Studying Peace Through Back Issues of Municipal Newsletters

Some municipalities in Japan publish the back issues of their old public-relations newsletters (kōhōshi). The traces of the war, and of the recovery from it, are still there in them. Reading these is, I think, one form of peace study.

Meiwa, Gunma — Meiwa-mura Kōhō, 1956 (Shōwa 31), no. 13

Goshogawara, Aomori (former Kanagi) — Kanagi Dayori, June 5, 1952

Set a newsletter from 1949 beside one from 1955 and — never mind the contents — the quality of the printing and the kind of advertising have changed completely, and you feel in your body that the recovery is underway. Watching something the war smashed to pieces return to what it was is a good experience.

The weak point is that it eats an absurd amount of time, so doing it in a school may be difficult.

Even people who could not care less about peace education may find it interesting to read. Things like the following give me a strange rush of feeling.

Kagoshima City, Kagoshima — Kagoshima Shimin no Hiroba, May 20, 1950

If this is your sort of thing your time will dissolve easily, so do it on your own when you are free.

I had wanted for a long time to gather up the sites that publish old newsletters, but every time I found one I got absorbed in reading it and never managed to collect the URLs. These days there is AI, so I had it collect them. Ōita City (from no. 1, 1949), Kagoshima City (from 1949), Adachi Ward (from the first issue, September 1948), Shinagawa Ward (from 1947), Osaka City (from the first issue, July 15, 1949). All of them publish a continuous run starting from a first issue in the postwar occupation period. It gathered a good deal more besides, so I am publishing that as it came.

By region

Hokkaidō

Tōhoku

Kantō

Chūbu

Kinki

Chūgoku and Shikoku

Kyūshū and Okinawa

Nationwide platforms and related archives

Caveats

• Within the range of this survey, no continuous digital publication of prewar municipal newsletters (the 1930s or the Taishō era) could be confirmed. The background is that most municipal newsletters in Japan began after the defeat, around 1947–49.
• Note that the "back issues" on official municipal sites are mostly from the 1990s on, and that publication of Shōwa-era issues is the exception.
• URLs are as of August 2026. Municipal sites change their URLs easily when they are redesigned, so links may break. There are more than 1,700 municipalities in Japan and a complete survey is impossible, so this list gathers, by preference, the "hits" that go back to the older years.