The Asahi Shimbun newspaper-reporter (Junji Nagai) visited with Yoshiko Yamaguchi and made recorded interviews of her three times between October 2007 and February 2008 (each interview took about 2 hours). During these interviews, Yoshiko gave her impressions of 126 photographs and post-cards which the Asahi newspaper had pulled from it's records (unfortunately, none of which actually featured her). Many of these images were ordinary tourist post-cards and such, not directly relevant to Yoshiko's life in most cases. What a waste of an intellect's time showing her these!
The 127th picture (of Y. Kawashima at the age of nine - see below left side) was an afterthought. Yamaguchi probably would not have been pleased to see this photo so prominently featured on her "Rikoran Digital Archive". The photo on the right side below (taken during construction of the Changchun film studio) was also a curious choice: why not show something more significant? like for instance this photo, since she was a bridge between cultures herself:
It is truly unfortunate that the Asahi did not show any photos from Yoshiko's own extensive personal collection, as this is the kind of information which researchers would have wanted to see and hear her comments on. It appears that the Asahi had intended to get these such pictures and comments in a final 2hr interview, but Yoshiko became sick in hospital, so it was lost to posterity. Even so (and despite garbled google translations of the photos) there are some real nuggets of information here which add confirmation and insight to her previous books, articles, etc. (such as her comment on picture 116, that she was the only child in the family taught Chinese):
The following screen-shots are from the website where the Rikoran Digital Archive was posted:
some of these beautiful re-touched photos below are in high-res (click on them):
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. . a colleague who took a phone call from her thought she was in her 30s . .
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