Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union


After :World War II there were from 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese personnel in the Soviet Union and Mongolia interned to work in labor camps as POWs. Of them, it is estimated that between 60,000-347,000 died in captivity.
The majority of the approximately 3.5 million Japanese armed forces outside Japan were disarmed by the United States and Kuomintang China and repatriated in 1946. Western Allies had taken 35,000 Japanese prisoners between December 1941 and 15 August 1945, i.e., before the Japanese capitulation The Soviet Union held the Japanese POWs much longer and used them as a labor force.

History

The majority of Japanese who were held in the Soviet Union did not consider themselves as "Prisoners of War" and referred to themselves as "internees", because they voluntarily laid down their arms after the official capitulation of Japan, i.e., after the end of the military conflict. The number of Japanese prisoners captured in combat was very small.
After the defeat of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, Japanese POWs were sent from Manchuria, Korea, South Sakhalin and Kuril Islands to Primorski Krai, Khabarovsk Krai, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Kazakhstan, Buryat-Mongol ASSR, and Uzbek SSR. In 1946, 49 labor camps for Japanese POWs under the management of GUPVI housed about 500,000 persons. In addition there were two camps for those convicted of various crimes. Prisoners were grouped into 1,000 person units. Some male and female Japanese civilians, as well as Koreans were also imprisoned when there were not enough soldiers to fill a unit.
Handling of Japanese POWs was, in line with the USSR State Defense Committee Decree no. 9898cc "About Receiving, Accommodation, and Labor Utilization of the Japanese Army Prisoners of War" dated by 23 August 1945.
A significant number of Japanese were assigned to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, in eight camps, in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Sovetskaya Gavan, Raychikha railroad station, Izvestkovaya railroad station, Krasnaya Zarya, Taishet, and Novo-Grishino.
The repatriation of Japanese POWs started in 1946.
yearnumber releasednotes
194618,616
1947166,240
1948175,000
194997,000971 transferred to PRC
19501,585leaving 2,988 remaining in USSR

Beginning in 1949, there were reports of returnees being uncooperative and hostile upon returning to Japan, owing to Communist propaganda they had been subject to during their imprisonment. These incidents resulted in the Japanese public gaining a more negative perception of the returning soldiers, and increased SCAP's hostility towards the left-wing in Japan.
Those remaining after 1950 were detained having been convicted of various crimes. The release of these persons continued from 1953 under various amnesties, and the last major group of 1025 Japanese POWs was released on 23 December 1956. From then on, some Japanese POWs were released in small groups, including those who would only return in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some Japanese prisoners who had been held for decades, who by this point had married and had started families, elected not to permanently return to Japan.
There are about 60 associations of Japanese former internees and members of their families today. The Soviet Union did not provide the lists of POWs and did not allow the relatives of those POWs who died in captivity to visit their burial sites. This became possible after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Japanese internees and Russians

Historian S. Kuznetsov, dean of the Department of History of the Irkutsk State University, one of the first researchers of the topic, interviewed thousands of former internees and came to the following conclusion:
However, many of the inmates do not share Kuznetsov's views and retain negative memories of being robbed of personal property, and the brutality of camp personnel, harsh winters and exhausting labor.
One of these critics is Haruo Minami who later became one of the most famous singers in Japan. Minami, because of his harsh experiences in the labor camp, became a well-known anti-communist.
Most Japanese were captured in Soviet-occupied Manchuria and were taken to Soviet POW camps. Many Japanese died while they were detained in the POW camps; estimates of the number of these deaths vary from 60,000, based on deaths certified by the USSR, to 347,000, based on the number of Japanese servicemen and civilian auxiliaries registered in Manchuria at the time of surrender who failed to return to Japan subsequently. Some remained in captivity until December 1956 before they were allowed to return to Japan. The wide disparity between Soviet records of death and the number of Japanese missing under Soviet occupation, as well as the whereabouts of the remains of POWs, are still grounds of political and diplomatic contention, at least on the Japanese side.
According to the map formulated by combining two maps, published by the former Ministry of Health and Welfare and the current Ministry of Labor, Health and Welfare of the Japanese Government, there were more than 70 labor camps for the Japanese prisoners of war within the Soviet Union:
File:MAP&LIST of the General location of the Japanese POW Laborers’ camps in the Soviet Union and in Outer Mongolia around 1946.pdf|thumb|LEGEND:NOTE 1. ○Large Circles with heavy outline : Over 20,000 detained. ●Black circles : Over 10,000. ○White, small circles : Less than 10,000. △Triangles Kôseishô engokyoku . Hikiage to engo sanjûnen no ayumi . Kôseishô. 1977. P56. 2)Kôseishô shakai/engokyoku engo gojûnenshi henshû iinkai . Engo gojûnenshi . Gyôsei. 1997. pp524–525.Location names, listed originally in katakana-Japanese, have been transcribed into English using five maps published in the United States, United Kingdom, and USSR. A)Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. Compiled and drawn in the Cartographic Section of the National Geographic Society for the National Geographic Magazine. Grovesnor, Gilbert. Ed. Washington. U.S.A. 1944. B)U.S.S.R.and Adjacent Areas 1:8,000,000. Published by Department of Survey, Ministry of Defense, United Kingdom. British Crown Copyright Reserved Series 5104. U.K. 1964. C)USSR Railways. J.R. Yonge. The Quail Map Company. Exeter. U. K. 1973. D)USSR Railways. J.R. Yonge. The Quail Map Company. Exeter. U.K. 1976. E)Soviet Union. Produced by the Cartographic Division. National Geographic Society. National Geographic Magazine. Grovesnor, Melville B. Ed. Washington. U.S.A. 1976. F)Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. Moscow News Supplement. Main Administration of Geodesy and Cartography under the Council of Minister of the USSR. U.S.S.R. 1979.
Because of the difficulty in retrieving formal USSR Government records, the numerical data are based on reports obtained from former POWs and elsewhere by the former Ministry of Health and Welfare and the current Ministry of Labor, Health and Welfare of the Japanese Government. The Japanese Government is disinterring the remains of the Japanese POWs who died in the USSR; more data may be anticipated, for example, at sites such as http://www.mhlw.go.jp/seisaku/2009/11/01.html "Investigation of records regarding persons deceased during detention in Siberia."

Japanese ex-internees today

Various associations of former internees seek compensation for their wartime treatment and for pensions from the Japanese government. An appeal to the Commission on Human Rights says
Those who chose to stay in Russia and eventually decided to return had to deal with significant Japanese bureaucracy. A major problem is the difficulty in providing the documentary confirmation of their status. Toshimasa Meguro, a 77-year-old former POW, was permitted to visit Japan as late as in 1998. He served 8 years of labor camps and after the release was ordered to stay in Siberia.
Tetsuro Ahiko is the last remaining Japanese POW living in Kazakhstan.

Research in Russia

Research into the history of the Japanese POWs has become possible in Russia only since the second half of the 1980s, with glastnost and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Until this time the only public information about any World War II POWs taken by the Soviet Union was some numbers of prisoners taken. After opening the secret Soviet archives the true scope of the POW labor in the Soviet Union has become known, and the topic has been discussed in the press.
Japanese POWs have become the subject of the historians of Siberia and the Russian Far East, who gained access to local archives of NKVD/MVD and CPSU A number of kandidat dissertations had been presented about Soviet POW in various regions. In 2000 a fundamental collection of documents related to POWs in the USSR was published, which contained significant information about Japanese.
In the 2000s, several books about Japanese POWs were published in Russia.
About 2,000 memoirs of Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union have been published in Japan.

Legacy

In 2015, records of the internment and repatriation were registered as a UNESCO Memory of the World under the title "Return to Maizuru Port—Documents Related to the Internment and Repatriation Experiences of Japanese ".

In fiction

The Japanese novelist Toyoko Yamasaki wrote the 1976 novel Fumō Chitai, about an Imperial Army staff officer captured in Manchuria, his captivity and return to Japan to become a businessman. This has been made into a film and two television dramas.
A dramatisation of experiences as a Soviet POW form a portion of the latter part of the epic movie trilogy, The Human Condition, by Masaki Kobayashi.
Kiuchi Nobuo reported his experiences about Soviet camps in his The Notes of Japanese soldier in USSR online comic series.
The 2011 South Korean movie My Way also shows the treatment of Japanese and Japanese-recruited Koreans in Soviet POW camps.