action in English.
Ishikawa’s perspective on Indochina leaned toward sympathy for Japanese imperial expansion into and control of the region, claiming rule by Japan to be preferable to Western colonialism. This was much to my surprise given his modern reputation as a harshly punished liberal writer. It’s hard to think that someone who witnessed first-hand the Japanese atrocities in China would have such a placative view of imperial activity elsewhere. I think this ideological inconsistency succinctly illustrates the limits of relying on popular reputation when analyzing history. Ishikawa’s writings reveal not a single, coherent ideological position, but a set of context-dependent criticisms shaped largely by circumstance and the often-unreliable human conscience.
One of the most valuable insights that I got from working at the Prange Collection was the realization that our collective understanding of history, however modern or informed, cannot be strictly defined. Though the Prange Collection is neatly organized and meticulously categorized, its deeper meaning contains multitudes, just as Ishikawa Tatsuzō does.
Grant Takeuchi graduated after the fall 2025 semester with a Bachelor of Science in Information Science from the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies.
Daniel Yeom worked with us this past fall semester as one of our Student Assistants. In this guest post he introduces Korean-language publications in the Prange Collection. Yeom shows how a magazine titled “Our Friend,” for example, sought to restore cultural pride amongst the Korean community residing in postwar Japan, and, by extension, equip future generations of repatriated Koreans to lead a unified Korea.
During the Japanese occupation of Korea (1905-1945), thousands of Koreans immigrated to major Japanese cities in search of manual labor jobs. After World War II ended, many Koreans were repatriated to their homeland, but others still remained in Japan throughout the next several decades. In the late 1940s, the zainichi community of Koreans living in Japan began to publish Korean-language texts that openly discussed Korean culture, which was previously prohibited by the Japanese government.
Our Friend (Uri Dhong-mu) is a Korean-language magazine published monthly for zainichi Korean students, whose families remained in Japan after World War II. This magazine highlights various subjects for the zainichi Korean student community. In the Prange Collection, there are currently five volumes of Our Friend (Vol #16 ~ #21), which all discuss Korean folktales and informational articles about scientific and cultural topics.
Vol #16 of Our Friend was published in January 1949 and included an article about Korean New Year traditions for young children such as flying kites, writing messages in calligraphy, and bowing to their elders to wish them good luck. Another article shows images with captions of how to build modern brick-layered houses, and compares the architecture of countries around the world. A third article describes the steps for teaching children how to carefully ignite and manage a charcoal stove at the optimal temperature.
Volume #16 also explains arts and science-related activities for children. For example, the author explains step-by-step instructions for how to fold make-shift pencil holders from paper food packaging cartons and containers. Another activity involves making “invisible calligraphy ink” by creating a liquid mixture from baking powder, alum, vinegar, salt, apples, onions, and persimmons. After writing words with the liquid mixture, children can bring the paper near a candle to reveal the ink!
Lastly, a major recurring theme in the Our Friend magazine was embracing a unified Korea after World War II and remembering Korea’s culturally-rich history. In Volume #16, children learn about the Three Kingdoms period (when Korea was split amongst Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla) through the story of Gwanchung, the legendary Silla warrior. Through his sacrifice in battle, Gwanchung became a martyr and boosted the Silla army to slowly unite the three kingdoms of Korea under one banner. Hence, under the same theme, the authors of Our Friend magazine seek to encourage future generations of Korean children to work towards reunification of their country under a strong national government.
During the 40-year long Japanese occupation, (1905-1945), the Korean people were unable to freely embrace their cultural heritage. Hence, shortly after World War II, the Korean community residing in Japan was finally able to learn and share all aspects of their culture such as their history, traditions and language. Through Our Friend magazine and other Korean-language publications, future generations of Koreans would have the opportunity to not only learn more about current affairs in the world, but also contribute their growing knowledge and skills towards building their mother country into a stable, prosperous nation once again.
Daniel Yeom is currently working towards an advanced degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCIM) at the University of Maryland’s College of Information.
‘Tis the season for holiday cookie exchanges, for festive arrays of home-baked offerings. It is the best of times, or it is the worst of times depending on where you stand on sugar joy. To get inspiration and ideas for pies, cakes and other sweet treats, look no further than the Prange Collection’s holdings of postwar Japanese baking.
First up we have「パンとお菓子の作り方」(Pan to okashi no tsukurikata; How to make bread and pastries, Call#TX-0174) a 1948 baking book by Uno Kyuichi. The cover shows a table set with a brioche bun, a classic sponge cake with fruit and fresh cream. Inside, color illustrations of black and white pinwheels, nutty shortbread, orange flower thumbprint cookies. Did I mention an apple charlotte, lemon meringue pie, a Bundt cake studded with sour cherries, even a quivering molded jello? The table of contents indicate an encyclopedic coverage of the gamut of American style baking and European patisserie, from croissants and eclairs to coffee waffles, Parker House rolls, and the strawberry shortcake…
「お菓子の作り方」(Okashi no tsukurikata; How to make pastries, 1948, Call#TX-0169) by Tsutsui Masayuki was published in the same year. Note the cover image, showing a modern Japanese woman wearing a Western-style blouse and apron instead of the traditional kappogi, a cooking coverall garment worn over kimonos. A page of illustrations show a panoply of baking tools — jello molds, donut hole rings, biscuit cutters make an appearance as well as more classical Japanese utensils such as a clayware suribachi (mortar and pestle) or a wooden urakoshi (strainer). In「洋風・和風 おやつの作り方」 (Yofu wafu oyatsu no tsukurikata, How to make Western style and Japanese style sweets, 1948, Call#TX-0170) by Kitagawa Keizo, a makisu mat of split bamboo, used for making sushi rolls, is cleverly repurposed for making jelly roll cakes.
Interestingly, in the preface to “How to make pastries” the author notes the following:
“Pastries using sugar can be, depending on its manner of consumption, a source of energy which is good for maintaining health but at the same time it can be detrimental. It’s a question of when you eat them and how much. But as long as they are consumed with intention and in moderation, they are more than worthy as sources of nutrition. … It is undeniable that our culinary lives have been greatly enrichened by the beneficence of the Allied Forces and sugar rationings. But sugar is a substitute for rice, so overeating pastries is equivalent to overeating rice. But in the end, the fact that sugar has become a substitute staple should put a break on eating too many pastries and it is actually a safety valve against over consumption.” (pp1-2; translation by author)
The reality though was perhaps more complex. In the Prange’s collection of censored newspaper articles, there is an item in Asahi Shimbun titled “This month’s sugar distribution unlikely”. This is dated to January 17, 1948, the same year the above books were published. Although it had been over two years since Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II, much of the population was dangerously undernourished. Another article in Yukan Miyako dated August 8, 1947 describes a mass meeting held by residents of Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward. The article states, “The meeting will decide a petition to the GHQ, the government etc. to overcome the food crisis, collecting the voices of inhabitants suffering from delayed rationings.” However, allusions to food shortages or mention of the thriving black market was prohibited by Occupation authorities and in the case of this short news piece, it received the censorship action of “suppress.”
Hardship, of-course, is the mother of invention. Families had to get creative when providing oyatsu, or after school snacks for their children. For example, Shufu no tomo, a magazine for housewives, featured various snacks that could be made with sweet potatoes. Featured on the back page of the October 1946 issue are recipes for biscuits made with ground yam flour, yams roasted in their skins then split in half, and five variations of traditional Japanese confectionery based on imo’an paste, cooked and mashed yams with a pinch of salt added to bring forth and maximize its natural sweetness. One recipe suggests cutting yams into thin matchsticks and then pan frying them to a crisp. The resulting concoction resembles the petals of a chrysanthemum flower and the recipe instructs that it be served on chrysanthemum leaves. Such visual playfulness was perhaps a way to bring comfort and a degree of joy to sweets-deprived children.
By 1949, when censorship operations by the Allied Forces ended, the landscape of cookbook publishing had evolved. The illustrated pages of 「お菓子と食料品」(Okashi to shokuryohin, Snacks and foods, 1949, Call#TX-0171) opens out to display a colorful spread of wagashi, traditional Japanese sweets, mostly based on mochi rice powder and an, sweet bean paste, in seamless co-existence with Western-style cakes and desserts. What is interesting is the presence of new hybrid concoctions such as the “strawberry sandwich” which could be described as a cross between strawberry shortcake and “dorayaki”, shown on the same page below. Dorayaki originated as a Japanese style pancake, baked to resemble the shape of a gong (dora), usually filled with sweet bean paste. Perhaps we can see here the glimmers of Asian-style bakeries popular today, with their use of Japanese-inspired flavors and ingredients such as matcha, black sesame, white miso, plum, yuzu and more.
Gordon W. Prange Collection 
