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However, given all the aforementioned expert testimony mentioned, the core of the present study remains the documents, never complete, but of which the author has had access to far more than Griswold could have dreamt. Griswold had the Archives of the State Department to 1906 and Papers Relating to 1922; the British Documents of the Origins of the World War series, 1898–1914 and some later Parliamentary papers and debates; Die Grosse Politik and Documents Diplomatiques Français, both of these series running until 1914; the Russian Krasnyi Archiv and a few other Russian materials; certain special reports like the Lytton Commissions; and a number of very valuable private collections, Hippisley and Rockhill, of which he made the fullest use, and Theodore Roosevelt, Knox, Bryan, and Lansing, which allowed him to take the pulse of Washington, as Treat pointed out, most thoroughly to 1906 and quite adequately to 1922.
But he had practically nothing from Japan, the great adversary, and therein lies our principal documentary advantage. We have access to the full run of Japanese Foreign Office documents from the middle Meiji era to 1945, as well as to some of their Army-Navy documents, and to the selections made by the Japanese for printing in the Nihon Gaiko Bunsho and Nihon Gaiko Nempyo narabi ni Shuyo Bunsho collections. We also can access the International Military Tribunal for Far East materials, which are not only pertinent to the Tokyo trial itself but also probe the whole era of Japanese military expansionism, from 1928 to 1945 in special depth. In addition, the U.S. State Department Archives were much more concerned with political and diplomatic currents in Japan after 1906, as the sense of American-Japanese rivalry grew, and they, together with the flock of more recently published memoirs and secret histories of the buildup of antagonism toward the Pacific War, add much to the stock which Griswold had at his disposal. Also, the author utilized British Foreign Office records especially for the earlier years, as well as the work of David Klein, Ian Nish, and Christopher Thorne for later years.