Talked with Beth after sending her draft of objectives for first six months. She knows of Japanese directory sources, but isn't sure about English - so will contact JSR to see if he's got a good idea, and if not, will get students to spend first week or so canvassing the possibles and then we'll settle.
She confirmed that pre-war Japanese language is tricky, particularly names, so part of the project this summer will be figuring out how advanced one's Japanese needs to be. We may end up doing conventional Japanese by one person and complex Japanese by another (e.g. names, or data in earlier sources vs data in later sources).
Some of the data exists only in analog form, so her student and/or one of the UVic ones will have to spend some time generating image files from those source artefacts.
She also mentioned the Kobayashi Geneology, which is the raw CSV tables of a defunct database, as something we might want to take a look at to see if if provides enough useful info to justify processing it into an XML data structure for use in the project.
She'll update the milestones document and send it back to me.