What are rokaku bunsho (鹵獲文書)?
— words that survive only in the enemy's translation

Meaning

Rokaku means to seize an opponent's property on the battlefield. Rokaku bunsho are the documents that passed into the other side's hands — orders, maps, rosters, and the diaries and letters of individual soldiers.

To the side that took them, these were intelligence. So they were translated, catalogued and filed. As a result, the original Japanese can be lost while the English translation survives. The nameless diary picked up on Makin is one such case.

How it worked

• Picked up — written material was collected on the field. Diaries and letters were treated as clues to the enemy's condition.
• Translated — specialist units rendered the Japanese into English and compiled reports.
• Filed — those reports were kept as official records. A private diary thus entered the archives of a state.

The Japanese disappears; the English remains

The original usually does not come back. It is lost, or sits in some depot, or in somebody's house. What remains is the translated text. We do not know the writer's name or his unit.

And yet this one line can still be read — through another language.

We're still alive today.

The last entry reads: "For the first time we wash our face and hands with soap." In the middle of a battle, he wrote down that he had washed his face with soap. The name is gone; the touch of that one line is not.

⚠️A translation is not the original. Word order and phrasing have passed through a translator's hand — and, in the Japanese version of this page, through a second hand translating back. Reading with that in mind is how these fragments must be read.

Source: the surviving U.S. Army G-2 translation, verbatim as preserved in NARA records; core lines read against the preserved scans (see the detailed page).

Fragments where this word appears

• The nameless diary of Makin (original unknown / only the English survives)

(As more captured fragments join the archive, they will be added here.)

The Makin diary, in detail → What is ihin henkan? →

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