In 1998, Izumi Omura, professor of economics at Tohoku University's graduate school in Sendai, and seven other scholars started a rather unusual job -- deciphering voluminous, almost illegible, 19th-century German handwritten manuscripts. The following year, Rolf Hecker from Germany joined the team, and the working language switched from Japanese to German.
The work of this group, which underwent a minor personnel change, finally bore fruit in November 2005 with the first-ever publication of "Redaktionsmanuskript zu dem zweiten Buch des 'Kapital' von Friedrich Engels (1884-1885)" or "The Editor's Manuscript of Frederick Engels for 'Capital,' Volume 2," which constitutes Volume 12 of Section II of Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe or Marx-Engels' Complete Works (MEGA).
MEGA is an international project dedicated to the preservation of literally every word and sentence written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Each MEGA volume consists of two books, the text (in print, not as duplications of manuscripts) and the apparatus (a collection of notes, indexes etc.). It is a 114-volume project of which 52 have been published.