Historians and political scientists are frequently handicapped in analyzing the contemporary scene, or a recent period, by lack of documentary evidence. The Pacific war, however, has created a unique situation regarding Japanese political and economic documents giving authoritative evidence of Japanese affairs during the two decades prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As a result of military defeat, the Japanese government and people have been forced to submit to the occupation authorities thousands of documents which otherwise might never have been made available for research purposes. The total sum of this material is so great that significant research work is now possible in many fields of recent Japanese government, politics, and diplomacy.

Soon after the beginning of the occupation, military teams were assigned the task of collecting documents. Their instructions were broad, and their haul was unbelievable. A large part of what they, and other agencies, have accumulated is still in the hands of the occupation forces, but two categories of materials are already available for private research: the documents assembled for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) and the Japanese Army and Navy department files which have been deposited in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. In this paper, an attempt will be made to survey the nature and scope of the first category: the IMTFE materials.