The Sunagawa Village Office Archives（Sunagawa-mura yakuba bunsho 砂川村役場文書）were created by the local administrative office, which successively changed from a small administrative district office（bankumi 番組or shoku 小区kaisho 会所：1873-­1878）to an administrative district office headed by Kocho（kocho yakuba 戸長役場：1878­1889）to a village office（mura yakuba 村役場：1889-­1954），and finally to a town office（machi yakuba 町役場：1954-­1963）．On May 1, 1963, Sunagawa Town（Sunagawa -machi 砂川町）merged with Tachikawa City（Tachikawa -shi 立川市）．

This paper examines the structure of the Sunagawa Village Office Archives basedonananalysisofthe organization of the creator of the archival records and states their characteristics. Most of the surviving records were created during the period when the Town and Village Districts Law（Chosonsei 町村制）was in effect（1889-­1947）．When this law was in effect, the Sunagawa Village Office was small, only having five to ten staff members, including the village mayor, and was not divided into sections. When the existing records created by such a small office are categorized according to the types of clerical works, often, most of the records are correspondences between the village office and the county office（gun -yakusho 郡役所）．This feature is a consequence of the fact that town and village offices（choson yakuba 町村役場）served as terminal organizations in the centralized administrative framework, with documents trickling from the top down（joi katatsu 上意下達）．

This paper studies the military records at the Sunagawa village office from the Meiji period（the volumes that record the details of soldiers that the government agencies requestedtobecollected）．It moves from studying records that were arranged without a table of contents to records that were arranged with a table of contents; it also studies how the records were classified on a case by case basis. Although, in 1892, because of wars like the Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War, the arrangement of the volumes was not ordered,this study will attempt to rearrange the records based on two viewpoints（1）: from an archival study viewpoint（that is, studying the technical understanding of rearranging documents），and（2）from a Japanese modern historical viewpoint. This study will present a framework to analyze the method of arranging these records during the unique period of the Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War.

This paper examines the handover of village office documents under the municipal government system by comparing the 1903 handover list of Sunagawa Village, Kitatama District, Tokyo, with that of Uonashi Village,Higashiuwa District, Ehime Prefecture. Five points are noted here: The two have the following in common:（1）They each had two separate handover lists, one from the village mayor and one from the treasurer,（2）Although their survival rate was comparatively high, the number of early modern era documents is small. The differences between the two are as follows,（3）While a document storage period schedule was not employed in Sunagawa Village, such a period was employed in Uonashi Village,（4）Although in Sunagawa Village, the succession of the village mayor reflected the documentation format of the handover list and the district government office played a strong guiding role, the intervention of the district government office was minimal in Uonashi Village,（5）While many family register­related documents and documents predating the municipal government system were included on the handover list in Sunagawa Village, these documents were rarely on the Uonashi Village list.

Hokkaido was once a“frontier”or a“domestic colony”for the modern Japanese state. After the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Empire extended its rule into inland Hokkaido, occupied it as farmland, and promoted immigration from the main land of Japan. At the same time, the empire ruled the Ainus, the indigenous people of Hokkaido.

Records of the government offices that ruled Hokkaido in those days, such as Kaitakûshi （Office of Hokkaido Development Commission）and Hokkaido­cho（Hokkaido Prefectural Government），carry traces of the manner of their acquisition and the distribution of the resources of Hokkaido. The world of archives has thus dominated the surface of Hokkaido. This process has incorporated the inhabitants of Hokkaido, including the Ainus, into the world of archives.

The government offices of Hokkaido accumulated their archives throughout the period mentioned earlier. However, after the reclamation by the land disposal policy came to an end, and Hokkaido lost its categorization as a frontier, those archives also lost their value for preservation. Archival collections kept by the Hokkaido Prefectural Archives today are those that managed to survive the crises of destruction or dissipation because of their newly recognized value as historical sources.

In this essay, we regard“collaboration among Museum, Library, and Archives”and the“preservation of materials”as activities promoting and assuring access to information from“synchronic”and“diachronic”perspectives. From these standpoints, we can see the close relationship between these two activities, using examples from the collections of the Resources and Historical Collections Office, The Library of Economics,The University of Tokyo. To be more precise, we categorize means of access to information through structural-functional analysis. Through this consideration, we indicate the possibilities of an information­ gathering body on the basis of the characteristics of each media outside the framework of museums, libraries,and archives.