I was in the Ginza, Shimbashi area the other day with a friend, and we came across an old book fair. Being as both of us are Japan geeks, we spend about 30min looking through some political books and things like that before moving on. As we were walking away, I saw a ‘Pre-War Old Textbooks’ section, and made a dash. In there I found this.
“Colorful Japanese History - Our Hometown - Tokyo-fu”
For those of you that are up on your Japanese, you’ll notice that it says Tokyo-fu, not Tokyo-to. These textbooks were published in 1933; the same year Prohibition started in America, and Japan left the League of Nations. Most all textbooks from pre-war times were quickly edited by the controlling GHQ forces after the war to remove controversial things such as the Emperor as living god, or anything else that could be considered propaganda. This book however, is in almost perfect shape, and has no such edits. In the back of each book, there is also a great map of 1933 Tokyo including some train lines that still exist today (well, I’m sure they were destroyed during the bombings but rebuilt in their same location after the war was over).
I hope to find some other ‘treasures’ in this book like the map and share them with everyone. As I said there are no black marker edits, so there probably isn’t anything too controversially juicy in here, but I’m sure they are full of interesting history and fun facts; if nothing else there are pictures of many temples and shrines around Tokyo that were most certainly destroyed during the war and have since been rebuilt, making the photographs in here scenes of things we will never be able to see again.
Also of interest (and this could also be related to their being no edits), is the lack of a tax stamp in the back. During this time period, there were serious problems with copy-written material being copied and sold for cheap, much like the pirates you see on the street of any major city in the world today. To counter this, all legitimate books had a stamp of authenticity in them that could only be achieved after paying the appropriate tax and the legitimacy of the book was verified. Both these books have the clearly labeled spot for a stamp, but there is no stamp or marks to hint that there once was a stamp to be found. Perhaps this is a pirated version of the textbook, which could explain why it hadn’t gone through GHQ editing (assuming there is anything that would qualify for such edits inside it), and why 75 year old textbook in amazing condition would be on sale on the side of the street for less than $15USD.
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