You ask an interesting question about copying categories etc. I don’t know about the censor records but I have been snapping pictures of a few examples where the documents use the exact same stationary as the colonial period, complete with hiragana, years labeled “Showa,” and with the Japanese administrative institutional names. More common, however, is the frequent use of the back of Japanese stationary or pages ripped out of books for forms. There seems to have been a major shortage of paper since the official documents of the period (often within a single package of identical forms) come from a hodgepodge of sources.

The most commonly Japanese form used, however, was the telegraph form, which is found throughout RG242.

It is a separate question however if the forms were changed slightly while the categories of the colonizer remained the same. I don’t have much to compare with since I’m not familiar with the colonial forms/categories. I can say, however, that there is a Soviet influence everywhere. Even as early as 1946-7 I’m seeing lots of translated Soviet textbooks on legal procedures, and lots of handwritten student notebooks on how to record things.

The lists of villagers also use very familiar “landowner, rich, middle, poor” peasant distinctions etc., and I might try to post some images of these forms that I came across. Party and religion is on almost every form, at least for the first two years of the postwar.

From a different angle, one approach that would be interesting would be to compare the sort of information recorded in these documents with equivalent or similar documents from the colonial period. I’d be interested to know how much the nascent North Korean state simply took on the bureaucratic/administrative practices of the Japanese colonial state, even perhaps down to copying their census forms. Conversely, how much did they change the categories of information that they recorded due to their different concerns? For example, I notice in the form you have reproduced above that they record the monetary wealth of the foreigner in question and their membership of any party or ‘social group’ (which in this case is recorded as Hwagyo – overseas Chinese).