Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0007-0488-1641

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Miya Qiong Xie

Second Advisor

Steven J. Ericson

Abstract

A state decouples its public myth of destroyed archives from its internal administrative maintenance. This paper examines the bureaucratic and archival labor involved in maintaining the destruction of records. In 1946, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) officially “destroyed” the “Phantom MOFA Report,” which detailed Japan’s wartime use of Chinese forced laborers. The report’s existence was denied by the Japanese government until 1993. Through an archival ethnography of MOFA’s 1980s records on the resurfacing of the “Phantom Report,” I analyze the institution’s epistemological and ontological anxieties triggered by the return of the history suppressed by the state. By juxtaposing the ministry’s frantic rediscovery of the phantomized records in its internal record-keeping with its routinized response to a survivor’s inquiries, the study highlights the ontological use of state archives for institutional consistency and routinization. This paper theorizes the concept of “Archival Folding,” where the state looks back into its own archives to control its unfolding past. It reveals that the destruction of records was not a one-time event, but a project to be maintained. This recursive denial was constructed through hastily drafting reports, redacting internal files, and fabricating narratives to align with previous records. In doing so, this paper reconceptualizes historical silence not as a passive void, but as an actively sustained project through the folding of archives.

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