PROJECT: University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s War Crimes Documentation Initiative (WCDI)

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s War Crimes Documentation Initiative (WCDI) recently launched new online tools to make fragmented archival materials about Japanese war crimes in Asia and the Pacific during World War II more accessible to students, scholars, and the public. Led by historians, librarians, and GIS specialists, the initiative brings together trial records, survivor testimony, and spatial data, supporting deeper inquiry into the scale and impacts of wartime atrocities.​

Among the new resources is an interactive ArcGIS map visualizing crimes against ethnic Chinese communities, drawing on documentation from postwar Allied war crimes trials and highlighting patterns of targeted violence. Additionally, a new text-searchable archive, digitized using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards, offers access to statements from General Imamura Hitoshi’s 1947 war crimes proceedings, providing insight into prisoner abuse and the Allied trials.

UH Mānoa’s Hamilton Library plays a pivotal role in stewarding, hosting, and contextualizing these materials for public use. As WCDI project lead and history professor Yuma Totani observes, “WCDI has a terrific team of librarians whose expertise in digital technologies, knowledge in the humanities, and commitment to collaborative work have been invaluable.”