A set of documents on German prisoners of war detained during World War I at the Ninoshima Internment Center, in the city of Hiroshima, has recently been rediscovered.
Eiji Takebayashi, an associate professor at Hiroshima University of Economics who specializes in the history of exchanges between Japan and Germany, found the list of POWs, a notebook and albums that had been left by an interpreter.
Researchers say the documents — rediscovered a century after the facility closed, in 1920 — are first-class materials that depict the character of the POWs and how they interacted with Japanese people.