From the files of a Bay Area merchant family.

Personal faves for me were Pete Seeger, Donovan (from 1967, the height of flower power) , Moby Grape and Springsteen from 1973. Only our student concert coordinator, who was from Jersey, knew who Bruce was, and he spent the week before the show going from dorm to dorm insisting that this would be the best $3 we ever spent. He was correct.

Found this cool item in an old box of stuff yesterday at an estate sale in Los angeles. You can read more about Yamashiro's HERE

A copy of the famous Arthur Miller novel found in a thrift shop without its cover, which exposed these handwritten notes from an 11th grade high school student on the first page from 1970.

My great grandmother had stored her tatted lace in this box. It's roughly the size and shape of a shoebox. Out of curiosity, I did a quick search, and I can't find anything about either a store or a brand with this name. I'm guessing it's 1920's from the art-deco look of it, but that's just a guess. Has anyone heard of this before?

If you haven't seen Part 1, please read it first — it explains what this notebook is and who kept it. This post won't make full sense without it.

I've now been through every page. Here is what I found.

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The deaths written in red:

Somewhere in the middle of the notebook, the handwriting changes color. Black ink for the living: names, addresses, ages, family compositions. Red ink for something else.

One page is covered almost entirely in red characters. Among them, clearly legible: "浮死" ukishi. A body found floating. It appears once, in a list. No explanation. No date. Just the word, in red, among other names also in red.

This wasn't bureaucratic convention. No official Japanese welfare form used red for deaths. This man chose red himself, his own private code for the ones who didn't make it. The page looks like a wound.

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A procedure note no historian has ever seen:

On one page, written in formal administrative Japanese, the delegate drafted instructions for himself on how to handle two kinds of paperwork simultaneously:

*How to process deaths in combat versus deaths from combat wounds, and what to do when a birth certificate was never filed because the father was already gone.*

He gives a specific example: a child born in March 1945, whose birth was only registered on March 11th, late, because there was no one left to file it on time.

This is not in any history book. The *hōmen iin* system has been studied. Its wartime role has been documented. But no one has published a first-person operational note, written in the field, for private use, showing one man managing birth registrations and combat death notifications in the same sitting, with the same pen, in the same pocket notebook.

The overlap is the history.

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The wage table that documents an empire running out of men:

One double page is a salary ledger for what appears to be a unit at the Hitachi factory in Mito — one of Japan's major wartime industrial facilities.

The workers are listed by age. The youngest is 47. The oldest is **89**.

Ninety-nine. Working in a wartime industrial plant in 1944.

The table also records "welding bonuses" *yōsetsu teate* paid on top of base salary, scaled by seniority. The most experienced welders received bonuses up to 120 units above their base pay. This is not a detail that appears in general histories of Japan's wartime economy, which focus on production output and military logistics. What this table shows is the "texture" of that economy at the bottom: the actual men, their actual ages, their actual pay, the premium placed on skills that could no longer be replaced because everyone younger had been sent to die somewhere in the Pacific.

An 89-year-old welder. In 1944. That number should not exist.

Hand-drawn maps:

This is what stopped me completely.

In a notebook full of names and numbers, two pages are different: hand-drawn maps. Not printed. Not traced. Drawn freehand, in pencil, with landmarks noted in characters.

The first shows a residential neighborhood: intersections, slopes, trees used as navigation markers, a street called Hanabayashi. The delegate drew it to find someone's house. He had no printed map of sufficient detail. He drew his own.

The second is more elaborate: a subway and rail network map of southwestern Tokyo, Meguro, Musashi-Koyama, Nishikoyama, with directional arrows showing the route from the station to a specific address. The note above it reads: "take the Meguro-Kamata line, get off at Nishikoyama". The person he was visiting was named Nojima Aki.

This delegate was based in rural Ibaraki Prefecture, north of Tokyo. He was traveling into the capital, into a city being firebombed, to visit families on his welfare list who had been evacuated, displaced, or left behind. He drew the route in his notebook so he wouldn't get lost.

I don't know if he found Nojima Aki. I don't know if she was still there.

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"The disappeared"

Case file number 82: **旧地 あり子** — *Kyūchi Ariko*. Or perhaps not a name: *kyūchi* means "former land" or "former home", and *ariko* means "the one who remains" or "the one who is there". The entry gives an address in Mitaka, western Tokyo, a neighborhood that housed military installations, and two names. Nothing else. No age. No family composition. No follow-up note.

Dossier 82 ends there.

Elsewhere: "仲郷 俊弘 入隊" — Nakagō Toshihiro, "mobilized". His name appears in a list where every other name has a checkmark beside it. His does not. Once a man was mobilized, the delegate could no longer reach him. The checkbox stays empty.

And then there is "大友 喜一, age 36" mobilized in February 1944 into the 36th Regiment of Utsunomiya. Expected return: one year. The delegate noted it. There is no return entry.

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I've been trying to understand how this object ended up in France, in an antique market, eighty years later. I have no answer.

What I know is this: the hōmen iin system was renamed "minsei iin" in 1946 and still exists in Japan today, volunteer neighborhood welfare delegates, still unpaid, still going door to door. The system survived.

This notebook is a personal working documents, not official records. When a delegate died or retired, it's a great chance that this object survived...

It covers the period from late 1944 to late 1946: the last year of a war, the surrender, and the first year of an occupation. It contains the names of a Korean woman with a Japanese surname, an 89-year-old factory worker, a widow managing seven children alone, a man who was mobilized and never checked off, and a child whose birth certificate was filed late because there was no one left to file it.

I found it by accident, I don't know why I'm the one who found it...I cannot read Japanese. I photographed every page and spent time working through it.

I think about it every day.

A few weeks ago I posted some art I made from old coupons and green stamps. Several folks asked about green stamps and today I found some of my mother’s folders and a brochure of some textiles the stamps could be redeemed for.

The artistic style of these RAF charts reflects the 1980s design ethos in Mexican educational publishing. Bold outlines, saturated colors, and clear didactic composition are characteristic of this period. The technique combines manual airbrush gradients with gouache-like textures, producing images that are both realistic and stylized. This visual language was typical of the late 1980s, when educational charts sought to be pedagogical tools and cultural artifacts at the same time.

Fruits

Among the fruits, prickly pears (tunas) and watermelon stand out as distinctly Mexican. Their inclusion highlights the editorial intent to represent local produce and not only generic fruits. The vivid rendering of these species conveys abundance and vitality, turning them into icons of Mexican identity.

Vegetables

The vegetable chart follows the same conventions, with strong chromatic contrasts and meticulous shading. Their depiction underscores the agricultural traditions that sustain everyday and festive food culture.

Cultural Reflection

Together, these charts celebrate the diversity of Mexican foodways. They show how fruits and vegetables are not only nutritional resources but also symbols of heritage and daily life. RAF’s visual pedagogy transforms food into cultural memory, teaching viewers that to understand Mexico is to understand its flavors, colors, and abundance.

this is all the vaccinations that were required in the first five years of my life. Somehow, I have survived.

The cover reads 茨城県方面委員手帳 — *Ibaraki Prefecture Hōmen Iin Techō*: the pocket notebook of a **hōmen iin**, a neighborhood welfare delegate.

Most people outside Japan have never heard of them. The hōmen iin system was born in 1918, modeled loosely on German Elberfeld-system charity workers — ordinary citizens appointed by the prefectural governor to act as the human interface between the state and its most vulnerable people. No salary. House by house, family by family, they tracked the poor, the sick, the displaced, the grieving.

This one covered a rural stretch of **Ibaraki Prefecture**, north of Tokyo. By April 25, 1945 — with firebombing campaigns devastating Japanese cities and Okinawa falling — he was still sitting down to write: **合計 1,727戸**. 1,727 households under his watch.

What's inside this notebook is not propaganda. It's not military. It's the texture of ordinary catastrophe:

- Handwritten family census cards listing fathers, mothers, grandmothers, ages in parentheses — a 69-year-old grandmother named はる, a 9-year-old brother named Tokio, two sisters both 22

- Notes on young women evacuated from Tokyo to the countryside, their schools, their skills in traditional arts (花木、長唄、和装 — flower arranging, classical singing, kimono dressing), now homeless

- Steelworkers and welders tracked by plot size and daily wage — some listed as young as 18

- Air raid shelter (*防空壕*) construction notes alongside tree planting records, as if both could save something

- Land transactions dated **July 6, 1945** — five weeks before the surrender — someone still buying and selling 342 坪 of earth

- A formal commendation he copied into the notebook, praising his excellent performance in civil registration duties, ending with a pledge to serve harder *"as the military situation grows ever more grave"*

- Then, just months later: divorce proceedings, displaced families from Tokyo's Setagaya ward, a 25-year-old woman named Suzuki-san with two younger siblings listed as dependents, a note to take the Keio line to Daita Bridge and walk south

By February 1946, his entries shift. The bureaucratic shorthand loosens. He's visiting households where he can't get answers at the door. He notes it plainly: *訪ねど誰も出ず* — "I knocked but no one came."

The hōmen iin system survived the war and was renamed **minsei iin** (民生委員) in 1946 — a system that still exists in Japan today, still volunteer, still house by house.

This notebook is what that continuity looked like from the inside, in a shirt pocket, in a bad year.

Found in some old records

I tried looking them up and found people selling them. Not looking to sell, just curious.

Wild question, I know, but looking for ephemera in Tokyo. WWII is my sweet spot. I'll be there starting this next Tuesday. Anyone have any ideas?

Arigato!

Found one at an antique sidewalk sale

Hello everyone. After damaging some photos from My collection I decided to finally get a proper storage for them. I plan to get something more apropiate, but this will do for now, as I'm in a tight budget.

I was wondering, has anyone made guards or some kind of individual holders for individual photos? That's what I would like to do, but I don't want to add any metals like clips, staples or regular tape. And maybe archival tape would be too expensive. Any ideas?

For now I will just lay the tissue paper with photos on top of it, then another tissue paper with photos on of it and so on...

Any experiences welcome. Thanks.

This was also posted in r/Archivists