BIO

I am a 3rd year History student. I went to high school in Navarre, Florida. I am most interested in developing nation states in the modern period and the ways in which they exert legitimacy through art and constituent homogenization. I aim to continue my scholarship in East Asian studies.

Digitally Archiving Post-war Japan

Abstract

During the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), social elites from American society lived amongst Japan's former ruling class and worked with them in establishing the new democratic Japanese government. Oliver L. Austin Jr. (1903-1988), an ornithologist working for the Natural Resources Section (NRS), and his family joined this group of Americans to assume this responsibility. During his family’s time in Japan, Austin and his wife Elizabeth took over 1000 photographs of places and events in Japan which reveal post-war Japanese society and natural settings. Austin's personal diary reveals a microcosm of American perceptions and reactions to Japanese ways of life. The Austin l. Oliver Photographic Collection serves as a public digital archive for scholars and the general public interested in postwar Japan. However, the massive collection of images remains incomplete insofar as not every image is fully captioned or contains information on when and where it was taken. Some slides were damaged over time. So, the continual process of digital archiving, of discovering links between photographs, diary entries, and academic journals to discover their relevance, must be undertaken to complete this digital archive for future scholarly work on this critical period of Japanese American history and US-Japan relations.  Researchers from Japan, including the independent scholar Noriko Sakoh and ornithological scientist Hiraoka Takashi, have assisted in the project, and have found and catalogued remote locations like Hokkaidô and Torishima.  The collection allows for unique interdisciplinary work on digital humanities to continue as the images continue to divulge messages from the past.​

Keywords: History Archival Japan Photography Humanities