In the late 1930s and during the Pacific War, East Timor was a sensitive and strategically important location. For Japan, it lay at the heart of what the Japanese called the ‘Austro-Asia-Mediterranean’ area, and following their withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, the Japanese paid particular attention to the island. It was controlled by Portugal, the weakest of the European colonial powers and neutral in international diplomacy, and it lay at the heart of a strategically important zone with Australia to the south, Southeast Asia to the west, Japan to the north and the Pacific islands to the east. The significance of Portuguese Timor to Japan is discussed in Goto Ken'ichi, ‘Japan and Portuguese Timor’, in idem, Tensions of empire: Japan and Southeast Asia in the colonial and postcolonial world (Athens, OH and Singapore: Ohio University Press and Singapore University Press, 2003, pp. 24–38).

The volume under review provides a comprehensive bibliography of materials on East Timor during the war years, covering publications as well as archival documents in Japanese, English, Portuguese and Dutch. It is an extraordinary achievement, and provides an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia, with Asian international relations and modern Southeast Asian history. The coverage is thorough, and includes not only collections in national libraries and national archives but also the holdings of bodies such as the Salazar Archive, the Geographical Society of Lisbon, the Macao Archives, private records in Australia, and the collection of the Institute for Naval History in the Netherlands. It is a definitive listing, handsomely and, it must be said, expensively produced. It should be part of the holdings of any significant research library.

The project to assemble this material was funded by a Toyota Foundation Initiative Grant. The project has also published a set of official reports on East Timor under Japanese rule (Nihon-gun senryō-ki no Higashi Timōru shisatsu fukumeisho – Nihon-Porutogaru ryōkoku tōjisha no kiroku [Reports on the Inspection Mission to Japanese Military Occupied East Timor: The Records of both Japanese and Portuguese Parties] (Tokyo: Ryukei Shyosha, 2005), and a further publication is planned that will contain a set of interviews with various individuals involved with East Timor during the occupation period.

The members of the forum deserve enormous credit for bringing this four-year project to fruition, and it seems fitting to record their names:

• Ken'ichi Goto (Forum Organiser)

• Aiko Kurasawa (Keio University)

• Akihiro Yoshihisa (former librarian at the National Diet Library)

• William Bradley Horton (Takushoku University)

• Geoffrey Gunn (Nagasaki University)

• Hiroaki Shiozaki (Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University)

• Isao Yamazaki (Saga University)

• Mayumi Yamamoto (Waseda University)

• Sadao Ōba (member of the Japanese military government in Java during WWII)

• Shigehito Takahashi (Waseda University)