Nowadays, scholars are not the only ones poring through the archives of the library at the Defense Agency's National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo's Meguro Ward.
The reading room of the institute's library has recently seen an increase in visitors leafing through official documents drawn up before and during World War II, countering earlier predictions by Defense Agency officials that interest would wane after the 50th anniversary of the war's end in 1995.
The reading room contains 116,000 documents related to Imperial Japanese forces that escaped destruction and were temporarily confiscated by the U.S. military. The institute also holds 45,000 books that detail the histories of various military units.