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This is not a neutral timeline. It is a chronicle of events in and beyond the Japanese Empire as reported in contemporary English-language publications that largely served, or at least were censored by, the Japanese state: The Japan Year Book, Contemporary Japan, The Japan Magazine, and the Nippon Times Weekly. In some years, these publications included “diary” or “chronicle” or other lists of recent events, and they have been reproduced here for the issues in which they were identified. Entries should be read critically, and always alongside other sources. Beyond the descriptions in the events themselves, it is interesting to explore what has been omitted and included here by the authors. Each event’s coloured dot marks its publication — hover over the dot for the specific volume or issue. Open online sources have an extra circle around the dot and you may click on it to be taken to the relevant entry on Internet Archive.
Transcribed from scanned PDFs using AI vision models. A partially automated review showed a small percentage of hallucinations, missing events, and some dates mis-identified, often due to difficult-to-read original text. Similarly, names of people and locations were occasionally mangled in the OCR process. Treat each entry as suggestive until you have corroborated it against the original. See the hallucination & accuracy report for how these transcriptions were verified.
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