Japanese Wartime Newsreels Online at NHK

[wesy]

Really interesting stuff. From 1940 to post war well worth checking out. Some pretty good combat shots from the Japanese side...Great shots of Jacks scrambling to intercept B-29s and more. It's not the usual stock footage you've seen a thousand times.[:)]

Japanese News Reels @ NHK

[seydlitz_slith]

Absolutely fascinating.
In the 1940 section I watched the japanese comment on the Dunkirk evacuation.
In the 1942 section I watched an airborne assault on an airfield near Kendari. Makes me wish I knew what the commenator was saying. The background music for the paradrop was Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

thanks for the link.

[The Gnome]

If you use google chrome as a browser you'll get a little handy translate button at the top of the screen when you navigate to a foreign language page. It doesn't help with the videos, but does a pretty good job with the text translations on the page.

[Sredni]

There's also an actual google page that does translations. Just enter Japanese --> English and the url and you get a strait up word for word translation of the webpage. Pretty terrible considering how structurally different English is then most other languages heh, but enough to figure out whats going on. Now we just need news reel subbers lol.

http://translate.google.com/#

[morganbj]

Just learn Japanese. How hard can that be?

[Saburo Kurusu]

Those are indeed fantastic documents of highest value! And something very "ironic" happened when watching.... I just followed the first vids of 1942 (with a bomber raid on a coastal city, at least it looked like something similar to that) when suddenly -here in my home town and the surrounding villages- the communal fire brigade's siren test alarm took place (that's generally every Wednesday evening) and the sound they always "play" is more or less the same you know from WW2 air raid warnings!!!
We live in a rather mountainous area here, so that very loud sound is wailing, yelling and echoing from the rooftops over the hills, forests, fields and valleys with delay from village to village (they don't activate them at exactly the same time). You can imagine that created a certain atmosphere with sinister feelings....   

[Bandkanon]

This is absolutely fantastic. Thanks for the find! How did you find it in the first place?

[wesy]

I saw it on the board at Combined Fleet dot com. I was blown away by the depth of materials from each year. Some pretty amazing stuff to see vids from Japanese ships during Leyte Gulf.

[jomni]

Propaganda or honest news? I haven't had the time to look at this yet...

[wesy]

Let's just say these were government approved at the time...so i would assume they are "on message" Nevertheless, well worth watching. I've haven't seen the vast vast majority of the footage before.