Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan 9780674269699
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ELEVEN WINTERS OF DISCONTENT
ELEVEN WINTERS OF DISCONTENT THE SIBERIAN INTERNMENT AND THE MAKING OF A NEW JAPAN
SHERZOD MUMINOV
H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England | 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Jacket art: Getty Images Jacket design: Graciela Galup 9780674269705 (EPUB) 9780674269699 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Muminov, Sherzod, author. Title: Eleven winters of discontent : the Siberian internment and the making of a new Japan / Sherzod Muminov. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021016795 | ISBN 9780674986435 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Prisoners of war—Japan—History—20th century. | Prisoners of war—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—History—20th century. | Prisoner-of-war camps—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—History—20th century. | Cold War. Classification: LCC UB805.R9 M86 2022 | DDC 940.54 / 7247089956—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016795
In loving memory of my mother, Mariyam Qobulova
CONTENTS
Note on Terms
ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: In the Prisons Stalin Built
1
1 Beyond the Nation: The Siberian Internment in Global History
25
2 Embodiments of Empire: The Internees as Imperial Vestiges
47
3 Bedbug Country Chronicles: The Soviet Union in Japanese Camp Memoirs
76
4 Cold, Hunger, and Hard Labor: Japanese Experiences in the Soviet Camps
111
5 The Skillful Application of Propaganda Principles: POWs and Soviet Reeducation
149
6 In the Cold War Cross Fire: Returnees and the Superpower Confrontation
205
7 We Cannot Die as Slaves: The Struggle for Recognition and Compensation
257
Epilogue: Breaking Boundaries
286
Notes 301 Acknowledgments
351
Index 355
NOTE ON TERMS
The term “Siberian Internment” in the subtitle is the common way of referring to the detainment of over 600,000 Japanese former soldiers and civilians in the Soviet labor and prisoner of war (POW) camps during 1945– 1956. While I use the term extensively in the book, mainly for reasons of convenience, I should point out that it is not entirely accurate. First, the internment was not confined to the geographical region of Siberia. Although many Japanese were interned in Siberia and the Far East, camps with Japa nese detainees w ere spread across the Soviet Union, from Ukraine in the west to Sakhalin in the east and from Norilsk in the north to Uzbekistan in the south. In other words, both in the Japanese texts and in this work, “Siberia” is a synecdoche, a part that represents the whole of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Second, the term “internment” is not without nuances. The Oxford En glish Dictionary’s definition of “confinement within the limits of a country or place” shows that in English the word is used in a broad sense. The Rus sian equivalent (internirovanie), however, is used to denote the detainment of civilians as opposed to that of POWs (voennoplennye). In this book “internment” pertains to the captivity of all Japanese citizens—servicemen and civilians alike—in the Soviet Union during the period 1945–1956. When talking about t hose conscripted into the Japanese military and later interned in the USSR, I take the liberty of referring to them as “serv icemen” in this book; this is because while a few hundred Japanese women were interned in the Soviet camps, they were attached to the military as civilians or medical and other auxiliary personnel, and it is not inaccurate to say that almost ix
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Note on Terms
all of t hose interned in the USSR were thus serv icemen. The terms “returnee” or “repatriate” are used to refer to the former internees a fter their repatriation to Japan. Japanese and other East Asian names are written in the traditional order, with the surname preceding the given name, except where they were rendered in the Western manner in the original source. Chinese words are romanized using the pinyin system and Russian ones using the Library of Congress convention (without the diacritics or ligatures), with rare exceptions where older forms are more familiar to the Anglophone reader (Chiang Kai-shek, KMT; Nizhny Novgorod, Mikoyan). Long vowels are generally marked by a macron, but not in words that are familiar in English such as Tokyo or Kyoto. Translations from the Japanese and Russian, except where stated otherw ise, are my own.
ABBREVIATIONS
AFL American Federation of L abor AP Associated Press AVP RF Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii), Moscow, Russia
BAM Baikal Amur (Railway) Mainline
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union d. Archival file (delo) DPJ Democratic Party of Japan ed. khr. Item (archival) f. fond (archival collection) FEC Far Easter Commission (also FECOM) FO Foreign Office (U.K.)
GARF State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii), Moscow, Russia
GASC General Affairs State Council (Manchukuo)
GHQ General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (also GHQ / SCAP) xi
xii
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Abbreviations
GPU State Political Directorate (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie)
GUPVI Chief Directorate for POW and Internee Affairs (Glavnoe upravlenie po delam voennoplennykh i internirovannykh)
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross IJA Imperial Japanese Army IMTFE International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as Tokyo Trial)
JCP Japanese Communist Party
JRCS Japanese Red Cross Society
KGB Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti)
KMT Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang)
l. Archival page (list)
LDP Liberal Democratic Party
MGB Ministry of State Security of the USSR (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti) 1946–1953
MHLW Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, Japan
MIS Military Intelligence Section of the GHQ
MMA MacArthur Memorial Archives
MVD Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del SSSR)
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, USA
NCO Noncommissioned officer
NDL National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan
NGO
NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nihon hōsō kyōkai)
NKVD People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR (Narodnyi komitet vnutrennikh del), forerunner of MVD
Nongovernmental organization
Abbreviations
p. Archival folder (papka) PFPC Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation, Japan
POW Prisoner of War
PRC People’s Republic of China Pt Archival paragraph (punkt)
RGAE Russian State Archive of Economics, Moscow, Russia
RGASPI Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History
RGVA Russian State Military Archive, Moscow, Russia
RSFSR Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
SCAP Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers
SCh Special part (archival)
t. Archival volume (tom)
xiii
op. Archival inventory number (opis’)
■
TsAMO RF Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (Tsentral’nyi arkhiv Ministerstva oborony Rossiiskoi Federatsii) TsKhIDK Center for the Preservation of Historic and Document Collections (Tsentr khraneniia istoriko- dokumental’nykh kollektsii) UKNA The National Archives of the United Kingdom USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
INTRODUCTION IN THE PRISONS STALIN BUILT
“In 1956, a Japanese man returned home a fter a long captivity in Russia. Captured by the Soviets in Pyongyang immediately a fter Japan’s defeat as a young man of twenty-five, he was to remain in the USSR for another eleven years. In 1953, Iosif Stalin ‘ascended to heaven’ but the Japanese man stayed on in the prison Stalin built, conversing with the dictator’s ghost. When the people of Poland and Hungary rebelled in 1956, Stalin’s specter suddenly became too busy and finally let the Japanese man return home.”1 Uchimura Gōsuke, a literary critic, translator, and later professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University, wrote these lines in a semifictionalized account of his Soviet captivity published in 1967. He was looking back on his eleven years of incarceration in camps and prisons from a distance of eleven years of freedom. Yet there was no hidden meaning behind this timing: eleven years was not a unit of time Uchimura had chosen after his incarceration to measure his existence. Neither was he seeking closure: he could not hope to purge his Siberian imprisonment from memory by having an equal length of freedom in postwar Japan. For Uchimura, as for the more than half a million of his fellow Japanese survivors of Stalinist labor camps, “Siberia” was a legacy that would stay with him until the end of his life.2 How did so many Japanese end up in Soviet captivity? The Siberian odyssey of Uchimura and his fellow captives had its roots in the d ying days of the Japanese Empire. It was a corollary of the brief Soviet-Japanese War of August 1945, which saw the last land b attles of World War II (WWII) in the Japanese puppet kingdom of Manchukuo in what is now northeastern China, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. In the small hours of 9 August, as 1
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the Manchurian colony slumbered under the summer skies, three Soviet armies that had been hardened in the battles against Nazi Germany crossed into Manchukuo from the west, north, and east. In less than ten days they had ripped through the puppet kingdom that had long been hailed as the empire’s safest corner and that contained more than 2.7 million Japanese residents and soldiers, plunging it into chaos and destruction.3 The Kwantung Army leaders had underestimated the Soviets’ magnitude, power, and speed and quickly withdrew south, leaving tens of thousands of Japanese settlers defenseless in the face of the Soviet assault. Some Japanese units continued their spirited resistance even after Emperor Hirohito announced the end of war in his monumental radio broadcast on 15 August. Still, it was an easy victory for the Red Army.4 Once the guns stopped firing, the Japanese surrender was formalized on 19 August, and the Soviets laid down the law, disarmed the Japanese troops, and made themselves at home in the newly occupied territory.5 Events, in other words, seemed to follow the familiar pattern in which Allied troops defeated and demobilized Axis armies. However, a twist of fate was awaiting the unsuspecting Japanese, who had felt relieved at having survived the Manchurian offensive. In a secret decree, Iosif Stalin, chairman of the State Defense Committee of the USSR, ordered the People’s Commissariat (later Ministry) of Internal Affairs (NKVD / MVD) to “select up to 500,000 Japa nese . . . physically fit to work in the conditions of the Far East and Siberia” and transport them to the Soviet Union.6 This order took even the Soviet officials by surprise, since only a week earlier, on 16 August, the Soviet government had ruled out taking any surrendered Japanese to the USSR.7 For a few months after Stalin issued his order, freight trains proceeded from Manchuria into Siberia, carrying the unaware Japanese soldiers into captivity. Other trains w ere readied to haul away the inanimate plunder of the Manchurian offensive: on 30 August, a week after his order to capture the h uman spoils of the Soviet-Japanese war, Stalin created a special commission to dismantle and appropriate “trophy equipment” from the industrial facilities of Manchukuo.8 This booty would be used to equip Soviet agricultural machinery plants, automobile factories, metallurgic and coal mining combines, electric power stations, chemical and rubber plants, and construction companies. The 500,000 h umans would provide the labor needed in building or rebuilding these facilities, contributing to a new chapter in Russia’s age-old effort to conquer and modernize its Far East in the face of encroachment by rivals—most recently, the Japanese.
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This was how the Siberian Internment—one of the largest forced migrations and detentions of foreign POWs in history—started. The Japanese captives w ere placed in more than two thousand camp units and prisons, where they were kept from a few months to eleven years. Between 1945 and 1956, more than 600,000 Japanese passed through the Soviet POW camp system. The vast majority of them, excluding about 1,500 so-called war criminals such as Uchimura, were allowed to return to Japan by the end of the 1940s. While there are no reliable statistics, around one in ten—roughly 60,000 in all—died in captivity, succumbing to cold, disease, malnutrition, mistreatment, and industrial accidents.9 Most deaths happened during the first winter of internment, one of the coldest on record.10 To add to the Japa nese suffering, when Stalin issued his secret order, the Soviet camp system was unprepared for an injection of a large number of new prisoners. As a result, thousands of Japanese w ere left stranded in transit camps, sleeping in dugouts, eating raw flour, wearing summer uniforms and clothing that was suitable for the August heat in Manchuria but not for the early winter in Siberia. Those who survived the journey often arrived at camps where conditions were more appropriate for c attle than for h uman beings. The winter of 1945–1946 thus remained in the internees’ memories as the most traumatic winter of their lives. As Iitsuka Toshio, a former internee, recounted, “those who somehow survived this first winter lived long enough until damoi [from the Russian domoi—“ home,” meaning repatriation].”11 Amid the chaos and confusion that followed its defeat on 15 August 1945, the Japanese state was helpless in the face of Stalin’s unexpected decision to ship the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) to the Soviet Union. Occupied by the Allied Powers (mainly the United States) between 1945 and 1952, Japan had few ways to bring pressure to bear on the USSR. The families of the internees and supporter groups lobbied persistently for the internees’ return, but such efforts were met with silence from Moscow, which repatriated the Japanese in small batches e very year and only during the regular shipping season from the ports of the Soviet Maritime Province (between April and November). U nder pressure from General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), US General Douglas MacArthur, in December 1946 the USSR signed an agreement with the SCAP in which it promised to repatriate 50,000 Japa nese each month, and MacArthur took the responsibility for providing repatriation ships.12 Despite this agreement, the Soviets w ere reluctant to let go of their Japanese charges, holding them for as long as possible.
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Even a fter regaining independence in April 1952, Japan was not immediately successful in its attempts to have the Siberian internees returned. Only following Stalin’s death in March 1953 did the ice of Soviet stubbornness show any signs of thawing. Still, it would take two more years and changes in government in both countries for Japanese-Soviet normalization talks to start in London in June 1955. Japan’s chief negotiator, Matsumoto Shun’ichi (who had served as the first post-W WII Japanese ambassador to the United Kingdom), viewed the repatriation of the Japanese from the Soviet Union as an issue that was “to be prioritized over all other issues.”13 His Soviet interlocutors, while using the Japanese captives as bargaining chips, nevertheless came up with gestures of goodwill immediately before and during the negotiations, allowing Japanese Red Cross delegates to visit the camps and providing internee lists.14 Two months a fter the signing of the Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration that restored diplomatic relations, the Soviets transferred to their Japanese counterparts the final 1,025 Japanese internees at the Soviet port of Nakhodka.15 On 26 December the 7,100-ton repatriation ship Kōan-maru entered the Sea of Japan harbor of Maizuru with these last returnees on board, bringing down the curtain on the Siberian Internment. Uchimura Gōsuke was among the passengers who had to wait for that last ship home. Still, he was grateful to return at all. After receiving a twenty- five-year sentence for “espionage” and “assisting the international bourgeoisie,” he had bid an imaginary farewell to his m other, telling her his bones would now be scattered among the millions of skeletons buried u nder the 16 Russian expanses, “a place littered with bones (honedarake).” Now he was returning home in one piece. The Kōan-maru had for years shuttled between the Japanese port of Shimonoseki and the harbor of Busan in colonial Korea. In the preceding decade, it had traversed the Sea of Japan between Nakhodka and Maizuru, carrying Siberian internees home. Arriving at Maizuru on that final journey from Nakhodka, the Kōan-maru put an end to a maritime shuttle service for Stalin’s Japanese prisoners. Its passengers, including Uchimura, had lived through the full eleven years and 132 days of the Siberian Internment.17 Throughout this time, repatriation ships like the Kōan-maru had been an eagerly awaited sight for the Japanese internees scheduled for repatriation and temporarily lodged in Transit Camp No. 380, near Nakhodka. A fter a two-day journey from Maizuru, the ships appeared on the horizon at Nakhodka, bringing with them the promise of returning home.
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Many ships served the Nakhodka-Maizuru route, but it was the Kōan- maru that incidentally ferried three of the men central to this book. On 20 August 1956, four months before the K ō an-m aru’s last journey from Nakhodka that brought Uchimura home, the “emperor of Siberia” himself had graced the ship’s deck with his presence. Asahara Seiki was one of several Japanese who had earned this derisive moniker for collaborating with his Soviet captors. Asahara had a long history with Marxism that started during his student years at the Tokyo Imperial University in the early 1940s. After he was conscripted, his interest in Russia had led him to the Kwantung Army’s Russian Education Unit, which trained intelligence officers working on the Soviet Union. In Siberia, Asahara’s Russian skills and left-leaning sympathies marked him out from other internees. In the spring of 1946, Ivan Kovalenko, the top Soviet official fluent in Japa nese who was responsible for publishing Nihon shimbun (Japan Newspaper), the Japanese-language propaganda paper for the POWs, appointed Asahara the newspaper’s editor.18 Asahara took his chance, penning editorials under the alias “Moroto Fumio” in honor of Viacheslav Molotov (an Old Bolshevik and then the Soviet foreign minister) and becoming a torchbearer for the camp propaganda education program, known to the POWs as the Demo cratic Movement.19 T hese services earned Asahara f avors from Soviet chiefs and the resentment of his fellow Japanese. In fact, his fame went beyond the camps in Khabarovsk and the broader Japanese POW community. In 1950, some Austrian POWs told Kagawa Shōichi, a Japanese interned along the Baikal-Amur Railway Mainline (BAM), about “a Japanese dog (sobaka) called Asahara in Khabarovsk. If such a dog w ere among us, we would not let it live for another day.”20 Back in Japan, the national daily newspaper Yomiuri shimbun reported Asahara’s return with the words, “The hatred toward this man runs deep among his fellow repatriates.”21 However, Asahara’s hard-earned loyalty to the Soviets was not enough to save him. Despite his favored position, the atmosphere of class warfare and denunciations Asahara had helped create in the camps eventually led to his downfall. When some internees reported to P. Naumov, chief political officer for the camps in the Khabarovsk region, about Asahara’s past in Manchuria, the “emperor” was arrested and, like Uchimura, given a sentence of twenty- five years in prison under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.22 On board the Kōan-maru with Asahara on that August day was also Lieutenant Colonel Sejima Ry ūzō, once a rising star in the Military Operations
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(Strategy) Department of the Army General Staff in the Imperial General Headquarters (Daihon’ei Rikugunbu Sakusenka). Born in 1911 to a farming family, Sejima had earned the highest grades both at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy and later at the Army War College, the highest school of military training in Japan, receiving gifts of honor from the emperor each time. Sejima quickly r ose through the ranks, joining the Imperial General Headquarters in 1940. In July 1945, he was dispatched to Manchuria to shore up the defenses against the impending Soviet attack. Following Japan’s defeat, Sejima was captured along with the Kwantung Army commanding officers and taken to Khabarovsk as a POW. Unlike Uchimura or Asahara, however, Sejima had an extraordinary chance to return to Japan during his captivity. In September 1946, his captors flew him to Tokyo as a witness for the Soviet prosecution at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, also known as the Tokyo Trial), one of three Japa nese officers carefully selected by the Soviet authorities to provide evidence of Japan’s aggressive plans against the USSR. Despite the Soviets’ thorough preparations, Sejima’s testimony did not significantly help their prosecution effort. Having breathed the Tokyo air but unable to visit his family home, Sejima was flown back to the camps. In 1949, he too received a sentence of twenty-five years in corrective labor camps for “espionage” and “assisting the international bourgeoisie” under Article 58.23 Uchimura, Asahara, and Sejima, three of our chief protagonists, were some of the more than 1,300 Japanese so-called war criminals and civilians freed from Soviet captivity in 1956, the final year of the Siberian Internment. For this reason, I refer to them as “the ’56ers” in this book. Somewhat confusingly, I could also call them, a fter Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “the ’58ers”—political prisoners convicted under Article 58—or even “twenty- five-year prisoners” (dvadtsatipiatiletniki), according to the length of their prescribed incarceration.24 The ’56ers’ long stints in Russia’s camps and prisons turned them into the old-timers of the Soviet penal system. They were kept a fter everyone e lse was allowed to return, their captivity dragging on beyond the death of Stalin, the man who had taken them prisoner. Only those Japanese with any history or suspicion of anti-Soviet activities remained incarcerated after what I call “the Great Sorting of 1949,” when anybody whom the Soviets did not view as potentially useful was marked for release and repatriation. The catchall charge under Article 58 meant that the ’56ers were a motley group consisting of former military, intelligence, and kempeitai (military police) officers; Manchukuo government
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employees (ranging from deputy ministers to schoolteachers); members of Japan’s bacteriological warfare program (Unit 731); and a few unlucky souls who, like Uchimura, had attracted the suspicion of the NKVD officers. Their status as the longest-serving internees notwithstanding, the ’56ers were but a small minority of Stalin’s Japanese captives, the overwhelming majority of whom (mainly conscripts) had been repatriated between 1946 and 1949. As suggested by the sheer number of these young returnees (there were more than 500,000 of them), they represented a cross section of Japa nese society, originating from all prefectures and e very imaginable social class and background from rural youths to the former prime minister’s son. There w ere farmer’s sons from Japan’s peripheries, and former farmers had been conscripted in the last stages of the war from Manchukuo. These farmers were not the only newcomers in the military fold in a desperate root-and-branch mobilization (nekosogi dō in): other civilian settlers in Manchukuo and Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) were conscripted, including schoolteachers, factory workers, and railway operators. In Karafuto, over 380,000 Japanese subjects, both civilians and serv icemen and including 23,000 Koreans, found themselves on land that had changed hands u nder their feet, suddenly becoming part of the Soviet territory. 25 Around 10,000 Koreans mobilized into the Imperial Japanese Army surrendered to the Soviet army and 3,000 of them ended up in Soviet camps.26 T here were soldiers who by sheer accident found themselves in Manchuria at the time of the Soviet attack, like Hayashi Teru, who was passing through Manchukuo from his station in central China on the way to Japan’s home islands.27 There were civilian women employed by the military and nurses in the Japanese Red Cross.28 And when the Soviets rounded up those destined for the Siberian journey, some who had no connection with the military inevitably became POWs by association. The internees’ experiences in the USSR were as diverse as their backgrounds. Like Uchimura, Asahara, and Sejima, many of the men committed their experiences to paper after repatriation. Some memoirs, like Takasugi Ichirō’s In the Shadow of the Northern Lights and Kurumizawa Kōshi’s Records of a Black Bread Captive, became best sellers.29 Other men, like Ishihara Yoshirō, found release from their Siberian ordeals through the medium of poetry. Still o thers painted their experiences, like Kazuki Yasuo and Shikoku Gorō, transmitting on canvas the impressions that Siberia had left in their hearts.30 For many of these men, the Siberian Internment was one long and untimely winter in their lives that had cut short the spring of
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Figure I.1. A rare image of Japanese women interned in the USSR, during a rally at Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
their youth. Their memoirs, poems, and paintings, while attesting to that winter’s horrors, w ere proof that even in the most desperate circumstances they had kept alive the hope of returning home. The b itter cold, perpetual hunger, and backbreaking work—the so-called Siberian trinity of suffering (Shiberia san jūku) perpetuated in their memoirs—ultimately could not deprive them of that hope. However long, the winters of discontent would finally be over, the internees believed, and with spring and the restart of navigation across the Sea of Japan, the day of return would come. This hope came alive in the lyrics of a song that the wider Japanese public first heard in August 1948 on the radio during an amateur singing contest organized by Japan’s public broadcaster, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, NHK). Set to the tune of a military march, the song had variations on the promise “The day of return w ill come, the spring w ill come” as its chorus. Before singing to the accompaniment of his accordion, the contestant Nakayama Kōzō made a brief speech: “I have just returned from an internment camp in Siberia. I would like to present a song
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sung by everyone at my camp. I devote it to those eagerly awaiting their return to the motherland.”31 Nakayama’s performance of “On the Foreign Hills (Ikoku no oka)” became the song’s minute of glory. In October 1948, the singer Takeyama Itsurō popularized the tune by adding it to his repertoire, and in the following year, the major film studio Shin Toho produced an eponymous film, with “On the Foreign Hills” as the theme song.32 The song’s popularity did not wane in later decades, even as the Siberian Internment itself faded in the national memory. In 1961 another popular singer, Miura Kōichi, released a cover version, and in 2001, the Shiki Theater Company (Gekidan Shiki), one of Japan’s most popular private theater groups, launched the original musical “On the Foreign Hills.” By July 2013, the musical had been performed over five hundred times.33 “On the Foreign Hills” and its spin-offs remained popular, keeping alive in memory the suffering, longing, and hope of those Japanese who had been cut off from their homeland at the war’s end. Interestingly, when the Japanese public first heard the song in 1948, not even Nakayama knew the identity of its true creators. Looking for the song’s author, the NHK publicized a call to Japanese returnees from the USSR, but the appeal only deepened the mystery surrounding the song. Many returnees wrote back with the name “Masuda Kōji,” yet no one using this name answered the NHK’s call. Masuda Kōji was nowhere to be found. As it turned out, he was not even in Japan at the time. Only in April 1950, nearly two years after Nakayama’s performance, did Masuda return from Siberia. Twenty-seven at the time, he had spent the previous fifteen years abroad: ten in Manchukuo and five in a coal-mining camp near Vladivostok. As he crossed the crowded pier on his return home, Masuda could not believe his ears: in the welcoming commotion a small group was loudly singing “On the Foreign Hills.” Not even in his dreams could Masuda have anticipated being welcomed back to Japan by the song he had written. During the cold winter of 1945, longing for his hometown in Fukushima Prefecture, Masuda had filled in with his own wistful words the missing lyrics of a military tune whistled by a campmate.34 The tune had been composed in 1943 by Yoshida Tadashi, a surveying engineer in the IJA. Masuda did not know Yoshida at the time, but he liked the tune. Having reincarnated the song, Masuda performed it in a camp concert in March 1946 to the applause of his fellow internees. From there, the song spread west into the Soviet heartland, carried by the internees who were transferred between camps, memorized on the go, and sung to pass the time and raise
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spirits during the long working hours. In one of these camps, Nakayama must have picked up the song before so memorably transporting it to Japan. At the time he performed it on radio in 1948, both Masuda the lyricist and Yoshida the composer were still in the Soviet camps. Unbeknown to them, the song they had fortuitously created about longing for home had returned home before them. And long before it found its admirers in Japan and guaranteed nationwide fame to Yoshida, who went on to become a prominent postwar composer, “On the Foreign Hills” soothed the suffering and raised the spirits of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens interned in the Soviet camps.35 It had become the anthem for the Japanese captives on the foreign hills.
THE SIBERIAN INTERNMENT IN HISTORY AND MEMORY
Eleven Winters of Discontent is a history of the odyssey of the over 600,000 Japanese who w ere captured at the outposts of Japan’s empire in Northeast Asia, transported to the USSR’s sprawling system of forced labor camps for foreign POWs, exploited for their labor and subjected to propaganda education, and returned to Japan at the beginning of the Cold War. This odyssey remains largely unknown internationally. The image of an archipelago, famously used by Solzhenitsyn to describe the Soviet penal camp system, is also an apt metaphor in describing the state of international scholarship on the internment: the islands of national histories remain separated by linguistic barriers, academic detachment, and political divisions. The Cold War, during which the Soviet archives w ere closely guarded, is partly responsible for this. In the absence of archival information, the history of the internment had to rely on survivors’ memoirs. Even after the Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s and works on the topic mushroomed in Russian and Japanese, the internment remained on the margins of English-language scholarship. Only in recent years have Anglophone historians started to analyze the internment in the wider context of postwar repatriations, as interest in the legacies of Japan’s empire steadily grows.36 These works nevertheless rely heavily on Japanese-and English-language sources and view the internment largely from the Japanese perspective. The abundance of internment memoirs and histories in Japanese and Russian is hardly reflected in English, while in Russia and Japan the Siberian Internment has been conceived of and written about largely within the confines of national
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histories, exclusively serving national goals. In short, there has long been a need for a comprehensive history of the Siberian Internment. Its history needs to be written using sources in multiple languages—especially the large body of Russian-language archival material—and approaches and frameworks that go beyond national borders. This book brings together archives, memoirs, and scholarship in Japanese, Russian, and English to place the internment at the intersection of global processes: Japan’s quest for colonizing Asia, the deadly conflict of WWII, and the international entanglements of the Cold War. Studying the internment, an important event in its own right, is useful in reconsidering t hese epochal processes. The internment bridged them and was s haped by them. Despite the attempts to document it as an episode of Japanese national suffering, the Siberian Internment was an event of transnational scale and significance. A look at the map of the internment w ill suffice to demonstrate this. A fter all, the internment started in what was still part of the informal Japanese Empire in northeastern China, but the area would soon become contested in the Chinese Civil War.37 It played out in over two thousand camp units scattered across the USSR, and it came to an end in a sea journey to a new Japan that was tottering into the postwar order under US guidance. Behind camp walls and barbed wire, the Japanese internees were unaware of the momentous changes taking place in their occupied homeland. Thus, when they crossed the Sea of Japan on their way back to the home islands, they traversed not simply the Soviet-Japanese border but also the boundary between epochs. Their experiences w ere uniquely akin to time travel from the prewar empire to the postwar nation-state, interrupted by a surreal bondage in a Siberian purgatory that Takasugi called “a historical experience of the Japanese people comparable to the Babylonian Captivity.”38 These passages across borders (national and natural, ideological and cultural) cannot be explained in full from the vantage point of the nation-state. They make sense only within the transnational contexts in which the Siberian Internment occurred. I stage this book in three such settings. The first was that of Japan’s failed empire, which seemingly “disappeared without trace” when Emperor Hirohito announced the Japanese defeat on 15 August 1945.39 On that momentous day the imperial reign that had spanned thousands of kilometers on land and sea—stretching from Alaska to Java and from Manchuria to Guadalcanal—shrank to the size of the Japanese archipelago, jettisoning its territorial possessions along with inconvenient
40˚
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B a rBe an rt es n t s S e aS e a
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Kara SeaKara Sea
Norilsk Norilsk DudinkaDudinka Vorkuta Vorkuta Inta
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Inta Ob'
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Pechora Pechora
Arkhangel’sk Arkhangel’sk
Yen
isey
Leningrad Leningrad
Ob'
isey Yen
U .. SS .. R S . R .' U . S Ob
YeniseiskYeniseisk Perm’ Perm’ MariinskMariinsk (247) (247) Sverdlovsk Sverdlovsk (435) (435) Sukhoi Sukhoi Log (153)Log (153) Krasnoyarsk Tomsk Tomsk Krasnoyarsk (34) (3 Krasnogorsk Anzhero-Sudzhensk ElabugaElabuga (97) (97) Krasnogorsk (27) (27) Anzhero-Sudzhensk (526) (526) Zelenyi Bor (531) Novosibirsk Kemerovo Kemerovo (503) Novosibirsk (503) Oranki (74) Zelenodol’sk Zelenodol’sk (119) (119) Zelenyi Bor (531) MoscowMoscow Oranki (74) Cheliabinsk (102) Petropavlovsk Abakan Leninsk-Kuznetskii Ufa Cheliabinsk (102) Petropavlovsk Abakan (33) Leninsk-Kuznetskii Ufa Morshansk Morshansk (64) (64) Kokchetau Barnaul Barnaul (128) (128) Stalinsk Stalinsk Kokchetau (1054) (1054) Tambov Tambov (525) (525 Samara Samara Biysk Chesnokovka Biisk Chesnokovka Rada (188) Rada (188) (36, Novoaltaisk) Rubtsovsk (511) (36, Novoaltaisk) Orenburg Rubtsovsk (511) Orenburg Saratov Saratov (238) (238) Kiev Kiev Leninogorsk Leninogorsk (347) (347) Khar’kovKhar’kov (415) (415) Karaganda Karaganda (99) (99)Ust’-Kamenogorsk Ust’-Kamenogorsk (45) (45) Kramatorsk (217) Kramatorsk (217) Stalingrad (Volgograd) Kengir Kengir Stalingrad (Volgograd) Zaporozhye (100) Zaporozhye (100) BalkhashBalkhash (37) (37) TaganrogTaganrog (475) (475) Dnepropetrovsk Dnepropetrovsk Lake Lake (315) (315) Aral Aral Kyzylorda BalkhashBalkhash Kyzylorda Sea Sea Ordzhonikidze CaspianCaspian Ordzhonikidze Dzhambul Turkestan (348) Dzhambul (Taraz) (Taraz) Turkestan (348) Black Sea Black Sea (Vladikavkaz) Sea (Vladikavkaz) Sea Alma-AtaAlma-Ata (40) (40) ChimkentChimkent Chirchik (360) Frunze (Bishkek) Chirchik (360) Frunze (Bishkek) Tbilisi (236) Tbilisi (236) Angren (372) Krasnovodsk TashkentTashkent (386) (386) Angren (372) Krasnovodsk Pakhta-Aral Pakhta-Aral (29) (29) (44, Turkmenbashy) (44, Turkmenbashy) Andijan Andijan (26) (26) Ferghana BukharaBukhara Ferghana (387) (387) BekabadBekabad (288) (288) Ashkhabad Ashkhabad Samarkand Samarkand Vladimirskii Tsentral Prison Vladimirskii Tsentral Prison
Ivanovo Ivanovo (48) (48) Yuzha (165) Yuzha (165)
a Volg
a Volg
ud Am
a ary
a ary
ud Am
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Locations of POW camps Locations of POW camps with with Japanese internees, 1945-56 Japanese internees, 1945-56 Rail network Rail network
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of railway tion oftion railway PrisonPrison
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CapitalCapital city city Other Other city city with Japanese internees: CampsCamps with Japanese internees: in brackets camp number NumberNumber in brackets indicatesindicates camp number or camp complexes Major Major campscamps or camp complexes Other Other campscamps
Kolymskoe Kolymskoe
Oymyakon Oymyakon Yakutsk Yakutsk Lena
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Lake Baikal Lake Baikal
Never Never Nikolaevsk-on-Amur Nikolaevsk-on-Amur (21) (21) Okha Izvestkovaya (22) Aleksandrovskii Tsentral Prison Okha (22) Aleksandrovskii Tsentral Prison Petropavlovsk Petropavlovsk Sretensk Mal’ta (255) Chita (24) (25) (25) Sretensk Mal’ta (255) KadalaChita (52) (24) Kamchatskii Kadala (52) Kamchatskii (75160) (75160) Khurmuli (5) Irkutsk (32) Khurmuli (5) Nerchinsk Irkutsk (32) Nerchinsk Komsomol’sk-on-Amur Ulan-UdeUlan-Ude (30) (30) Komsomol’sk-on-Amur (18) (18) Khilok Khilok Blagoveshchensk Blagoveshchensk (20) (20) 50˚ KyakhtaKyakhta Suhbaatar Borzia BorziaRaichikha 50˚ Raichikha (19) Suhbaatar Muli (1) Muli (1) SakhalinSakhalin (19) Petrovsk-Zabaikalskii Birobidzhan Sovgavan’ (2) Petrovsk-Zabaikalskii Birobidzhan (46) (46) Zuunkharaa Sovgavan’ (2) Kharaa Kharaa Zuunkharaa Izvestkovaia (4) Izvestkovaya (4) Khabarovsk Khabarovsk (14, 16) (14, 16) Ulanbaatar Ulanbaatar Bei’an Bei’an Khor (17)Khor (17) Choibalsan Ugui norUgui nor Nalaikh Choibalsan Nalaikh Iman (15) Iman (15) M GO ON LG IOA L I A Lesozavodsk Harbin Harbin M O N Lesozavodsk (47) (47) Tetyukhe Changchun Tetyukhe (10) (10) Changchun Semyonovka Mudanjiang Semyonovka (15) (15) Mudanjiang (Shinkyō)(Shinkyō) Artyom (12) Artyom (12) Hokkaido Suchan (11) Hokkaido Suchan (11) Nakhodka (9, 380) Nakhodka (9, 380) ShenyangShenyang Vladivostok Vladivostok (13) (13) Voroshilov (14, Ussuriysk) BeijingBeijing Voroshilov (14, Ussuriysk) Cheremkhovo Bukachacha Cheremkhovo (31) (31)Bukachacha (23) (23)
C H ICNHAI N A
Sea of Sea of
Japan KOR EKOR A E AJapan
Yellow Yellow Sea Sea
E a s tE a s t C h i nCa h i n a Sea Sea
J A PJAANP A N
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Tokyo Tokyo
Maizuru Maizuru Kyoto
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legacies. The internment was one such legacy, for without Japan’s imperial project, motivated by its urge to secure and retain land and resources on the Asian mainland, and the country’s humiliating defeat by the Soviets and their allies, the IJA soldiers would not have ended up in Siberia in the first place. Years later, when they disembarked at Maizuru, many Siberian internees were still wearing their tattered IJA uniforms, briefly reviving the empire in Japanese public memory. With the belated return of the fallen imperial army, it was as if the empire itself was making a late comeback in a Japan eager to leave it behind. As the empire’s embodiments and remnants, the returning internees challenged by their very appearance the attempts to erase the imperial past from postwar society. The second context is the sprawling system of Soviet labor camps for foreign POWs administered by the Chief Directorate for POWs and Internees (Glavnoe Upravlenie Po delam Voennoplennykh i Internirovannykh [GUPVI]) of the almighty Soviet interior ministry (NKVD / MVD). This camp network—founded in September 1939 to accommodate the USSR’s first foreign POWs, who w ere captured in the invasion of Poland and the Soviet-Japanese clash at Khalkhin-Gol (Nomonhan)—is yet to have a systematic study in English.40 It was created in the image and likeness of the Chief Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps and Settlements—the USSR’s sprawling system of forced labor camps—better known by its acronym Gulag (for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei). The GUPVI camp system benefited from the experience and expertise of the Gulag chiefs, and POW camps were often located near Gulag ones. Despite some similarities, however, the GUPVI camps were a different kind of an institution. In this book I demonstrate how, while POW captivity in the USSR was undeniably inhumane, Soviet officials expended extraordinary amounts of resources and energy to ensure the well-being of foreign POWs, sacrifices rarely made for the benefit of Soviet inmates. Besides the general contrast between GUPVI and Gulag camps, conditions within the GUPVI archipelago differed from camp to camp, as foreign POW groups were not all treated equally. Placing Japanese experiences within this foreign context is crucial in exposing the narrow, Japanese-centered nature of postwar historiography on the Siberian Internment. A close reading of internee memoirs against the background of Soviet archives on the Siberian Internment helps move the epicenter of events outside Japan, making it possible to study domestic transformations of the Occupation era from without. While it is natural for Japanese memoirists and historians to prioritize the suffering of their com-
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patriots in the GUPVI system, the truth is that these Japanese constituted only one group among many in the Soviet POW camps. Trains that transported them to Siberia in late 1945 w ere not the only vehicles with prospective inmates for the USSR’s labor camps. Within the context of the Soviet camp system, the internment of over 600,000 Japanese was not simply a Japanese national tragedy. It was also a nexus in the chain of forced migrations, population exchanges, and deportations of whole ethnic groups initiated by Stalin across vast distances of Eurasia before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of WWII.41 The w hole of Eurasia was on the move, with millions uprooted as a result of the world war, and the events described in this book were hardly extraordinary for the period. In fact, my analysis demonstrates that the Japanese, who entered the camps months if not years later than the European POWs from the deadly Soviet-German War of 1941–1945, w ere hardly the most disadvantaged captive group in the GUPVI. The so-called race war waged by the United States against the Japanese and the racial hatred of Americans toward the enemy w ere hardly replicated h ere: t here is no evidence to suggest that the Soviet attitudes t oward the Japanese or their other enemies were defined by race.42 Moreover, many internees, even the ones repatriated as early as 1946 and hence most critical of the USSR, expressed surprise at what they perceived as a lack of racism in the USSR, writing “There is no racial discrimination in the USSR,” and “We, the Japa nese, w ere treated as equals.” 43 For the Soviets, those most deserving of retribution w ere the Germans and their European allies. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the Japanese, in comparison, were a mere afterthought in the eyes of the Soviet leaders and camp chiefs, who nonetheless made e very effort to ensure that the Japanese captives stayed alive and well even in the early postwar years, when famine ravaged the Soviet countryside. Why did the camp chiefs try to save “the POWs of former e nemy armies” even as Soviet citizens starved?44 Beyond the obvious explanation that the Japanese were an important source of labor, an answer to this question leads to our final setting: the Cold War international system. The GUPVI housed citizens with over thirty nationalities—a truly international community of inmates—who were valued for more than just the labor they provided. In the increasingly heated international competition of the Cold War, the Soviet leaders reasoned that these foreign POWs could be a useful tool for Soviet interests abroad. Summing up the achievements of the internment in a May 1950 memo to Stalin, Sergei Kruglov, the interior minister, wrote
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that “upon repatriation many POWs play an active role in democratic transformations, assist in unmasking the calumnies of the bourgeois reactionary forces against the USSR, [and] explain to their compatriots the importance of friendly relations with the Soviet Union.” 45 The utility of the Japanese captives to the communist cause was not lost on the American side either, as is evident from special reports compiled by the GHQ of the SCAP.46 Clearly, as the discord between the United States and the USSR deepened, the Siberian Internment became another Cold War battleground. I argue, however, that the internment had much earlier origins and was the source of one of the early disagreements between the superpower allies that later blossomed into the global standoff. The archival evidence that is now available, while inconclusive, points to the fact that the August 1945 Soviet decision to drive away the surrendered Japanese troops was not premeditated but came after President Harry Truman coldly rebuffed Stalin’s request that the two countries jointly occupy Japan.47 In other words, the Siberian Internment was more than a marginal issue in the Cold War that became a point of contention at the beginning of the 1950s. Instead, it was coeval with the Cold War. These broad international and transnational contexts are essential in writing a comprehensive history of the Siberian Internment. In turn, studying the internment helps unmask the fundamental characteristics of each of these contexts and expose the contradictions inherent in them. For a start, the Siberian internees’ experiences highlight the excesses of the expansionist Japanese empire that had sent hundreds of thousands of p eople to the distant corners of Asia in search of resources and living space, stretching itself beyond the limits of the possible. More importantly, t hese experiences point to what may be the biggest contradiction of postwar Japa nese history: the Japanese empire—a multiethnic, transnational, and pan- Asian undertaking that spanned millions of square kilometers on land and sea—was forced into a national straitjacket after the war, a framework it did not fit and thus could not survive in. In short, a history of the Siberian Internment shows how and why the Japanese empire was excised from public memory and the pages of history in the new, postimperial Japa nese nation-state. The Japanese experiences in the GUPVI system of camps for foreign POWs also provide an intimate look into the inner workings of this peculiar camp archipelago. Japanese memoirs and Soviet archives together open a window into the living conditions in the camps, the day-to-day struggles
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over food, sleep, and work. But they also help unmask the thinking, methods, and hierarchies b ehind the power relations in the expansive POW camp system. Importantly for everyone involved—but especially the captives, who were often exploited to the full during the day only to have to sit through propaganda classes in the evening, reading about the USSR’s mission to liberate the workers of the world from capitalist exploitation—these experiences also awakened them to the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Soviet system. This incongruity between thought and reality, or propaganda and life, combined with the coercion and hypocrisy of the Soviet officials that the Japanese captives regularly experienced in the camps, provides, in my view, the most persuasive explanation for why the effects of the Soviet propaganda education program so praised even by the US Occupation officials proved to be so short-lived. Years before the exposure of Stalinist crimes led to the disillusionment of foreign Marxists with the Soviet version of communism, this version had lost its luster in the eyes of some Japanese captives who had immediately experienced it on their bodies and had perhaps had a fleeting fascination with the Soviet alternative. The attraction to Marxism of thousands in the camps—and away from it once they w ere able to return to their homeland—shows that the allure of the Democratic Movement applied mostly in the controlled environment of detainment camps and was reevaluated by internees as soon as they w ere no longer subject to the camp walls, barbed wire, and rifles of the Soviet guards. Finally, a study of the Siberian internees’ experiences in postwar Japan provides us with firsthand accounts and impressions of the Cold War international system and the new Japan shaped by its demands. This was a new Japan in the sense that it claimed to have made a clean break with its past self, the Japanese Empire. It was conceived and s haped to a large extent by the new realities and necessities dictated by the US-Japan alliance as a guarantee against communist expansion for both allies, as well as by all the strategic, economic, and political benefits this alliance afforded. The supposedly harmonious pan-Asian empire was aggressively effaced from the postwar scene to make way for the new Japan that defined itself domestically in terms of Japanese ethnicity and internationally through its ideological and economic alliance with the United States. The returnees from Soviet captivity did not fit in comfortably in this Japan, which was fundamentally and existentially opposed to communist ideology (though not necessarily always to the governments that professed that ideology). This was especially true during the internees’ lives soon a fter their repatriation—a period that
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coincided, to their misfortune, with the most turbulent events of the early Cold War in East Asia: the founding of the P eople’s Republic of China (PRC), the unprecedented success of Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in the 1949 general elections, and the conflagration on the Korean peninsula. The internees’ tribulations in this incipient Cold War international system also reveal important contradictions. First, the rhetoric and attitudes in society toward returnees from the communist camp demonstrated how even the compatriots (dōhō) for whose repatriation tens of thousands of Japanese campaigned in the early postwar years could overnight turn in public opinion into suspicious foot soldiers of the coming communist revolution in Japan. The Cold War thinking and reporting in the early 1950s facilitated this transformation. Second, the long and largely unsuccessful struggle for compensations and apologies that some internees waged against successive Japanese governments demonstrates the exclusivist and narrowly national nature of the Japanese governments’ postwar commemoration and honoring of former conscripts and war victims. For a start, the non-Japanese internees in the Soviet camps—for example, Koreans and other former imperial subjects—were unceremoniously excluded from any consideration for compensations by the postwar Japanese state, underlining the ethnically defined nature of state compensation and homage it paid to war victims. In other words, the former subjects who had fought under the IJA banners and given their lives and limbs for the Japanese Empire w ere treated as foreigners in the new, narrowly national definition of Japaneseness, and hence they were not eligible for any compensation or honorary mention. But even the ethnically Japanese returnees’ allegiances and membership in the postwar national community initially came into question b ecause of their captivity u nder the communist enemy. Moreover, the indifferent and reluctant stance displayed by the government to these Japanese citizens’ calls for compensation, while other victim groups achieved their aims, outlined clearly the contours of the new Japanese victimhood advocated and practiced by the nation’s conservative ruling elite. The struggles of the Siberian returnees unmasked, among other t hings, the hypocrisies of postwar Japan during the Cold War. Bridging t hese three broad contexts, the Siberian Internment provides a fresh outlook on the major international events of the 1940s and 1950s. While its main protagonists are a group of predominantly young Japanese men, this study also illuminates the momentous postwar developments in the Soviet Union and its attempts to grapple with the challenges of Cold
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War international politics. The year that the Siberian Internment ended, 1956, was also when a new era in Soviet history began: it was the year the Soviet Union started its “lurching progress . . . away from a regime of terror and ideological orthodoxy.” 48 The observations of Japanese captives on daily life in the Soviet Union that were committed to paper in the postwar years and the large body of archival sources I have consulted present a peculiar window into Soviet society and played a significant part in shaping Japanese views of the USSR. A history of the Siberian Internment is inevitably also a history of the Soviet Union. In short, the knowledge that Siberian internees and repatriates gained in the camps and after repatriation is invaluable in documenting the making of a new Japan and the broader processes of postwar, Cold War, and international politics. Much of this book is devoted to the reconsidering and rewriting of these well-studied events through the eyes and experiences of the Siberian internees, both during their Soviet captivity and following their return to Japan. In particular, the book aims to write the history of the internment as an encounter that—despite the confrontations that conditioned it—defied borders, ideologies, and the divisions of the Cold War. The internment, I believe, presents a perfect argument for rewriting national histories through extranational—primarily global international and transnational—lenses, based on the largest possible number of multilingual sources. As I w ill show, the internment was many things at once: a corollary of WWII and an early bone of contention between wartime allies; a vestige of Japan’s empire and a tale of imperial fall; and a Cold War story of confrontation, discrimination, and betrayal. Despite all this, its complexity and its relevance did not become apparent during decades of postwar history, as it was reduced in the eyes of many Japanese to a chapter in the history of exclusively Japanese victimhood, a Cold War trope about a brutal communist power that was hell-bent on sacrificing millions to its utopian ideals. The history of how this reduction and simplification was perpetrated by many actors, and for a variety of reasons, provides a case study of how arbitrary boundaries and political agendas shape the historical consciousness of millions of p eople. In a version of history influenced and enabled by the Cold War and national politics, the Siberian internees are easily seen as mere instruments, pawns on the g reat geopolitical chessboard of the Cold War struggle for domination, bargaining chips on the t able of international politics, and caricatures that various groups in Japan and beyond used for their political
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goals and discarded once their currency as political actors was spent. An alternative reading of history which I present h ere views the Siberian internees not merely as former Japanese serv icemen who found themselves, against their w ill, in extraordinary circumstances that transformed their lives and the history of their country. While I acknowledge—and document to the best of my ability—the tribulations that these survivors had to live through during the internment and its long afterlife in postwar Japan, I challenge the hackneyed identity of pitiful victim that has most often been assigned to the Japanese internees of the Soviet Union, both casualties and survivors alike. I suggest that the extraordinary circumstances in which they found themselves make the internees historical actors in an event of global significance, players on the international scene who were not passive, voiceless victims as they are often portrayed. Japanese experiences b ehind camp walls and in postwar Japan cannot be explained solely through the lens of victimhood. These encounters were not limited to the illegal deportation to and confinement in the camps, as is argued by the majority of historians, but were a complex array of interactions, confrontations, and longer-term relationships with Soviet citizens and other captives. But it is equally true that if the Siberian internees w ere victims, they were victims not only of the Soviet Union, but also of the Japanese Empire and the Cold War Japan to which they returned.
OUTLINE OF THE CHAPTERS
At its heart, therefore, this book is about the struggle of a group of individuals against the tides of history. These individuals had served to protect and expand Japan’s empire and its Northeast Asian colonies. They had lived through world war, though for many that experience was limited to a few days of combat. Through their captivity they took part, briefly and inadvertently, in the making of the postwar Soviet Union. Most importantly, they participated in the making of the postwar Japan, though they did so from the margins. This book tells their story—or part of it, since one volume, however comprehensive, cannot do justice to the history of the Siberian Internment. Their lives were linked by many threads: the military units to which they had been attached before their internment, camps in which they found themselves, and ships on which they returned home. We w ill pursue t hese threads to retrace the internees’ odyssey, each station of which unfolds a
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new layer of knowledge about the place and historical period: the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo on the eve of Japan’s defeat, freight trains and transit camps on the road to Siberia, barracks and camp infirmaries, worksites and leisure centers, classrooms and propaganda reading clubs, decks of repatriation ships, crowded train stations, homes, assembly halls, and streets of postwar Japan. For much of the journey, our travel guides w ill be the internees themselves, whose voices we w ill follow. We w ill also rely on archival material to explain the inner workings of systems and forces that the internees could not control or overcome: the deliberations of those who made decisions affecting the lives of the Japanese captives concerning their food, shelter, clothing, and work, as well as the date of their return to and the treatment they received back in Japan. The travels and travails of our protagonists—the trajectory of their movements to imperial outposts in Northeast Asia, the Soviet camp system, and back to postwar Japan—dictate the organization of the book. Before embarking on our own Siberian odyssey in the internees’ footsteps, however, we should start with an excursion through the pages of history. Such an overview is integral to this book’s objective: to comprehend the internment in its entirety, as a phenomenon that joins and overlaps the tectonic plates of the prewar and postwar periods and crosses geographic and national bound aries, without submitting to the dominance of the nation or other narrowly defined communities. Nations are but one type of community that sequester the retrospective for political reasons. As we see in this book, divisions in history also follow ideological lines. To write a comprehensive history of the internment, not as a chapter in the annals of any one nation or community, we should view it as an event in global history that is not subject to the literal or metaphorical confines of nations, ideological camps, or political groups. Crossing borders in both space and time, the Siberian Internment does not make sense when viewed within one nation or without an appreciation of how national goals and international rivalries shape understandings of the past. Therefore, we start our journey not in a physical place but in the realm of the written word, tracing the story back to first reports and newspaper accounts, Diet testimonies, and early memoirs printed on the low-quality paper of the immediate postwar period and scrutinizing the conditions that shaped views of the internment in Japan, the Soviet Union or Russia, and around the globe. After this analysis of how the internment was written, four chapters follow the internees’ long wanderings in Eurasia. In Chapter 2, we trace the internment’s roots to the Japanese Empire by flying back to its outposts in
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Northeast Asia where our protagonists preserved and protected the empire’s frontiers as IJA soldiers, workers in various civilian posts, or tillers of the land of agricultural settlements. Our goal w ill be to understand the internees’ roles as imperial agents—roles they were not always conscious of—to show that there would have been no internment without the empire. Their roles as the empire’s so-called human bullets (nikudan) did not become obvious to many IJA soldiers u ntil after the war: many were awakened to this truth with the help of the Democratic Movement that blossomed in the Siberian camps with the encouragement and guidance of Soviet political officers. The internees’ passage from defeated imperial outposts to their new surroundings of Soviet camps started with a realization of defeat and their sudden change in status from proud soldiers of the empire to shameful POWs. While the internees did not always confess to having such complex emotions, a careful reading of their narratives helps re-create their confusion, uncertainty, and loss. How the Japanese soldiers ended up in the bedbug country—an experience restored through their stoic, comic, and sometimes self-pitying narratives of their daily lives, struggles, and hardships in the camps and outside camp walls—is the subject of Chapter 3. The internees’ memoirs w ere for decades the sole source of knowledge about the Siberian Internment, but on their own they present only a partial view. In Chapter 4 I read them against the background of archival documents accumulated during the Siberian Internment by Soviet ministries and other national government agencies, regional directorates and local officials, camp offices, and industrial enterprises. The diverse archival material makes it possible to scrutinize, for the first time in English, the Japanese experiences in the vast system of Soviet camps specifically built for foreign POWs and to locate Japanese experiences in Soviet camps within the larger context of forced migrations, detainment, and labor exploitation of millions of Soviet and foreign citizens in the USSR between 1939 and 1956. Reading Japanese recollections together with archival records, we realize the motivations of both sets of writers: the Soviet bureaucrats who recorded the existence of the Japanese in the camp system to ensure their effective utilization and the Japanese memoirists who tried to rewrite themselves into postwar society as good citizens. These motivations are most clear in the records of the Democratic Movement that emerged in the camps as a confluence of soldiers’ revolt against officers’ tyranny and Soviet encouragement of class struggle. The camp reeducation program that used the methods of both carrot and stick to turn the Japanese captives into true democrats is
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the subject of Chapter 5, which tells the story of the little Cold War that started in the camps before the internees joined the big Cold War a fter repatriation. We read memoirs by and about several born-again Marxists and other Democratic Movement leaders, as well as those who militantly resisted any attempts to democratize them. The two remaining chapters are devoted to the internees’ long homecoming, including the struggles and suspicion that greeted them upon their return to Japan in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The behavior of the more ardent adherents of the Democratic Movement did not help their case: these militant repatriates caused successive disturbances at the port of Maizuru, train stations and city squares, singing the communist “Internationale” and, upon arriving in Tokyo, marching to JCP headquarters to collectively join the party. T hese antics caused alarm in Japan during the early Cold War, since in an environment of suspicion of communists, the Siberian returnees became a potential threat to public order. The Cold War cross fire in which they found themselves is the story of Chapter 6, told based on newspaper reports, records of Diet sessions, memoirs, Tokyo Trial records, and US Occupation reports. Despite the early suspicion and discrimination, the Cold War storm soon subsided as the repatriates returned to peaceful existence and managed to find their places in postwar society. Once it became clear that they would not become foot soldiers in an imminent Soviet invasion of Japan, they quietly exited the political scene and became confined to the margins of society. This marginal position was most evident when some repatriates claimed compensation from the government, claims that remained unanswered for decades. Enraged by the lack of concern and compassion from successive governments, some repatriates organized themselves into associations and lobbying groups and started a Sisyphean campaign for state compensation that lasted nearly four decades and largely ended in failure, as analyzed in Chapter 7. In this multilayered history, we w ill inevitably encounter people in positions of power: heads of states, top diplomats, military leaders, propaganda chiefs, camp wardens, and the like. These leaders are always t here, lurking in the background, as we see in the episode when Uchimura is reminded of Emperor Meiji when looking at the moustache in Stalin’s portrait on the wall of his interrogator’s office.49 We w ill try to grasp the c auses and outcomes of their decisions. But the main protagonists of the book are the Japanese captives—servicemen and civilians alike—of the Japanese imperial project, the Soviet camp network, and the far-reaching Cold War international
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system. I have come to know many of them through their memoirs and interviews with them, but their lives are also reflected in a variety of documents in Japanese, Russian, and English that talk about them as objects, hostages, and pawns. For this reason, in the following pages I let them speak for themselves wherever possible. And while we cannot do what Takasugi did, “making sense of the Soviet Union with the Russian people, in a violent embrace with them, working with them and struggling with them standing knee-deep in the mud,” we can at least try to replicate the gaze “from below, from the viewpoint of the POW” with which he and thousands of his fellow captives observed, understood, and presented the momentous events of their lives.50
C H A P T E R O NE
BEYOND THE NATION THE SIBERIAN INTERNMENT IN GLOBAL HISTORY
It would be our great luck if this book became a reference of “the Red Country” as we saw it, a snapshot of internee lives for family members still awaiting their return, and a memory of survival for those who returned alive—if it became a page in the history of rebuilding a new Japan. —Hashimoto Takuzō and Kimura Takao in the preface to their 1948 memoir of Siberia
The cable car at Mount Takao, a low mountain to the west of Tokyo that offers city dwellers and tourists an escape from the bustle of the concrete metropolis, takes its passengers close to the summit. Still, there is a long walk ahead of us. On 1 March 2017, Satō Kashio, three weeks short of his ninety-third birthday, leads us uphill along the winding concrete paths and past stalls selling cotton candy and sesame dumplings to an opening crowded with stone monuments. A tall statue of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, with baby angels at her feet overlooks the opening. Satō walks briskly past the columns and colorful flags with the deity’s name, gesturing t oward a gray-and-black stone monument he and a fellow Siberian internee had erected in 2010. He takes out a cloth and wipes the stone with care, and then he turns to a metal plate next to the monument and wipes that too. Characters on the smooth black stone devote the monument to t hose “who found eternal rest in Siberia.” Inscribed on the metal plate is a poem by Satō titled “Siberian Requiem,” which implores the North Star to “reveal the true history of our internment.” When I ask him about the poem, Satō replies, “My sincere wish is to know the truth about the Siberian Internment while I am still alive.”1 25
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Looking back, I understand that Satō had two kinds of “truth” in mind. First, t here is the “truth” about the origins of the internment, which Satō spent in Taishet, in the Irkutsk region, “a name that strikes terror in the hearts of Soviet prisoners.”2 Taishet was where the BAM branched off from the Trans-Siberian Railway. Satō was one of the tens of thousands of Japa nese who labored to build the BAM, later touted by the Soviet propaganda as “the mainline of the century.”3 Like everyone with a stake in the internment, Satō hopes to find out the truth about the real reasons behind his captivity. Yet more than six decades after its end there is still no definitive and publicly available archival evidence that explains the reasons b ehind the internment, leaving historians unable to do more than make educated guesses. Probably closest to the truth is the conjecture that the internment was born of early Cold War disagreements in one momentous week between 16 August 1945, when the Soviets clearly stated their intention not to intern the Japanese on Soviet territory, and 23 August, when Iosif Stalin ordered their transportation to the USSR. It is useful to summarize what we know from the archives about this week. On 17 August, Stalin sent a tele gram to President Harry Truman requesting two amendments to the US General Order No. 1, which spelled out the procedures relating to the Japa nese surrender.4 The first request was to “include all of the Kurile Islands” in the Soviet sphere. Since this had been agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, it was not controversial. But Stalin’s second proposal went further, adding “the northern half of the island of Hokkaido . . . into the region of surrender by Japanese armed forces to Soviet forces.”5 In other words, Stalin requested that Soviet troops be allowed to land in Japan to accept the Japanese surrender on Hokkaido. Truman rejected this request outright: “it is my intention and arrangements have been made for the surrender of Japanese forces on all the islands of Japan proper, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, to General MacArthur.” 6 We can speculate whether this rebuff alone triggered Stalin’s decision to renege on Article 9 of the Potsdam Declaration, which stipulated that the “Japanese military forces, a fter being completely disarmed, s hall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives.” 7 Economic factors might have played a part, considering the enormous task of rebuilding the Soviet economy following the war, though the real benefits of this exploitation have been called into question by recent works by Rus sian historians.8 Geopolitical considerations, most importantly the opportunity to prevent any Japanese military revival by detaining a large number
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of servicemen, might have been another f actor in Stalin’s thinking. In short, until the archival documents containing the deliberations b ehind the 23 August decision become available, we cannot pinpoint the “truth” about the internment origins. Still, it is not implausible that Stalin decided at the last minute to reserve this army of foreigners for some future use as a bargaining chip, a friendly force, or a destabilizing element in postwar Japan—and in the meanwhile put it to use as a labor force. In the absence of the primary “truth” about the origins of their internment, Satō and other former internees have sought their own truths. At the very least, they have striven to “tell it as it was” (arinomamani) and “record the facts as facts” (jijitsu o jijitsu toshite kirokusuru).9 This motivation to bear witness to one’s wartime exploits was common in postwar Japan, with many military and civilian survivors choosing to commit their recollections to paper. Notable in this regard is the jibunshi (self-history) movement, espoused and practiced by nonprofessional writers who advocated “honest and direct writing” that “honors the intent of wanting to communicate” over eloquent expression.10 This second kind of first-person and direct “truth,” then, is especially abundant in retrospective records of the internment. Takasugi Ichirō, interned like Satō near Taishet, had this bitter reality in mind when he wrote of the ignominy of Japanese officers’ and soldiers’ currying favor with the Soviet camp bosses. “I have no interest whatsoever in exposing to the public eye the disgrace of my compatriots,” Takasugi wrote. “I am writing to tell the truth about the bitter experiences the defeated Japanese had to taste in the extraordinary circumstances of military captivity. I was there myself, so it is painful for me to write this truth. But t here is no way I can avoid it.”11 Such truth, as remembered and committed to paper by former internees, has molded public knowledge on the internment in Japan. For the survivors, it forms a historical canon to be bequeathed to f uture generations of Japanese. It is a monument to the sacrifice of the survivors and the dead that is as hefty as Satō’s stone memorial on top of Mount Takao. The recollections of Siberian captives constitute an impressive body of historical rec ords as diverse as their authors’ experiences, upbringing, education, characters, and interests. The recollections form a treasure trove of episodes and anecdotes of extraordinary events, of youth squandered in the frigid expanses of a foreign land, friendships forged at worksites and in barracks, and hope that survived in the depths of despair and deprivation. And while anyone willing to devote time and effort to reading these camp memoirs
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extensively w ill no doubt see themes and patterns emerge, it is their diversity that lends the memoirs an epochal importance. Survivors wrote memoirs not simply to document the truth, but also to reassert existing identities and forge new belongings. Writing about the spread of “self-history” in post-Showa Japan, Gerald Figal has observed the advancing of “putative local identities within an ultimately national framework.”12 This was also true for Japanese returnees from Soviet camps, with one difference: they constructed an experiential identity, one based on a shared experience that set the survivors apart from not only the general Japanese public, but also other former soldiers. Viewed through a different lens, their identity also was local, though their locality was tied not to their Japanese hometowns (furusato) but to Siberia. They were “Siberians,” and this identity set the history they wrote apart from other jibunshi about the period. Their subject matter distinguished them from other amateur historians. Aaron William Moore’s claims about “former Japanese POWs [who] created a unique hybrid language community” and produced works of “testimonial literature . . . primarily employed to generate sympathy for victims of past injustice” therefore resonate with the experiences of the Siberian internees.13 Like their fellow former POWs and veterans, the internees formed their own language community characterized by literary forms, themes, and terms (mostly borrowed from Russian and intelligible only to the initiated). This language community strengthened their group identity, but it also opened a gulf between the narrow community of former Siberians and the broader national community of Japanese citizens. Though rewarding and liberating in helping the former internees reintegrate into Japan a fter the war, this community was ultimately overtaken by the Japa nese national one. Understanding the relations between t hese communities and the internees’ allegiances to them is essential to authoring a comprehensive account of their experiences. Despite their variety, however, camp memoirs form but one corpus of sources from which this book draws in writing the internment history. As such, they should be analyzed in the context of ideas and discourses dominant in the Cold War Japanese society and the postwar discourses about war, empire, and citizenship. They bear the marks of transformations in Japan’s socioethnic body necessitated by the new order a fter the war. Japan’s metamorphosis from an expansionist empire to an exclusivist nation-state would be impossible without a simultaneous rewriting of national history. Accounts of Siberian captivity thus became part of attempts to “transform
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the past into stories of collective becoming,” to rewrite Japan’s recent and painful past into the history of the new, postwar national community.14 The central theme of this chapter, therefore, is the rewriting of national history, and it investigates how the Siberian Internment was documented in Japan and internationally and incorporated into the history of the Japanese nation as the prevalent form of human community. In interaction—and sometimes in confrontation—w ith the history of the nation, the Siberian Internment acquires its true interpretive value. It shows how the dominance of the nation has skewed understandings of the past by prioritizing the narrow national community over other communities and by excising the multinational and transnational processes that contradict the logic of the nation. Prevalent among practices of affirming the nation in postwar Japan was the prioritization of Japanese victimhood, which shaped both Japanese attitudes toward the war and empire and the history and memory of the Siberian Internment in Japan and abroad.
VICTIMHOOD AND SUBJECTIVITY: CITIZENSHIP AND AUTHORSHIP IN COLD WAR JAPAN
Japanese views on WWII in the initial decades a fter the conflict were informed by a complex mix of emotions. Amid this ambivalence, one tendency dominated public attitudes t oward the recent war as the nation embarked on its peaceful reconstruction. This was “a tendency to privilege the facts of Japanese victimhood over considerations of what occasioned that victimhood. In its most common form this tendency appeared in the restricted contexts of discourse on personal Japanese war experiences in stories of the atomic and fire bombings, the repatriations of civilians from Manchuria and Korea, and general privations such as hunger on the home front.”15 Over the postwar decades, this common form evolved into a complex memory culture, commemorating—and sometimes commodifying—t he war experiences of the Japanese p eople in a plethora of tangible and intangible cultural products: “aestheticizing sacrifice,” exhibiting war experiences in public and private peace museums and lieux de mémoire that blossomed across Japan to cater to domestic and foreign visitors, and expanding the calendar of commemorative events that went beyond the traditional anniversaries of atomic bombings and so-called end of the war dates.16 And while the experiences of the internees did not immediately become part of these mainstream
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war experiences, so widespread and pervasive was the tendency to prioritize Japanese victimhood that the Siberian captivity was inevitably bracketed according to the same principle. If, as Lee Pennington has observed, the wounded and disabled soldiers w ere wrapped “in the bloodied rags and white robes of victimhood” in postwar Japan, a similar propensity existed to package the former Siberian internees and their experiences within a mythology of victimhood.17 Tellingly, the author of the first full-length study of the internment in Japan, Wakatsuki Yasuo, emphatically placed the victimhood of the internees on the same level as that of atomic bomb victims (hibakusha): “If paying respects to the hibakusha is a national duty, it is imperative that we pray for the peace of the souls of those who found eternal sleep in Siberia.”18 The evolution of knowledge and memory about the Siberian Internment thus makes better sense within the context of victim discourses in Japan. This is especially true if we consider that the internees’ suffering did not end in August 1945 but extended deep into the postwar period. Unlike the Japanese in the home islands, t hose who w ere trapped in Soviet captivity became victims not just of the war, but also of its aftermath. It is surprising, therefore, that the acceptance of the internees’ suffering into Japanese popular consciousness involved a tortuous road with numerous obstacles that took decades to traverse. In the early postwar decades, the internment aroused conflicting emotions and reactions in society: on the one hand, the internees w ere met with calculated indifference by t hose e ager to leave the war behind; on the other hand, their memories became useful raw material for discourses of Japanese victimhood and postwar pacifism.19 Stories of suffering inspired by Japanese experiences in Siberia, like other victim narratives, played a part in constructing Japan’s postwar national identity as a peace-loving nation that came to prosperity through sacrifice, helping reinscribe Japan into history as primarily a victim, not a perpetrator, of violence. Victim mind-sets thus helped divert attention away from Japan’s aggressive role in Asia, hampering attempts to critically analyze the Siberian captivity as an outcome of complex processes and not simply as a Soviet crime. Importantly, Japan’s role in laying the ground for the internment was left out of the picture. For example, these mind-sets made possible a historical paradigm in which it was possible to talk about the Japanese victimhood in Soviet camps without once mentioning the suffering of Allied captives in Japanese camps. Interestingly, in postwar decades these victim mind-sets
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provided the common denominator for a variety of actors across the political spectrum, from nationalists to leftists. Hidden under this blanket consensus were history’s inconvenient parts, particularly the role of Japan’s failed attempt to build an empire and its aggressive colonization of Manchuria, in creating the ground for the Siberian Internment. The victim perspective helped shift attention from the failure of the Kwantung Army to protect Japanese residents lured into Manchukuo by government resettlement policies. It also helped deemphasize the class, gender, and political divisions that surfaced after Japan’s defeat to undermine the myth of a harmonious society. Importantly, the pervasiveness of victim mind-sets in postwar society made the returnees compliant: denied victim status for most of the Cold War, after that war’s end many former internees embraced the attempts to recruit them into the national pantheon of victimhood with relief and often with quiet gratitude. For many, this acceptance went far enough to forgive t hose who had ignored their calls for recognition a fter the decades they had had to spend in the wilderness competing for acknowledgment and respect. An analysis of how the domestic Japanese society reacted to the experiences of the Siberian internees offers three lessons about Japanese collective memory and identity formation. First, in postwar Japan a hierarchy of war victims evolved that favored Japanese victims over foreigners, even when the latter included the victims of Japanese aggression. The hierarchy extended into the domestic realm, with some groups receiving more sympathy for their suffering and being accepted more readily by the state and society, while other groups had to fight for recognition and compensation. To make sense of the conditions enabling this hierarchy, we should resort once again to the broad contexts of the war, empire, and the Cold War. The traces t hese events left in postwar Japanese society and the ways of thinking they favored about war, sacrifice, and national belonging are crucial in understanding the history of Japan’s remaking in the decade immediately a fter WWII. Second, the internees’ experiences reinforce the view that Japan’s memory culture was a product as much of individual efforts to preserve and relay the truths of the past as it was of political struggles among varying interest groups. Franziska Seraphim has shown how successive Japanese governments “left war memory to participants in domestic political contests—to representatives of special interests, to citizens’ movements, to self-proclaimed opponents of the state, all of whom used war memory to further their aims
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and interests.”20 Former internees found themselves in the middle of the fray both as individuals and in organized groups, but their presence, pronouncements, and activities served as the perfect foil for other social and political groups. Viewed in this light, the internees’ inputs into postwar memory culture challenge Lori Watt’s claim that they had “no apparent po litical utility for the right or the left.”21 The “truths” they told in the immediate postwar period had political utility for both the right and the left, and as we w ill see, this utility was present in early Cold War discourses even when the internees did not say or write anything. One obvious area where the internees’ memories proved useful was their reports about the USSR in occupied Japan. Stories told by the returnees from Siberia about America’s communist rival often helped inspire and sustain in the public sphere myths about a backward, brutal, and threatening Soviet Union that was not averse to using violence and subversion in its attempts to destabilize Japan. The stories also provided the Occupation administration (and the US government) with firsthand knowledge about the Soviet Union, extracted from the returnees through interrogations at the Maizuru repatriation center as part of intelligence-gathering operations code-named Project Stitch and Project Wringer.22 Along with Japanese newspaper reports about the Soviet threat in East Asia in the 1950s, the Korean War (1950–1953), and the regular tit- for-tat allegations between the US and Soviet representatives in international forums, accounts by Japanese recently repatriated from the Soviet Union enriched the discourses critical of the USSR. Despite their utility, however, the experiences, accounts, and even existence of the Siberian internees w ere problematic for the leaders of postwar Japan. This may be why amid diverse internment experiences, t hose testimonies that depicted the USSR in an unflattering light received more publicity in Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s when anticommunism was rife and leftist groups came under increased pressure from the GHQ. Thus, it w ill not be an exaggeration to argue that the internment narratives facilitated Japan’s fall into America’s embrace by helping recast the Soviet Union as the foremost threat to the new Japan and by discrediting the Soviet form of government as a v iable alternative to US-implanted democracy. This leads us to our third and final lesson about the impact of Cold War thinking on the domestic sphere in Japan. What I have in mind here is not something as narrow as the censorship of the press. Rather, I mean less tangible yet more far-reaching processes in public consciousness that the Cold
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War made necessary. One sign of the prevalence of Cold War thinking was how it came to dictate the domestic debates, and in the convenient solutions it offered to complex international problems. But I am far from claiming that Cold War thinking was something imposed from above and passively accepted by the public. Masuda Hajimu has described the Cold War as a constructed “conflict that became ‘reality,’ ” a reality “that did not exist at a particular time and place” but was born first and foremost in the imaginations of millions. It was “an imagined reality, fueled by fear, antagonism, memories of war, and concerns about disorder at home [that] eventually became the irrefutable actuality of the postwar era.”23 Early Cold War attitudes in Japan toward the Siberian Internment w ere influenced by all of these at once: fear of the USSR, antagonism t oward fellow citizens suspected of being communist converts, and concerns about disorder that t hose citizens could help instigate. So w ere the attempts in later decades to use the internment for political purposes and to write its history mainly for national consumption.
WRITING THE INTERNMENT’S HISTORY IN JAPAN AND ABROAD
If we map the histories of the Siberian Internment in Japanese, Russian, and English as an archipelago in which each linguistic tradition represents an island, the Anglophone historiography w ill no doubt be the smallest and most remote islet of all. In this archipelago, l ittle interaction happens among the islands. Somewhat like the Galápagos Islands in the eastern Pacific that inspired Charles Darwin to form his theory of natural selection, each island has its own endemic ecosystem that is conducive to some ideas and unfavorable to o thers. A look at t hese insular environments is revealing about the evolution of historical knowledge and consciousness about Japan’s remaking itself in the second half of the twentieth c entury. An analysis of this evolution, I argue, should pursue the twin objectives of highlighting the dif ferent conditions shaping knowledge and consciousness about the internment in each historical tradition and pointing out the limitations hindering attempts at comprehensive, international, and transnational versions of the past. More than a historiographical essay or a review of literature, the following paragraphs explain the reasons for, on one hand, the inconclusiveness of the truth about the Siberian Internment that Satō laments and, on
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the other hand, the enduring marginality of the internment in international historiography despite its momentous implications for postwar Japanese and global history. The argument in this chapter—and, more broadly, this book—is that there have been two obstacles to a more inclusive history of the internment, and by extension of other contemporaneous events of the making of a new Japan in the postwar period. The first obstacle is the dominance of the national community in history writing, and the second is the prominence of ideology in informing contemporary historical consciousness. Nation-states, either developing as kernels of expansive empires or emerging from the ruins of dead ones, have claimed among other monopolies a primacy over history writing, dominating how the past was introduced to citizens. As Christopher L. Hill observed, “one of the most important characteristics of the writing of national history . . . was its labor to channel, constrain, and in some cases extinguish objections to the nation as a form of community.”24 The Cold War international system, which threw a new layer of division on a world carved up into nation-states, conditioned national allegiance with ideological allegiance, at least in the states belonging to one of the two camps. These interrelated phenomena explain both the inconclusiveness and the marginality of truths about the Siberian Internment in postwar histories. I use the internment to highlight t hese overlapping and interrelated layers of historical consciousness not to break new ground, but to understand how consciousness about the past has been conditioned by the nation and the Cold War in Japan, the former Soviet Union, and the West. In addition to unearthing the truth about the internment, such an exercise helps understand the larger forces that have formed the dominant norms and terms of narrating WWII during the postwar period. The uniqueness of the internment, as we see below, is that it best highlights the differences and limitations in divergent historic and linguistic traditions. In Japan, several limitations have hampered the development of a comprehensive history of the internment. The first limitation concerns the gap between the worldviews of the returnees and the ideas dominant in Japan during the period immediately after the war. As Moore observed, war veterans “wish to communicate their experiences, but find that post-war audiences are either ill-equipped or unwilling to listen.”25 Having returned to the Japanese home islands, many Siberian internees found that their compatriots w ere on a different wavelength from them. This divergence was evident during early Cold War years, when the imperial revenants realized
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that the real Japan was different from that presented in the camp propaganda newspaper Nihon shimbun. This gap did not always originate in ideological differences: in hindsight, alarm about the communist allegiance of the majority of the internees proved to be unfounded. Rather, the gulf separating the returnees from the USSR from domestic Japanese society had its roots in what we can call the different time zones inhabited by, on the one hand, the new Japanese society and, on the other hand, the late returnees from the past. It was as if there had occurred a shift in time for the more than 600,000 Japanese at the time of their transportation to the USSR, and many of them struggled to set their inner clocks to this new time even after surviving the hardships and deprivations and finally returning to Japan. In a sense, they must have felt like passengers who arrived at the platform only to see the back of a train that had just departed. This gap is fundamental in explaining the marginalization that the Siberian returnees experienced in postwar Japan. The second limitation is related to the abovementioned dominance of national history and the tendency to prioritize Japanese victimhood without considering it in broader contexts. This constraint resulted from the uncritical acceptance of survivor accounts in recent years and has s haped what may be the most widespread explanation of the Siberian Internment among Japanese readers: that it was an illegal captivity by an ideological enemy that victimized Japanese citizens and used them against their w ill for Soviet domestic and foreign policy interests. Accordingly, the survivors of Stalinist camps are predominantly portrayed as passive victims, and the attitude displayed toward their experiences is one of dignified yet distant compassion. Interestingly, this approach has been almost universally accepted by a broad range of political groups, representing a consensus rarely achieved on controversial legacies of WWII in Japan. Chronologically, this limitation is the most recent, having been established a fter the Cold War—although the pioneering works in this vein appeared in the late 1970s. The third limitation is that in Japan the internment has long been seen as the purview of the historians of Russia or the Soviet Union. T here is an undeniable practical reason behind this belief: a historian attempting to write a comprehensive, empirical account of the internment—rather than one based solely on Japanese-language memoirs—could hardly do so without the ability to read and interpret Russian archival sources. As a result, Japa nese historians working on modern Japan have rarely ventured into internment research. Of the five nonmemoir historical works on the internment
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published in the past two decades, three w ere written by historians fluent in Russian, one by a professional translator from Russian, and one by a former Moscow correspondent for the Japanese newspaper Asahi, and all of these works relied on Russian-language sources to varying degrees.26 Thus the linguistic boundaries separating Japan and Russia largely coincide with—and help reinforce—the borders of their respective national histories. Finally, the fourth limitation concerns boundaries imposed on historiography by ideological differences. In Japan, the defeat in WWII led to the reemergence of Marxist historiography. At the start of the Allied Occupation, leading Japanese Marxists were released from imperial prisons, and the general feeling in light of the war was that Marxists had been prescient in predicting the failure of Japanese imperialism. Sebastian Conrad described how “almost overnight, historical materialism had become the strongest force” in the debate on the past in postwar Japan, and observed that in “a short time, Marxist historiography advanced to become the hegemonic interpretation of Japanese history.”27 This limitation also explains some Japanese historians’ reluctance to tackle the Siberian Internment, which was considered a controversial research topic for a long time. Reasons for this are not conspicuous and are rarely discussed in formal publications, which makes them especially perplexing for foreign researchers not entirely familiar with the nuances of the Japanese historical profession. When I consulted a group of senior Japanese scholars at a seminar on the internment in Tokyo in 2014, and in subsequent private conversations, many diplomatically alluded to the gravity of the topic, saying that it was “too hard to handle.” For many Japanese historians the internment is a Pandora’s box, locked within which is a powerful mix of uncomfortable truths about Japan’s responsibility for WWII; the Kwantung Army’s ignominious failure, the humiliation of Japan and rape of Japanese by Soviet soldiers; the melancholic memories of Manchukuo; and the suffering of the internees in Soviet camps, the depravity and discrimination t hose internees endured a fter the war, and their protracted struggle for compensation. Even more impor tant, however, Japanese colleagues have intimated that for any historian during the Cold War period, in which Marxist historiography was a formidable force, touching on the internment would have carried the risk of being called a rightist. Moreover, the existence of so many glaring omissions in the story of the internment led historians to set it aside for a brighter f uture, when hard archival evidence would eventually become available. In the meantime, it fell to investigative journalists, nonfiction writers, and other
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commentators to speculate on various aspects of internment history. While it is difficult to verify the above conjectures, they probably partially explain the scarcity of serious historical works on the internment during the Cold War in Japan. Also, despite the Soviet Union’s divisive role in debates among academics and ordinary citizens alike, the topic of the Siberian Internment has caused relatively little disagreement among Japanese historians. Behind this, I argue, was the widespread consensus on the illegality of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war and its internment of Japanese. Works written by Japa nese historians generally have more to offer in answering the what, when, and where questions about the internment than the all-important why question—answers to which have rarely led to major disagreements. The why question has almost always had a ready-made answer about the Soviet Union’s disregard for international law, which helped divert attention from Japan’s inconvenient imperial legacies.28 It is possible, then, to talk about a consensus among Japanese historians that rests on the emphasis of the illegality of Soviet actions at the war’s end. Japanese writings on the subject carry the imprint of this illegality discourse, as well as having the other limitations listed above. While recent works have overcome the linguistic and ideological constraints, with few exceptions their contributions have yet to lead to a fundamental revision of the national tradition. Interest in the Siberian Internment in Cold War Japan developed within the context of Japanese indignation t oward the USSR. The other events informing this illegality discourse w ere the Soviet violation of the 1941 Neutrality Pact and the occupation of the Kuril Islands. This national reading of history of bilateral relations informed even the works of professional Japanese historians, with Wakatsuki’s Siberian Prisoner-of-War Camps being perhaps the most significant example.29 Wakatsuki’s stance was unapologetically nationalist and passionately anticommunist. While his analysis and documentation of the internment were as detailed and accurate as one could expect from someone with no access to Soviet archives, Wakatsuki undoubtedly put the nation before the individual, as is evident in his judgment that the “Democratic Movement of the Japanese POWs in Siberia laid bare Japan’s private parts in front of the w hole world.”30 In this analysis, Japan’s loss of face internationally mattered more than the suffering of Japanese soldiers. Such colorful metaphors w ere common in Wakatsuki’s narrative. For example, he contemptuously called Asahara Seiki “the handmaid of Soviet power.”31
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The national discourse about the illegality of Soviet actions is hardly a relic of the Cold War past: elements of it survive today. Its endurance is evident in that even empirical histories that shun the polemical approach and base their findings on archival sources, such as Abe Gunji’s The Reality of the Forced Internment in Siberia, or Tomita Takeshi’s The Siberian Internees’ Postwar Period, make a nod t oward this national approach.32 Abe aimed to analyze the history of the Japanese captured by the Soviets “despite the fact that the war was over.”33 Some historians go further in their assertions, writing about the internment from a nation-centered if not openly nationalistic perspective. For Nagase Ryōji, the author of The Siberian Internment: What the Japanese Went Through, the internment was an outcome of Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s centuries-old expansion to the Far East, and the Siberian internees w ere heroic representatives of the Taishō generation whose members died on battlefields and endured the hardships in Siberia “to protect their nation.”34 According to Nagase, “Asia was colonized by Europe,” and the Siberian Internment was a continuation of this long-term historical process summarized in the expression “Western powers’ eastward expansion” (seiryoku tōzen). In this narrative, Japan—its own expansionist and colonial empire notwithstanding—was a victim of European expansion eastward and American expansion westward. Nagase’s book reflects this theory of epochal victimhood of the Japanese, but at the hands of the Soviet enemy, including the Soviet invasion of Manchukuo and the transportation of the Japanese to the camps; the Siberian trinity of suffering and the inadequate medical treatment of the internees, as well as their propaganda education and the long-awaited repatriation; and, finally, the analysis of the innocent Japanese falsely labeled war criminals by the USSR. In the book’s epilogue, Nagase reaffirms his main idea about Japanese victimhood by comparing the Siberian Internment to the abduction of Japa nese citizens by North K orea—an issue that strikes a chord in contemporary 35 Japan. The opening of Soviet archives since the early 1990s has changed the orientation of Japanese-language internment histories from polemical to empirical. Most recent notable scholarly works rely more on foreign-(mainly Russian-) language archives than on internee recollections. At nearly 700 pages, Abe’s The Reality of the Forced Internment in Siberia was surely the most detailed study of the conditions faced by the Japanese in the Soviet camps at the time of its publication, providing painstaking details on e very stage of the Japanese captivity. Also for the first time, the book included
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rich factual information on various aspects of the internment: forced l abor, food and nutrition in the camps, clothing and other daily necessities, medical serv ices and hygiene, and death and burials, among others. Ultimately, however, the book fell short of its goal to investigate the internment comprehensively through sources in both Japanese and Russian, for it did not make extensive use of the abundant archival sources in Russian and relied mostly on secondary works by Russian scholars during the 1990s. This situation was amended through the works of Tomita, who consulted hundreds of Soviet-era documents in writing his book that aimed to “deepen the existing knowledge on the Siberian Internment as a whole.”36 Tomita also penned a popular history of the internment in the shinsho pocket-book format. Of the three works in this format to appear in the past decade, Tomita’s is the only one by a professional historian (the other two are by journalists) and the only one that locates the Japanese experience in the camps in the broader context of the Soviet camp system for foreign POWs. The trend toward empiricism seen in the works of Abe and Tomita has been given a further spin by works authored by a new generation of historians, of which Kobayashi Akina’s The Siberian Internment amid the Changing Soviet-American Relations is most representative.37 This work is fundamentally different from e arlier histories in that it transcends the national paradigm. Kobayashi was the first Japanese historian to write about the internment from a predominantly international viewpoint, “using American and Russian archives that have so far been overlooked by previous works.”38 Importantly, Kobayashi did not feel the need to use a deferential, solemn tone characteristic of many e arlier historical accounts of internee suffering. Instead, hers is the approach of an empirical historian who perceives various complex angles on the event’s history and legacy. Also, Kobayashi’s source base is more diverse and eclectic than that of any other Japanese history of the internment. Not only does she not take the well- beaten path of relying, like many of her predecessors, on survivor memoirs, but also Japanese-language archives and secondary works make up a clear minority of the sources she uses. In Russia during the Soviet period and before the opening of the archives, the internment was a topic that was largely unknown and rarely discussed in the public sphere. Public opinion on foreign POWs during the Soviet times was formed by a mixture of citizens’ fear of prosecution for drawing attention to an inconvenient topic and, to a greater extent, the widespread belief in the moral superiority of the Soviet people in dealing with the former
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e nemy. According to this view the soldiers of former enemy armies— especially the Germans, hatred against whom was genuine and cultivated in no small part by the powerful imagery of wart ime propaganda—had gotten what they deserved. Perhaps for this reason, it is fair to say that even during the period of glasnost in the late 1980s, when Soviet historians busied themselves with publicizing the injustices of the Stalinist era (receiving an enthusiastic reaction from the curious public), the topic of foreign POWs in Soviet labor camps received little attention. Following the opening of Soviet-era archives, historians’ endeavors to comprehend the Soviet system of forced labor camps also contributed to the study of the internment.39 Their conclusions, as seen in a recent edited volume, can be extended to a certain extent to the GUPVI camps. The most important of these findings is the assertion that forced labor was never profitable for the Soviet state, at least not in monetary terms.40 If this was the case for Soviet prisoners who w ere exploited at a lower cost, it was surely true for the foreign forced laborers. Archival information shows that the Soviet state often spent more resources for the more than four million foreign captives than their labor returned. This conclusion, analyzed later in more detail, is important in evaluating the importance of Japanese captives in the broader setting of the Soviet forced labor economy. At the same time, despite the mushrooming of works in Russian based on newly available archival information, many complex aspects of POW captivity in the USSR have yet to be adequately studied, and a colossal body of archival documents remains untapped in central and regional archives in Russia. Three major conclusions can be drawn from the Russian-language scholarship on the internment of foreign—including Japanese—POWs in the Soviet camps.41 The first of these concerns the logic behind exploiting foreign POWs and other prisoners for labor despite the apparent costs of supporting them, which outweighed the return their l abor provided. This logic hints at the fact that the foreign POWs were not kept in the USSR solely out of economic considerations. Secondly, regardless of whether or not their labor was profitable in monetary terms, foreign POWs were a precious resource for the Soviet agencies that relied on workers who could provide crude, manual labor. They were indispensable in fulfilling short-term production quotas set by the state often without regard to longer-term goals and workforce shortages. As a result, varying ministries, industrial enterprises, heads of infrastructure projects, officials responsible for the timely harvesting of agricultural crops, and representatives of other Soviet agencies vigorously
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competed for this workforce. This competition is revealing about the methods and means used in the vast forced labor economy of the USSR. Finally, and most importantly, while the suffering of the Japanese was genuine and their treatment illegal, an extensive study of Soviet sources demonstrates that it was nothing out of the ordinary in the conditions of GUPVI camps. In fact, when we consider the hierarchy of inmates in the forced labor economy and the late start of the Japanese captivity when WWII was over, it is not an exaggeration to say that among all Axis POWs, the Japa nese may have had the easiest time in the system of Soviet camps for foreign captives. Their experience compares even more favorably with that of the millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag proper. We have seen that the Anglophone scholarship on the internment has lagged behind Japanese-and Russian-language literature, and three explanations are possible for this. First, English-language histories of East Asia during WWII and the Cold War are still predominantly US-centered. The Siberian Internment, in addition to being geographically remote from epicenters of historic interest, seemed to possess little value for audiences in comparison to other, hotter, Cold War battlefields. Second, during the Cold War, geopolitical interests and policy priorities influenced research output. In this environment the internment, considered a relatively settled issue, often was ignored in favor of unresolved issues capable of sparking further tensions. Perhaps as a result of this, the first Anglophone monograph on the internment, William Nimmo’s Behind a Curtain of Silence: Japanese in Soviet Custody, 1945–1956, came out more than three decades a fter the internment’s end.42 This attitude proved resilient even after the Soviet Union’s collapse: while the horrors of Stalinist terror and the Gulag moved into the public spotlight, with copious amounts of hard evidence emerging from the archives, Stalin’s foreign prisoners hardly became a global history topic and at best received attention at the national level in the countries whose citizens had been interned. Finally, the scarcity of archival evidence during the Cold War was an obvious yet significant f actor, further complicated by linguistic boundaries. Even after the opening of Russian archives, few scholars had language skills or resources to research the Japanese and Russian primary sources and publish their findings in English. Those who did have both resources and skills focused on investigating what were seen as more consequential issues, such as the territorial dispute between Japan and Russia. This state of affairs changed in the twenty-first century, as interest in the legacies of Japan’s empire, transnational migrations, and entanglements
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within wartime and postwar East Asia gained greater traction as academic subjects. Among the works to have scrutinized such legacies, two books located the internment in broader contexts of postimperial repatriations: Watt’s When Empire Comes Home and Yoshikuni Igarashi’s Homecomings.43 As mentioned above, in her work Watt was skeptical about the internees’ roles in postwar Japan, seeing the returnees from Siberia as an afterthought in the narratives of civilian repatriates’ strug gle to rejoin Japanese society. While this position contains some truth, it does not do justice to the role of the former internees in postwar society, and thus the need remains for a more nuanced and detailed evaluation of their exploits as imperial soldiers, captives in a foreign land, and inconvenient repatriates. Igarashi’s observations about the internees, made in the context of belated repatriations of former serv icemen, helpfully demonstrate the gulf that existed between those returned servicemen and the domestic society that had moved on. Still, the plight of the Siberian captives occupies only part of Igarashi’s book, while a more comprehensive analysis would be required to do justice to the internees’ experiences. In short, both works bring the straggling serv icemen into the broader literature on postwar Japan but do not venture beyond a general analysis of their roles in postwar society. The returnees, as pointed out by both Watt and Igarashi, struggled to become relevant in postwar society beyond their role of witnesses of conditions and transformations in the USSR. There w ere notable exceptions, of course, such as Sejima Ry ūzō, who became an important business strategist and one of the architects of Japan Inc., and the prominent politician Itagaki Tadashi, who had to completely denounce his association with the USSR just as he had denounced the Japanese imperial project and his father’s role in it in the immediate aftermath of his conversion as a young communist in 1950. Other internees also rose to prominence in postwar Japan: one former captive, Uno Sōsuke, even rose to the summit of national politics, serving briefly as Japan’s prime minister in 1989.44 Nevertheless, these exceptions are fewer than the examples that demonstrate the pervasive association with Siberia that often framed and conditioned the personae and experiences of the returnees, making them primarily valuable as e ither testifiers to Soviet transgressions or unfortunate (and somewhat shameful) losers who had had the bad luck of being captured by the e nemy. Even the prominent former internees w ere marked by their Siberian experience for many years. A comprehensive history of the internment, therefore, should move beyond facile explanations and draw attention to international, po
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litical, and social factors to highlight the diverse and complex roles that Siberian captives played in postwar Japan. Of the works published in the past decade, Andrew Barshay’s The Gods Left First was the first Anglophone history of the internment to come out in the period when historians had access to the entire spectrum of primary sources in three languages. The Gods Left First combined the elements of international, social, and cultural history to view the internment as a product of broad international processes, one that left deep scars in postwar Japa nese society. In his own words, Barshay chose “interpretive depth over so ciological breadth”: his work relied on the recollections of three remarkable men instead of “mining the many hundreds, indeed thousands, of memoirs in order to create a kind of ideal-typical image of internee experience in its different dimensions.” 45 This book is different from The Gods Left First. What I offer h ere is a political and social history of Japan’s transition from empire to nation-state, told through the lens of the Siberian Internment. The frameworks I have chosen necessarily influence the version of internment history I offer: I am interested in the social and political implications of the internment in postwar Japan, particularly how a “new Japan” was conceived, promoted, and contested during the US Occupation by a variety of political groups. Significantly, I investigate how representations of Japanese suffering in the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in WWII s haped Japanese views on the war and the internment, as well as the attempts to make sense of the Soviet Union as a Cold War foe and to write it into the postwar narratives as such— in ways different from how it was conceived in prewar years.
T OWARD A GLOBAL HISTORY OF THE MAKING OF A NEW JAPAN
To understand and do justice to the internees’ experiences in the new Japan, a new approach is needed. Like many other great tragedies of the twentieth century, the Siberian Internment was a product of competition between empires real (the Japanese Empire) and imagined (the United States and the USSR), and a corollary of the deadliest conflict in recorded history, WWII. In equal measure, it was shaped by the early Cold War that followed the fading and death of old empires and the emergence of new ones. Thus, the internment was much more than a chapter in Japanese history, and even the most inclusive history of Japanese empire building in
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Asia—while producing valuable conclusions about its preconditions—cannot singlehandedly explain the internment’s origins and significance. National history tends to stop at national borders, and it is not very helpful in making sense of cross-border movements of human beings, ideas, and images such as those that occurred in the Siberian Internment. Nor was the internment a purely bilateral encounter between Japan and the USSR, despite the ubiquity of Japanese victim narratives that portray the communist superpower as the primary perpetrator of Japanese suffering in Manchukuo and Siberia, and regardless of Soviet narratives that dressed up the Soviet victory in 1945 as a settling of the score for the Russo-Japanese War four decades e arlier. A history of Russian- and Soviet-Japanese relations in the twentieth century, eventful and illustrative as it may be, is not enough to help us comprehend Stalin’s decision to detain former Japanese soldiers and exploit them u ntil the last possible moment. Even the most thorough study of economic conditions and manpower shortages in the Soviet Union immediately after WWII cannot explain, let alone justify, the enormous and expensive logistical and administrative undertaking of selecting, transporting, accommodating, feeding, clothing, exploiting, and reeducating over half a million foreign soldiers in addition to the hundreds of thousands of POWs already detained in the USSR at the time. A history of the Gulag may provide insights into the conditions in internment camps, but on its own it w ill succeed only in painting camp life in bold brushstrokes, lost among which would be the many nuances of internee existences. If the USSR-Japan nexus cannot account for the Japanese captivity in Siberia, neither can the US-Japan one, despite its dominance in English- language histories of postwar Japan. As Barak Kushner pointed out, “Our grasp of modern Japanese history is still relatively hopelessly US-centric.” 46 Conrad also emphasized how in occupied Germany and Japan war memories became fixated on the relationship with one country: the United States.47 This was especially true in Japan, where during the Occupation the GHQ effectively drove “a wedge” between the prewar and the postwar periods, reducing Japan’s so-called Fifteen-Year War (1931–1945) in Asia to what was referred to as the Pacific War with the United States.48 This exclusive focus on the US-Japan war and later alliance overlooks other external factors in Japan’s makeover, prominent among which was the USSR’s influence in the decade immediately a fter WWII. The complexity of the Siberian Internment is best served by a history that transcends the traditional axes of interaction and confrontation. Its various
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facets are best illuminated within three varying and overlapping contexts: Japan’s imperial project on the Northeast Asian mainland, the USSR’s system of POW labor camps, and the global division of the Cold War. These contexts enable us to view the internment as a global history event and the internees as direct participants in the g reat competition between the superpowers and their allies—on land and sea, across diplomatic tables, and in the minds of the so-called new emperors such as Stalin and Truman—for security and power in East Asia. While the “truth” about the origins of the internment so patiently awaited by Satō might still be some way off, historians can at least start working toward a more comprehensive history of the internment. Why should we favor a global history framework over others in writing the history of the Siberian captivity? T here are at least three reasons why such a framework helps extract lessons and insights from our story that could be applied to other events in postwar history. First, as I argued in the Introduction, the internment was by nature an event that transcended the traditional spatial and temporal boundaries and would thus be difficult to explain using tools confined to such borders. Any work attempting to pre sent the internment’s history and evaluate its legacies has to follow the journey of the internees across divisions between epochs, countries, and ideologies. “The most interesting questions,” argues Conrad, “often arise at the juncture where global processes intersect with their local manifestations.” 49 The internment was quintessentially an intersection of the global with the local, and it provides us with questions about the making of postwar Japan and the world—as well as with answers to them. The second reason concerns the complex relationships between the nation and the citizen or, in more formal terms, the issues of citizenship, belonging, and allegiance. T hese issues are featured prominently in this book, helping us trace the changing contours of what it meant to be Japanese under the influence of momentous transformations in the Japanese national community in the aftermath of WWII. We see the wartime concepts of belonging challenged following the collapse of the multiethnic paradise of Manchukuo, where people of five races were said to coexist in harmony. In analyzing the Japanese captivity in the USSR, we see the Japanese internees reinforce their national identity both vis-à-v is other groups in the multiethnic, multinational universe of the GUPVI and within their own community of Japanese p eople. Importantly, the distinctions between and definitions of nationhood and citizenship became starker when a fter years in
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the camps the former internees rejoined the Japanese national community, and when the behavior of some of them raised questions about loyalty to Japan or allegiance to an alien ideology. Applying a framework that goes beyond the nation as the only dominant community supplying the individual with her primary identity allows us to liberate the Japanese captives returning from the USSR—and, by extension, other Japanese citizens—from the long-dominant relationship models with the nation. It also throws into sharp relief the fact that in the treatment of internees in postwar Japan, their nationality was their ultimate marker. If during the war the dominant model for such a relationship was one of unquestioned loyalty prescribed openly in the clauses of the Field Serv ice Code (Senjinkun)—released by the Army Ministry in 1941 to cultivate obedience and the spirit of sacrifice in Japanese soldiers—the postwar reforms and reorientations enabled new forms of interaction with the government. Yet the position the former internees occupied vis-à-v is the state in the new Japan remained ambiguous, evident in the discrepancy between their obvious victimhood and the neglect their calls for compensation and recognition met with in the postwar decades (analyzed in Chapter 7). Finally, viewing internee experiences within broader frameworks—the imperial collapse and the postwar migrations it entailed, the Soviet system of forced labor camps, and the global Cold War—offers alternatives to victim narratives that have dominated Japanese public discourse throughout the postwar decades. A multilingual, multi-archival study of a phenomenon long considered a mere chapter in Japanese national history makes obvious the fact that the Japanese captives were victimized not only by the Soviet Union, as discourses during and after the Cold War argued, but also by the GHQ and their own nation and society. But it also goes beyond exposing the victim mind-sets to show the limits of such a one-sided perspective. Returning to the Siberian internees the agency of which they were deprived in Japan during the Cold War requires moving them away from the eternal role of pitiful victim and portraying them as active participants in world-changing events that are hard to fathom solely from the vantage point of the nation.
CHAPTER T WO
EMBODIMENTS OF EMPIRE THE INTERNEES AS IMPERIAL VESTIGES
Why did we go to war? B ecause climbing up the ladder of monopoly capital, Japanese capitalism had reached its climax—imperialism. The war had become inevitable. —From a conversation between two internees in Siberia
Even someone with only a superficial knowledge of the Marxist-Leninist canon can recognize in the quote above Vladimir Lenin’s famous thesis about imperialism.1 This quote would not look out of place in a speech at a rally by a JCP politician or in a book by one of the many influential Marxist historians.2 Yet the person who turned to Lenin in answering perhaps the most fundamental question of twentieth-century Japanese history was neither a JCP activist nor a Marxist intellectual. The words are from a conversation between IJA Private First Class Watanabe and his friend Itō Masao in a POW camp in Siberia. In a memoir written in 1948 a fter his return to Japan, Itō recounted the discussion of the imperialist war in which he and Watanabe had become POWs.3 Why would Japanese internees in a Soviet camp turn to Leninist epistemology in explaining the events in which they w ere, in their own words, “the most direct participants”?4 One could see this as a product of the camp propaganda education program, known as the Democratic Movement. Indeed, the impact of the Democratic Movement on the Japanese is evident in this quote. Even so, the self-reflective exchange between Itō and Watanabe reveals a lot more than simply a few Marxist maxims parroted by brainwashed internees in a casual conversation. The fact that an internee chose to resort to Lenin in his memoir to explain Japan’s pursuit of empire and its role in World War II is a sign of a deep transformation. Whether it turned 47
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Itō and Watanabe into Marxists or not, reeducation in the USSR opened their eyes to how blindly they had followed the Japanese wartime propaganda about empire and Manchukuo. The Marxist worldview on the war had come to replace in their minds the imperial doctrine dictating that Japan stand ready to sacrifice millions—including its own citizens—for victory. The boldness with which former Kwantung Army soldiers criticized this doctrine shows how for many former soldiers the imperial consciousness collapsed with the empire, to be replaced by the ideologies of the impending Cold War. Implicit in the dialogue was the fact that the Kwantung Army had failed miserably in its duties. A powerful political and military organization that enjoyed a degree of autonomy from the imperial Japanese government, the army was the chief driver of imperial expansion on the Asian mainland. It had in practice created the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo in 1932 and ruled it until August 1945. It not only protected Japanese interests on the mainland, but also drew up blueprints and long-term development plans for Manchukuo.5 The ignominious end to the empire, when the Manchurian dream was trampled u nder the boots of Soviet soldiers in August 1945, suddenly showed the Kwantung Army for what it was in the eyes of many—a weakened army led by indecisive commanders whose actions (or, rather, inaction) had cost the lives of tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians. In defeat, propaganda messages about Manchukuo as the empire’s safe haven proved to have been completely illusory. In addition to the Japa nese casualties of the Kwantung Army’s weakness, there were millions of non-Japanese victims of the settler colonialism that the army had masterminded and implemented. Yet t hese w ere rarely discussed in Japanese memoirs of the empire’s fall: the postwar realities of a narrowly defined Japanese ethnonational state dictated that. Itō, Watanabe, and thousands of their fellow Kwantung Army soldiers who ended up in Siberia had been stationed in northeastern China to protect Manchukuo, the showcase of Japan’s imperial modernity, as well as the members of the Japanese national community who had crossed the sea to fulfill the imperial destiny. They had helped build and protect the very imperialism that they later blamed for pushing Japan toward war. How some of them arrived at critical viewpoints on the imperial past was connected primarily with the complete failure of Japanese imperial modernity in August 1945. Manchukuo, hailed as the model of a bright future for Asian nations, was about to become history as a puppet state, a “chimera.” 6
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Soon the new Cold War realities would slowly but surely fill the vacuum left by the fall of the Japanese empire. As the foremost powers among the Allies, the Soviets and the Americans, charged into the d ying empire’s expanses across land and sea in the last days of WWII, the territories they secured before irreparably falling out with one another soon became separated, an omen of the imminent Cold War. Areas that had briefly been united under the imperial Japanese flag w ere now fissured by fractures both wide and deep. In China, the withdrawal of the Japanese enabled the Nationalists (Kuomintang, or KMT) and Communists (Chinese Communist Party, or CCP) to throw off the thin masks of toleration for each other that they had donned in the presence of a foreign invader, ushering in what S. C. M. Paine has called “the final act of the long Chinese civil war.” 7 This conflict culminated in the Communists’ conquest of the mainland and the Nationalists’ withdrawal to Taiwan, once part of the Japanese Empire. On the Korean peninsula, the empire’s collapse and the early Cold War divisions perpetuated the partition along the thirty-eighth parallel that had been meant to be temporary. Even in the crushed empire’s successor, the postwar Japanese nation-state, these divisions threatened to split society. A few years after the defeat, the imperial remnants taken away at war’s end by the Soviet Union arrived into t hese divisions. In the eyes of the domestic Japanese populace, some of these returnees came armed with the most dangerous weapon, ideology, though many were still wearing their tattered IJA uniforms. Though this fact was often lost on their compatriots, returnees from Siberia arrived as the embodiments of the Japanese Empire, remnants of a failed army and the shameful past. With the uncomfortable memories of the past, they brought the empire back to postimperial Japan. Understanding the origins of the Siberian Internment requires unearthing its imperial roots and the continuities between the prewar empire and postwar nation-state. The returnees from Siberia linked the empire with the postwar period, bridging parts seemingly separated by a wedge driven between them during the Occupation. The Soviet Union’s agency and influence in shaping postwar Northeast Asia, particularly in shaping Japanese views of the imperial collapse in the region, should also be analyzed. Soviet archives reveal that “imperialism” was a term commonly used in the camp reeducation program, repeated so often by activists that it nearly lost all meaning. Yet without their experience as captives in Soviet hands, many internees would probably not have understood, in the way Itō and Watanabe did, the central role they had played in building, expanding,
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and protecting the empire. Analyzing their experiences of defeat and internment requires “writ[ing] the ‘empire’ back into the history of postwar Japan” and reestablishing the internees as imperial agents.8
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN: JAPAN’S IMPERIAL PROJE CT IN MANCHURIA AND KARAFUTO
The Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and its collapse are important parts of the history of the Siberian Internment for three reasons. First, Manchukuo was arguably Japan’s most important colony, a nation-building experiment that sought to promote the empire’s achievements and extend its promise throughout Asia.9 Bound with it in the early stages of WWII were the dreams of a harmonious pan-Asian empire. Later, as defeat became inevitable, Manchukuo came to be seen as the last stronghold on which the empire could rely in continuing the struggle.10 More than a third of all overseas Japanese—over 2.7 million, including Kwantung Army personnel— resided in Manchukuo at the time of Japan’s defeat, and the informal colony had been a significant source of imperial income for the best part of the previous decade. Second, Manchukuo’s fate after defeat was different from that of Japan’s other colonies and occupied territories—Taiwan, Korea, parts of mainland China, and the southeast Asian possessions. Unlike all the latter territories, Manchukuo, along with Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) and the Kuril Islands, was overrun and occupied not by the United States or Great Britain, but by the Soviet Union. Unlike other parts of the USSR where the Japanese were transported by the Soviets following the end of hostilities, before Japan’s defeat Karafuto had been a Japanese territory and home to hundreds of thousands of Japanese and other imperial subjects, and it changed hands following defeat. The postconflict disarmament and repatriation in these areas were conducted differently by the Soviets, compared to how the United States and the United Kingdom proceeded elsewhere. The Soviet invasion into and occupation of formerly Japanese areas in Northeast Asia left numerous legacies—as is most clearly shown by the Siberian Internment.11 Finally, Manchukuo and Karafuto became a space of memory that had a profound impact on how the empire was remembered in postwar Japan. A peculiar strand of civilian national victimhood of the Japanese originated in Manchukuo. The empire’s fall came to be viewed in postwar Japan mainly
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through the eyes and suffering of the civilians who had survived the treacherous journey home with children and relatives in tow, escaping the Soviet invaders. The sympathy evoked by their narratives, which formed the core of a discrete genre of repatriation literature (hikiage bungaku), converged with the disdain for the failed masculinity of the Kwantung Army. This combination partly explains why the accounts of former soldiers interned in the USSR were overshadowed in postwar Japanese memory by civilian narratives and why returnees from the USSR did not even exist as a distinct group in early postwar years, instead being subsumed into the catchall term “repatriate” (hikiagesha).12 Most accounts of repatriation and other testimonies about the empire’s collapse in Manchuria leave out the other half of the story: the fate of the soldiers who ended up in Soviet camps. This is perplexing if one considers the influence and importance of the Kwantung Army in establishing, expanding, and attempting to protect the Japanese presence in northeastern China, as well as the role it played in Japanese militarism, imperial expansion, and the eventual collapse of Manchukuo. Following the army’s surrender to the Soviets, it seemed to have made a backdoor exit from history. It was remembered in the hikiagemono (repatriation) narratives in largely negative terms, but few authors approached the topic of the army’s responsibility for the Siberian Internment head-on. Ironically, it was the Soviet Union, which broke into two the Japanese community in the Northeast Asian colonies, that laid the foundation of a soldier-civilian duality in Japanese popular histories of defeat. Considerations of practicality were paramount for the Soviets, who—as specified in Iosif Stalin’s decree (see the Introduction)—needed young, able-bodied men who could work in the arduous conditions of Siberia and elsewhere in the Soviet Far East. This pragmatic concern inadvertently s haped the ways in which the last days of Manchukuo were remembered and documented in the Japanese popular imagination in later decades. As the two parts of the erstwhile Japa nese community in Manchukuo moved in opposite directions—w ith half a million former soldiers traveling north into the Siberian camps, while the remaining w omen, c hildren, and the elderly fled south or southeast toward the sea and, ultimately, to Japan—so their narratives diverged from that point on. The divisions in the Japanese community caused by the Soviet invasion also had a gender dimension. True, before applying the gender lens we should acknowledge other reasons why the victimhood of civilians might have been romanticized over that of the soldiers. First, the former was a
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victimhood of the innocent. This lent it a morally high position and legitimacy, simultaneously obscuring the civilian victims’ earlier roles as colonizers and victimizers. Second, the victimhood of the male former ser viceman was tarnished: little about becoming a POW was noble. These men had failed in their duty by losing the war, and their past role as valiant enforcers and protectors of imperial expansion did not lend itself easily to victim status. For t hese reasons, the suffering of soldiers yielded its place in the popular imagination to the humiliation of the innocent and unprotected. In writing about the Soviet role in ending Japan’s empire, many Japa nese memoirists were not comfortable with emphasizing the resounding strategic and tactical victory of the Red Army over the once-famed Kwantung Army. Yet the uncivilized features and transgressions of the Soviet soldiers and officers—their looting of food and valuables; raping of Japanese women; and almost total disregard for humanity, law, and order—were also ubiquitous in repatriate lore. Simplistic victim narratives obviated unpleasant discussions of defeat and failure. The Kwantung Army’s own transgressions made it difficult to romanticize it after the war. Starting with the Manchurian Incident in September 1931, which Kwantung Army officers Ishiwara Kanji and Itagaki Seishirō had masterminded as a pretext to invade and occupy the three provinces in the Chinese northeast (modern Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang), Japan sought to consolidate its foothold on the mainland by all means possible. Foremost among t hese was the task of populating the new colony with Japanese citizens. The puppet state of Manchukuo—proclaimed in March 1932, six months a fter the Manchurian Incident—was seen as a long-term project to consolidate and expand the Japanese presence on the mainland. Manchukuo would not only provide the Japanese p eople cramped on their mountainous archipelago with lebensraum—the concept advocated by Karl Haushofer, the ideologue of Nazi expansion and an admirer and proponent of Japan’s search for “living space.”13 According to the imperial propaganda of the time, the success of Japan’s empire and, consequently, the fate of the Japanese people depended on the prosperity of Manchukuo. Furthermore, the triumph of “the Manchurian paradise” meant hope for the whole of Asia, for the Manchurian dream was also the “Dream of Pan-Asia.”14 Manchukuo’s success would be ultimate proof that Japan held the keys to modernity and prosperity in Asia, and that under the emperor’s benevolent reign all ethnicities could coexist in harmony and peace. T hese messages were reflected in grandiloquent four-character slogans such as “the paradise
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of the Kingly Way” (ōdo rakudo); “concord of five peoples” (Japanese, Chinese, Manchus, Koreans, and Mongolians; gozoku kyōwa); or, on a broader scale, “eight corners of the world u nder one [Japanese] roof” (hakkō ichiu). Bringing t hese lofty ideals to fruition required all the Japanese people to act as one in colonizing Manchukuo. The first plan for increasing the Japa nese population in Manchukuo was drawn up in 1936: it aimed to settle a million families, or five million people, in Manchukuo within the following two decades.15 Once populating Manchukuo with Japanese settlers became state policy, waves of migrant groups (imindan) started arriving in quick succession. The government’s ambitious colonization strategy required a domestic propaganda campaign that started in the mid-1930s. T hese concerted endeavors succeeded in creating among the Japanese a powerful dream of Manchukuo. Propaganda sponsored by various agencies and companies, such as Manchukuo’s General Affairs State Council (GASC) and the South Manchurian Railway Company (Minami Manshū Tetsudō Kabushiki Gaisha, or Mantetsu), aimed to appeal to a specific audience among the Japanese— farmers and agricultural workers in rural areas—and persuade t hose p eople to move to Manchukuo.16 The message was that the land was there to be tilled, and that the mighty Kwantung Army was t here to protect the lives and property of Japanese settlers. Indeed, the Kwantung Army played a central role in establishing, expanding, and Japanizing the puppet state of Manchukuo, where local people accounted for 80 percent of the total population as late as 1937.17 Surely, propaganda was not in itself sufficient to make the move attractive for potential pioneers. The government had to work out a comprehensive plan of incentives and benefits, foremost among which were earning rights to land and other property. Despite the emphasis on harmony and concord between settlers and locals, guaranteeing Japanese settlers’ security was paramount in luring them to the mainland. One of the Kwantung Army’s foremost roles was to protect the colonizers from “Manchurian bandits.”18 Yet incentives for Japanese pioneers inevitably meant discrimination against local populations in northeastern China. Illustrative in this respect is a testimony by Furumi Tadayuki, a top bureaucrat in the Manchukuo government (1933–1945) and later an internee in both the USSR and the PRC (1945–1963). According to the journalist Okabe Makio, Furumi—who occupied important positions in the puppet government, most notably the post of vice director of the Economics Department in the Manchukuo GASC— squarely admitted that the land used as an incentive to attract new settlers
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from Japan had been captured by force from the local peasants.19 The fertile land touted in propaganda films was far from empty, and imperial expansion dictated that the Kwantung Army be proactive. In other words, the “protection” promised to settlers included forcing local farmers off their land to make way for Japanese colonizers. Lieutenant Colonel Asaeda Shigeharu, a Kwantung Army strategist who was interned in the USSR, acknowledged the army’s role in land seizures when he said in an interview, “What the Japanese did in Manchuria was nothing short of robbery (gōtō).”20 How did the soldiers and officers in the Kwantung Army reflect on the military’s role in providing this “protection”? How did they view their own part in this task? Did they see themselves as agents of empire, colonizers who had occupied a foreign land by force? How did they justify—to themselves or their readers—the injustices in which they had taken part? The critical consciousness seen in Itō and Watanabe’s conversation did not appear immediately. Instead, it was nurtured in the camps by a combination of interrelated factors: discontent with officer tyranny that boiled over into class struggle was fanned by the ideas gleaned from propaganda activities. Yet for these activities to have an effect, the soldiers had to look back at their time in the imperial outposts and realize both the quotidian violence of the IJA, which was mostly directed at themselves, and the bigger violations of Japanese imperialism, which were directed at the colonized peoples and in which they had played a part. Sarah Kovner has argued that the Japanese treatment of Allied POWs should be viewed “in the context of how the Japanese government treated its own civilians and soldiers,” particularly the IJA’s “history of interpersonal violence” that conditioned Japanese interactions with foreign combatants.21 This mundane violence is equally important in understanding the experiences of the Japanese who became POWs of the Soviets. Testimonies of former IJA soldiers stationed in China show that brutality in the military contributed to violence against locals.22 Andrew Barshay has argued that some internees w ere aware of this “vicarious sense of victimization”: for example, Takasugi Ichirō reconstructed “his sense of himself, his time and place, in terms of [an] aggressor facing history’s judgment.”23 Many an internee memoir also opens with experiences in Manchukuo where, depending on his rank and place in the military hierarchy, the memoirist dispensed and / or received violent treatment. Owada Mitsu, drafted into the army from a job at the Nippon Light Metal Company, was shocked by the daily vio lence in army life. Owada, who was twenty-eight at the time, stripped to
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his loincloth before the physical examination but was told “naked means naked”—those who refused to strip all the way were beaten with a bamboo broom.24 Owada’s humiliation was relatively mild. Ishiguro Tatsunosuke, a schoolteacher drafted into the IJA at the rank of lance corporal, guiltily remembered how he had violently beaten an older draftee for stealing food. His first slap awakened a feeling of guilt in Ishiguro t oward this man and, unable to suppress the feeling, Ishiguro beat the man harder. Reflecting on the system that normalized such violence, Ishiguro wrote: “Basic h uman rights w ere absolutely nonexistent in the Japanese army. There was no good or evil, right or wrong—only stars that denoted military rank.”25 Such experiences demonstrate the often simplistic and one- sided nature of the victim mind-set when memoirists remembered the Japanese experiences in Manchukuo, Karafuto, and later in Siberian captivity. Ironically, the high-handedness of the officer class in the Soviet camps made it easier for the other internees to realize the connection between the colonization of Manchuria and their subsequent Soviet captivity. Asahara Seiki, a leader of the Soviet reeducation program for Japanese POWs, thus described the role of the propaganda newspaper Nihon shimbun in helping the internees identify the real culprits behind the Siberian Internment— Japanese imperialism and war of aggression. For Asahara, this realization would have been impossible without the “socialist thought” propagated by the Democratic Movement: “From the pages of Nihon shimbun the new democratic and socialist thought reverberated across the Siberian plains, exposing the truth about the aggressive war and those truly responsible for the misfortune of the internment. This spiritual transformation of 600,000 officers and men was akin to a tempest.”26 In the foreword to a candid memoir by Hiraide Setsuo, an army doctor interned for four years in the USSR, Shirai Hisaya, a former Asahi journalist and a scholar of the internment, provided perhaps the most withering analysis of the Kwantung Army’s role and Japan’s imperial ambitions in bringing about the internment: When discussing the Siberian Internment, it is customary to talk about the bad Soviet Union that unilaterally v iolated the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, invaded Manchuria, and took away a great number of Japanese officers and soldiers to Siberia as forced labor. Yet there is an important point missing from such thinking: Why was the Japanese Kwantung Army stationed [in Manchuria] on such a large scale in the first place? I
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do not wish to excuse the Soviets’ aggressive actions. Their entry into the war against Japan was a grave violation of international law and in itself enough to prove the USSR’s guilt. However, we must confront the facts that w ere in place well before the Soviet invasion: that the Kwantung Army had been stationed in Manchuria as a colonial army on a foreign campaign (gaisei), and that it had played a central role in Japan’s invasion of the mainland.27
This calls Japanese readers to shift their gaze—and the blame—from the Soviets and t oward the Kwantung Army, the Japanese empire, and the millions of ordinary citizens complicit in that empire. It shows how the Japa nese turned overnight from perpetrators of land grabbing into victims in the postwar national consciousness, with the narratives of Japanese suffering eclipsing in their magnitude alternative interpretations of the war and empire. This victim consciousness masked the early enthusiasm for and the spirit of participation in the empire displayed by Japanese citizens involved in Manchuria. While not always driven by “total” and selfless allegiance to the imperial project, the Kwantung Army soldiers and officers played “significant supporting roles” in the construction of the empire.28 The Japanese soldiers guaranteed the security of the Japanese community that was busy securing the reach of the empire by cultivating land, building cities, r unning factories, and rearing cattle.29 They were also there to expand the empire’s borders toward the north and west if conditions became ripe (they did not). And while there were many individual reasons for deciding to participate in the colonization project, many settlers and soldiers followed the well- beaten track to Manchukuo b ecause they e ither believed the official propaganda or w ere attracted by the many incentives. As one pioneer remembered her f amily’s move to Manchuria, “Neither a fortune hunter nor a failure at home, my husband was one of those who answered [the government’s] call out of a sincere belief that it was right and good.”30 W hether they sought a clean slate to start a new life away from the crowded and resource-hungry home islands or pursued immediate economic benefits or the more nebulous promise of a glorious future for the Japanese and Asian races, Manchukuo appealed to millions of Japanese. First as protectors, then as abandoned subjects in Manchuria and later the Soviet Union, and finally as remnants of the failed empire a fter their repatriation, the Japanese internees in the USSR were the immediate prod-
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ucts of that empire. Despite their role as its vanguards, however, the empire is conspicuous by its absence in their reflections. Scathing criticism similar to Shirai’s is rare in internee memoirs. Watanabe’s and Itō’s caustic pronouncements on the empire are more of an exception than a rule: little evidence exists in camp recollections (except t hose authored by Marxists) of a pervasive critical consciousness of Japanese colonialism and the emperor system. In an essay on “human flows” (jinryū) in the wake of Japan’s defeat in WWII, the Japanese historian Narita Ry ūichi also emphasized the absence of colonialist consciousness in repatriation and internment narratives: “It is necessary to squarely face the absence (ketsuraku) of awareness about colonialism in the accounts of repatriation and the fact that these accounts often became narratives of the empire’s collapse. . . . This reflects the difficulty of dealing with the topic of empire during Japan’s ‘postwar period.’ ”31 In other words, immediately a fter the war the Japanese colonialist experience—including the flight from the former colony in the face of an enemy invasion—became diluted in the general discourses of defeat, and few conscious attempts were made to single out the imperial project as the foremost culprit in the violence that befell the Japanese in Manchukuo. From adventurous agents of empire who moved overseas to build a bright future for themselves and their nation, the pioneers of Manchukuo suddenly turned into passive, defenseless, and pitiful victims. Their repatriation memoirs merged with the greater body of war memoirs, united under the umbrella of war stories with other narratives of Japanese victimhood. This was also evident in the number of recollections: “Compared to the enormous number of war memoirs produced during the ‘postwar period,’ accounts of imperial and colonial experience were relatively few. Moreover, even those that exist were not written [as memoirs of empire] in a conscious (jikakuteki) manner.”32 This is not to say, however, that when thinking and writing about the momentous few weeks at the end of WWII, the Siberian internees completely excised from their accounts the empire and the sacrifices it had necessitated. Let us turn to Itō again to demonstrate the relationship of an IJA soldier to the empire. While few memoirists consciously defined their wartime and postwar experiences through the prism and terminology of empire, neither did they disavow the empire completely. Rather, it often appeared in the memoirs in the shape and image of the emperor, while the war waged in his name became a crucial part in the memoirists’ drama of
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defeat and subsequent captivity. In other words, the former soldiers’ connection to the empire started with the emperor and was preserved in their relationship with him. This connection is key to explaining the sacrifices the Japanese had suffered for the nebulous dream of the empire. It is evident in the practice of “distant worship of the Imperial Palace” (kōkyo yōhai) that Japanese officers and soldiers performed in Soviet camps.33 Listening to Emperor Hirohito’s fateful broadcast on 15 August 1945 about Japan’s decision to surrender, Itō experienced a mixture of emotions. Like millions of Japanese in the home islands (naichi) or stranded in overseas territories (gaichi), Itō searched the monarch’s very formal, classical language for meaning and consolation or for some preview of the brave new era that lay ahead, wondering about his own place in the postwar period. “The emperor proclaimed he did not ‘consider us prisoners of war’ (furyo to mitomezu),” Itō wrote, “and I was happy not to be reduced to that status. Instead, I found self-confidence in calling myself an ‘honorable POW’ (kōei aru furyo). This was why I never thought of running away [when confronted with the Soviets] in Manchuria and saw t hose who escaped as cowards of the worst kind.”34 In Soviet custody, however, Itō had to reconsider his initial thoughts: “The treatment we received was not one reserved for the honored. The emperor might not have called us that, but for the Russians we were POWs all right. The reality was directly opposite to what I had imagined.”35 This is a vivid example of how camp experiences woke many former soldiers from their imperial dream. All the same, the empire in the subject’s mind remained in the guise of the emperor, as well as what he said and did.36 Although Itō was clearly irritated by the emperor’s choice of words in his broadcast—Itō mocked Hirohito’s meek call to “endure the unendurable” in the 15 August broadcast by contrasting it with the arrogant wording of the December 1941 proclamation of war against the United States—Itō nevertheless made it evident that he had heeded the monarch’s call and even taken consolation from it.37 What is more, taking his emperor’s words seriously, Itō had not run away when he had had a chance to do so. He was grateful for Hirohito’s promise that he would not become a POW in the emperor’s divine eyes, which would have been ignominious for an IJA soldier. Furumi Tadayuki’s reaction to the imperial broadcast is also telling: for all of his heartache at seeing his beloved Manchukuo laid waste by the Soviet e nemy, Furumi de cided to obey the emperor and denounced t hose who called on the Japa nese to “barricade ourselves in Manchuria and resist to the b itter end.”38
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Although they were desolated by the news of the surrender, as were millions of other Japanese at the time, both the prominent bureaucrat Furumi and the soldier Itō turned to the emperor for reassurance and continued to acknowledge imperial authority without question. Only in the Soviet camps, with the benefit of hindsight and help from propaganda instruction, did Itō and many of his fellow captives realize that they, too, had been complicit in advancing Japanese imperialism. In long conversations with Watanabe, Itō discussed the “recent war” (kondo no sensō), their participation in it, and the reasons why they had had to fight in the first place. Watanabe, a cheerful and knowledgeable graduate of Hōsei University in Shinkyō (then the capital of Manchukuo, and today called Changchun), had worked for the Manchukuo government, earning a reputation as a diligent and reliable employee. Watanabe called for a “cool- headed” and calm analysis of the war and its causes.39 Was the war they had fought r eally a holy war (seisen) or a just war (seigi no sensō), as they had been told on a regular basis by imperial propaganda? If the Japanese troops really were, as the emperor’s soldiers, on the side of justice, how did this not guarantee victory? Was victory always supposed to belong to the just? The answers were as candid and coolheaded as the questions: “In reality, we had sided with defeat. The holy war was not holy after all. Without doubt, we [the soldiers] knew nothing. An empty belief (karanenbutsu) in ‘certain victory’ (hisshō no shinnen) came ahead of advanced weapons in our case. . . . It was leadership based on nothing but persistent spiritualism (seishinshugi ittenbari), and we were its ‘human bullets’ (nikudan).” 40 This forthright statement dovetailed with Watanabe’s gratitude at having survived the war. Even in Siberia, he felt grateful to be alive—which at first glance sounds strange, given the cheerless circumstances in the Soviet l abor camps. “Although we are starving h ere e very day, when I think I am still alive, I feel enormous gratitude. I am grateful for the piece of black bread and the bowl of pulpy gruel I receive every day,” Watanabe said.41 While his fellow internees were moaning and groaning from cold, hunger, and onerous work quotas, Watanabe’s heart was full of gratitude. This gratitude may not be surprising if we take into account Watanabe’s realization that he was happy not to have died a meaningless death as the empire’s “human bullet.” In a b itter irony of fate, he eventually succumbed to pneumonia in Siberian snowfields. Such testimonies help us take Narita’s findings one step further and outline four major conclusions about the place the Japanese Empire occupied
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in internee narratives. First, similar to the accounts analyzed by Narita, few internees’ memoirs consciously point to the imperial project as the reason for their stationing in Manchuria or the primary cause of their Siberian captivity. This is especially true in the case of recollections by those who returned from the USSR in 1946–1947, who had witnessed only the initial, bitter period of the internment, as well as the recollections by ordinary soldiers who had not given much thought to the greater historic and political significance of the Japanese Empire. Still, t here are important exceptions to this generalization, as seen in Itō’s candid recollections, to which we w ill return below. Second, the language of many early internment narratives and the terms used to make sense of the Japanese presence in Manchuria represented a mixture of prewar or wartime Japanese imperial propaganda about the so- called holy war and the more familiar arguments that Japanese people were victims of their masters. The aggressive propaganda campaigns that accompanied the expansion of the Japanese presence in Manchukuo had succeeded in creating a dream of the region as the “paradise of the Kingly Way.” Interestingly, however, many internees deliberately used the words “empire” (teikoku) or “imperialism” (teikokushugi) in their camp memoirs only when writing, often sarcastically and mockingly, about propaganda lessons or slogans dispensed by Soviet political officers. Itagaki Tadashi, the son of General Itagaki Seishirō and a young officer and internee, confessed that when he first read the Soviet propaganda newspaper Nihon shimbun, he found it “full of unfamiliar (miminarenai) words, such as capitalism and imperialism.” 42 “Empire” was not a word the internees were used to brandishing, in other words—at least, not in any specific sense beyond the quotidian consciousness of being imperial soldiers. Imperial consciousness, even in an affirmative form, was absent from the minds and daily vocabularies of many internees at the time they w ere taken to Siberia. Third, accounts of defeat and internment did not represent a uniform body of homogeneous tales but w ere contingent on social, educational, gender, and other identities of the narrators, as well as their experiences in the camps. Unsurprisingly, the vocabulary of empire is more conspicuous in the recollections of the more educated and mature among the internees, such as Furumi. There was a clear class division among memoirists: the empire-builder Furumi’s conception of the empire and Manchukuo, to which he had devoted his best years, was naturally different from that of a drafted soldier sent to Manchuria or of someone who had volunteered to go
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t here because of economic hardships at home—like Katō Kintarō, who became a soldier “because in the army you could at least eat your fill.” 43 Class was not the only boundary, and perhaps the most evident line of division concerned gender. Women became the main engines behind the popularization of the narratives of defeat, victimhood, and repatriation, as exemplified by Fujiwara Tei, whose memoir The Shooting Stars Are Alive became a best seller in postwar Japan.44 Finally, transformations in memoirists’ attitudes toward empire and war occurred u nder the influence of the Soviet reeducation program carried out in virtually every camp for foreign POWs. It is true that this program depicted the world in Manichaean terms—w ith the image of the just and benevolent Soviet Union that stood for all the workers and peasants of the world and the opposite image of the evil Western capitalists who now had Japan under their control. At the same time, the Democratic Movement had a tangible impact on the low-ranking and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and, most of all, the ordinary soldiers interned in the USSR. It is not an exaggeration to argue that the Soviet camp reeducation opened the eyes of many internees—even those who ultimately rejected its arguments—to the spell under which they had been during the war, a message that ironically is consonant with the early US Occupation line about Japan’s having been tricked into war by the militarist cliques (gunbatsu). Significantly, the Soviet propaganda program also succeeded in equipping its students with a new vocabulary—evident in this chapter’s epigraph—with the help of which, in hindsight, they reassessed their views on the war and their involvement in it.
THE FALL OF MANCHURIA, THE FALL OF EMPIRE
Considering the lofty wartime propaganda about Manchukuo, the Kwantung Army’s failure in its duty to protect the Japanese community may be a mark of the dire circumstances in which it found itself at the end of WWII. In his memoir, published half a c entury a fter the war, Lieutenant Colonel Sejima Ry ūzō, the Imperial General Headquarters strategist encountered in this book’s Introduction, wrote, “In July 1945 the Kwantung Army did not have even a third, let alone a half of its military capacity at the start of the war in December 1941.” 45 As the naval and land b attles in the Pacific and Southeast Asia took a heavy toll in 1942–1943, the Japanese had to move
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many divisions south. Manchukuo was believed to be the empire’s safest haven, and troops t here had to be moved to the Pacific theater where they were needed most. As a result, when the Soviets joined the war against Japan in August 1945, the army entrusted with defending the puppet kingdom had been left badly weakened. And while the top strategists anticipated what was about to come across the Soviet border, neither the Japanese people in the colony nor the ordinary soldiers of the Kwantung Army had any idea about the time of the imminent Soviet attack. The Japanese settler-farmers bore the brunt of the Soviet invasion. Many had settled in northern Manchuria near the Soviet border and hence became easy prey for the advancing Red Army on 9 August 1945. Memoirists writing about the Soviet entry into the war and the Kwantung Army’s neglect of the pioneers admitted that their own travails paled in comparison with the tragedy that befell these clueless and defenseless settler-farmers. “The plunder (ryakudatsu) of the Soviets pouring into Manchuria was ruthless,” Furumi wrote in his memoir of the last days of Manchukuo. As a founding father of the puppet kingdom who had actively promoted Japa nese settlement t here, Furumi felt guilty about t hese pioneers.46 Some Japa nese authors questioned w hether the Kwantung Army had been at all committed to the pioneers’ security.47 For them, there was something intentional in the fact that the army simply left the Japanese settlers to face the enemy “exactly like young rabbits thrown to hungry wolves.” 48 Clearly, it was not simple incompetence that caused this anger. Rather, the pioneers were infuriated by the belief that the army had deliberately kept the settlers in the dark about the impending disaster. Despite Kwantung Army intelligence reports that predicted an imminent Soviet attack, the army command hardly moved a finger to evacuate residents of the Japanese communities from border areas. This negligence may have originated from a strategy to use the settlements near the border as a “buffer zone” to slow the Soviet advance.49 In the summer of 1945, the Kwantung Army command had to use e very means at its disposal to counteract the imminent Soviet onslaught. As the central government—represented by Hirota Kōki, the former prime minister and former Japanese ambassador in Moscow—made overtures t oward the USSR seeking its mediation vis-à-v is the Allied powers, the Kwantung Army had to prepare for the imminent threat of the Soviet entry into the war against Japan.50 As part of these plans, Sejima was dispatched to Manchukuo from the Imperial General Headquarters in July 1945. He arrived
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in Shinkyō a month before the Soviet invasion to muster the remaining strength of the Kwantung Army. As he later reminisced, “It was gravely important that we strengthen the border areas in order to defend Manchukuo and the well-being of the Japanese settlers.” In the event of the Soviet invasion, which Sejima estimated would come in September 1945, “[our] inferiority in military might would make it strategically impossible to wage a long war of attrition,” which had been a dopted as Japan’s primary strategy against the USSR in May 1945.51 The naivety of Sejima and his superiors soon became evident. The eminent military historian Hata Ikuhiko has argued that the Japanese command was deluded in thinking that the Soviets would abide by the letter of the Potsdam Declaration and obey the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, the SCAP. This delusion was shattered when the vice chief of staff—General Kawabe Torashirō, who had flown to Manila on 19 August to negotiate the terms of Japanese surrender— asked MacArthur’s chief of staff, General Richard K. Sutherland, if the SCAP would send instructions in case, following the surrender, trouble w ere to occur between the Chinese and Soviet armies on the one hand and the Japanese army on the other. Sutherland responded by denying that the SCAP had any authority in these matters.52 Besides exposing the cluelessness of the Japanese vice chief of staff, Sutherland’s response reaffirmed the Yalta agreement, according to which the Soviets w ere given full control over Manchuria and Karafuto. The Russian historians Kirill Cherevko and Aleksei Kirichenko have written, in agreement with Sejima, that t here was no substance b ehind the Kwantung Army’s vaunted reputation as a million-strong army. According to Soviet sources, just over a third of a million Japanese troops actually engaged the Soviets in battle.53 For Sejima, the immediate task in July 1945 was to strengthen the border areas by drafting all able-bodied men from the local Japanese community in a root-and-branch mobilization and transferring to Manchuria the army divisions that had been stationed in southern China. The new recruits lacked training and military spirit, but they would have to fill the ranks of the army that had been weakened by the transfers of “cream of the crop” divisions to the Pacific theater in 1943– 1944.54 In his memoir, the internee Ōki Tatsuji remembered meeting some of these settler-soldiers in his Siberian camp: “These people still held onto their pioneer spirit and were well versed in Manchurian affairs.”55 For Sejima and his superiors, the desperate attempts to secure the empire’s last stronghold also necessitated keeping the settler groups in total darkness, as
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the army apparently desired to avoid the panic, chaos, and the difficulty of evacuating tens of thousands of civilians from remote areas. The military historian Edward Drea saw some truth in the settlers’ suspicions: the Japanese high command kept in the dark not only the civilians living in the border areas but also the commanders of frontline troops. Drea also called into question the effectiveness of Japanese intelligence reports about the movements of Soviet troops. While relatively good at gathering data, Kwantung Army intelligence suffered from a lack of coordination: the Japanese strategists knew the Soviet attack was imminent but disagreed among themselves on its timing. A memoir by the Soviet cavalry general Issa Pliev corroborated Drea’s assessment but emphasized the role of Red Army’s speedy attack in quickening the Japanese defeat: “Our advance was so rapid and strikes so sudden and crippling that they conclusively persuaded the enemy of its doomed fate.”56 Drea scathingly concluded that “the Japa nese were unprepared strategically, operationally, or tactically for the massive Soviet blow that fell on 9 August 1945. . . . That is the indictment of a high command that was unable to grasp the integrative nature of warfare in the mid-20th century.”57 Sejima, who was in the thick of the Kwantung Army’s strategy making at the time, remembered the army’s initial indecision at the news of the Soviets’ rapid advance. Yet following a 10 August directive from the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, there was a sudden and complete change of strategy that abandoned the plans that had been a dopted in May 1945. As Sejima put it, using euphemistic terms, “While continuing to extensively resist the Soviet forces, our new goal was now to secure southern Manchuria and northern K orea.” This was a veiled admission that the Japanese had been stupefied by the speedy advance and the “overpowering superiority” (attōteki na yūsei) of the Red Army.58 As early as the second day of the Soviet invasion, the Kwantung Army command had given up any hope of securing Manchukuo and concentrated all its forces on preserving the southerly territories. It is painfully evident that the Kwantung Army was in no position to worry about the Japanese settlers caught in the northern parts of Manchukuo. The news of the Red Army’s advance came as a bolt from the blue for the Japanese residents who woke up on the morning of 9 August. T hose Japanese not awakened by the rumbling of Soviet bombers were gathered by their settlement elders, who broke the news and implored the settlers to remain calm and collect only the most necessary items when leaving their
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homes. Yet it was not easy to maintain order in a community left to itself in the face of the coming enemy. Soon, panic set in. Very often the elders themselves did not know what awaited the settler groups in the long run or whether they would be coming back to their homes, so all they could do was to move the residents to temporary locations. Many settlers, w omen and children among them, had to leave all their belongings and could take “only the photographs,” as recalled by Kubota Tomi, who became a refugee with her three children on 13 August.59 The day of the Soviet invasion was, therefore, a moment of extreme national insecurity for the Japanese. In his memoir, Kanzaki Tatsuo described the invasion as “wave after wave” of an overwhelming number of Soviet soldiers.60 The Soviet attack immediately shattered in the residents’ eyes the myth about harmony in the Japanese community. Remembering her flight from mainland China in The Shooting Stars Are Alive, Fujiwara wrote about the “cracks” (kiretsu) that showed within the diaspora.61 Furumi could barely hide his resentment at the repatriation procedure, according to which the families of Kwantung Army commanders were evacuated first, followed by the families of Mantetsu employees—who “had the advantage of being able to use the trains freely.” After these, the families of Manchukuo bureaucrats w ere repatriated. Ordinary Japanese w ere left on their own.62 Furumi’s own family was able to leave Manchukuo only in 1946.63 In an interview with Sejima, the public intellectual Handō Kazutoshi used the word gunkanmin to describe the order in which repatriation was carried out. Gunkanmin is written using three Chinese characters that mean “army bureaucrats people,” which conveys the priority given to each group.64 As Yamamuro Shin’ichi, a historian of Manchukuo, has pointed out, “the men who should have protected the state and its p eople . . . were the first to flee the scene.” 65 In major cities such as Harbin, Shinkyō, and Shenyang, the situation got out of control. Sejima emphasized that following the decision to move the Kwantung Army headquarters to the south, the army’s highest priorities were “to rescue the Manchukuo Imperial family [by moving them to Japan] and to deal with the refugee problem among the Japanese residents in Manchuria.” 66 Ultimately, the army failed on both counts: the Soviets captured Pu Yi, Manchukuo’s emperor, on 19 August and transported him to the Siberian town of Chita for trial, and thousands of Japanese residents became refugees due to the Kwantung Army’s inaction.67 The “residents,” lumped together by Sejima, were never a homogeneous and organized mass.
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Abandoned by their army to their own devices, they faced the enemy which was by now well accustomed to plundering and abusing defeated peoples. However, it would be too simplistic to join the chorus condemning the behavior of the Soviet forces that carried out the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation (also known in the west as Operation August Storm) without attempting to understand some of the soldiers’ fundamental ideas that made it possible for them to behave worse than soldiers typically do in war zones. The geopolitics behind Stalin’s impatience to enter the war against Japan, analyzed most notably in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy, was one factor b ehind the ruthlessness and haste with which the Red Army acted in Manchuria.68 I am interested in shedding light, briefly, on how the Soviet side made sense of the Japanese, who they referred to as the “samurai,” without denying the perpetrators’ responsibility for the suffering and humiliation they inflicted on Japanese civilians.69 While Japan and Russia may not have been hereditary enemies in the same way that Germany and France were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russo-Japanese relations went from bad to worse a fter the 1917 Russian Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922.70 The fact that Japan considered the Bolsheviks worse than the tsarists was evident in the active role it played in the allied intervention in Russia.71 When that intervention ended, the Japanese forces w ere the last to leave Siberia, in 1922. This foray into the Russian mainland, also known as the Siberian intervention, resulted from Japan’s ambition to be seen as a global power. But it left the Soviets with an image of a Japanese aggressor that had attempted to smother the young Soviet state in its cradle and remained e ager to test the strength of the USSR’s eastern borders. Tensions culminated in two border conflicts between the Soviets and the Japa nese, one of which—the clash near the Khalkhin-Gol River (known in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident) in 1939—resulted in a regional war. The hostility between the USSR and Japan had existed for decades before the Soviets’ Manchurian offensive of 1945. Some of the c hildren of the veterans of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 came face-to-face in Manchuria, and their respective children would grow up during the ideological confrontations of the Cold War.72 Soldiers in the Soviets’ three-pronged Manchurian offensive had been sent East following the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945. In contrast to the Kwantung Army’s new recruits, whose inexperience Sejima lamented,
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t hese fighters had been there and seen it all during the previous four years, and they had been hardened in the cutthroat battles of the war’s European theater. Many of them had marched through Eastern Europe to Berlin, wreaking havoc along the way.73 These soldiers’ views on the war had been shaped by two major f actors. First, the Soviet wartime propaganda had led them to believe that entering the war against Japan was a historical necessity, without which the USSR’s mission of “liberating the world from the tyranny of German fascism and Japanese militarism” would not be complete.74 This liberating mission became the main component of Soviet propaganda about WWII during the Cold War. Hidden behind this high-minded façade, of course, w ere the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interests. Second, for many Soviet officers and soldiers who w ere indignant about Japan’s expansionist ambitions vis-à-v is the USSR, the Manchurian campaign was an opportunity to exact retribution and redress the balance of power in the Far East. Perhaps no other reference to the Russo-Japanese War was as historically significant as that made by Stalin on 2 September 1945, the day of formalizing Japan’s surrender. Recollecting the events of forty years before, the Soviet leader alluded to the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War as a dark spot [in the history] of our country. Our people believed in and longed for the day when Japan would be beaten and this dark spot removed. We . . . waited forty years for this day. And at last, this day has come. Today Japan accepted its defeat and signed the act of unconditional surrender. This means that Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands w ill be returned to the Soviet Union and w ill serve from now on not as a means to cut the Soviet Union off from the ocean and as Japan’s base for attacking our Far East, but as a means of connecting the USSR to the ocean and a base for defending our country from Japanese aggression.75
Stalin’s reference to the tsarist defeat four decades earlier was in line with his previous efforts to use Russian nationalist rhetoric and symbols in rallying support for the Soviet war effort.76 While prewar propaganda of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had hailed the Russo- Japanese War as a blow to the old tsarist regime and an act that had helped bring down the Russian Empire and thus facilitated the Bolsheviks’ ascent to power, in the summer of 1945 Stalin altered this propaganda line with the aim of presenting his entry into the war against Japan as righteous retribution for Russia’s humiliation four decades e arlier.77 Immediately a fter the German defeat, allusions to the Russo-Japanese War and the Soviets’
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duty to “fight the samurai” became central to propaganda efforts, seasoned by the rhetoric of loyalty to the Allied cause.78 Thus, winning the war against so-called Japanese militarists who would have expanded their empire to the Ural Mountains if not for the heroism and selflessness of the Soviet p eople was an absolute historical necessity, not least because victory would redress the balance of history and secure the USSR’s supremacy in the Far East. The internment of more than half a million Japanese former serv icemen ordered by Stalin only ten days earlier was apparently another way to ensure this supremacy. The historical justice proclaimed by Stalin is evident in the memoirs of Soviet soldiers and officers during the Manchurian campaign. Recollections in one volume of memoirs, I Fought the Samurai (Ia dralsia s samuraiami), are revealing in that they break with the Soviet tradition of grandiloquent, self-congratulatory prose praising the heroism of the Red Army written by high-ranking officers.79 Instead, t hese recollections recount the experience through soldiers’ eyes. In one example, Oleg Smirnov, a soldier who also contributed to his unit newspaper, eloquently described the trip south from the Soviet-Manchurian border: the sandstorms of the wastelands, the constant struggle to catch up to the tanks, and the rainy crossing of the Khingan Range. He wrote about the brothels under the red lights that were “more numerous than eateries,” as well as the army’s ban on visiting them both because “no vaccination could save you from the inglorious diseases” and b ecause, “after all, this was a disgrace for the Soviet soldier.”80 He did not leave out of his story the grumbles about the ban from soldiers who had not enjoyed female company in months. Yet even within such a candid and detailed account, t here is not a hint of the rapes of Japanese women. Writing about them was probably considered a “disgrace for the Soviet soldier,” too—though the act itself, as is evident from the Japanese side of the story, was clearly not. In turn, Japanese narratives of rape and humiliation highlight the hierarchy that existed within Japanese national victimhood and explain the marginality of internee voices in the postwar period.
MANCHUKUO AND THE HIERARCHY OF JAPAN ESE NATIONAL VICTIMHOOD
In Japanese civilian narratives of defeat, the rape of Japanese girls and women is one of the most prominent offenses committed by the Soviets.
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Rare is the memoirist of the empire’s violent fall who does not recount the humiliating experiences of Japanese w omen and girls. Sataka Makoto summarized the point well when he wrote, “The story of the Soviet army violating Japanese women became the archetypal image of the Soviet Union during the postwar period.”81 Furumi remembered with compassion the Japanese girls who shaved their heads and dressed in Buddhist robes to avoid the attention of lascivious Soviet soldiers.82 Mariko Tamanoi’s study of Japan’s last days in Manchuria shows how even those who managed to avoid the humiliation of being abused by the invaders were aware of the numerous cases of abuse happening daily around them. Interestingly, of the two groups of rapists, “Manchurian bandits” and “Russian soldiers,” “the Japanese nation collectively remembers only the latter as ‘the e nemy (rapist)’ of its women.”83 Rape was hardly the only Soviet atrocity that the chroniclers of defeat and repatriation committed to paper: it was just one among many atrocities endured by Japanese civilians. The hikiagemono are replete with heartrending accounts of horrific experiences in defeated Manchukuo. Many women wrote about watching their children die of hunger, cold, and the brutality of having to walk tens of kilometers daily trying to escape the battlefields. T here were stories of mass murder-suicides, in which mothers killed their c hildren one a fter another before taking their own lives. T here were tales of babies abandoned by the roadside or smothered by their mothers lest their untimely cries give away the presence of a whole group of refugees. Kōno Chiharu’s story, “Five Victims”—in which she recounts the deaths, one a fter another, of her five children during the long flight out of Manchukuo—is a paramount example of such tragic experiences.84 At the same time, in the hikiagemono, for the female narrator or a witness sympathetic to the women, rape by the enemy seemed to be the ultimate humiliation, the gravest abuse in an act directed t oward the defenseless and abandoned Japanese woman. Her shame was a graver outcome of the war than the death of her husband from an e nemy bullet, not least because of the rejection and alienation she would face in postwar Japanese society. This rejection can be seen in the life story of an anonymous memoirist who, raped in Sakhalin by a Soviet soldier, gave birth to a “red-haired” son and for decades had to put up with social marginalization and discrimination in Japan.85 Importantly, when writing about rape, the usual suspect—the Soviet soldier—was not the only one blamed by the victims. The female writer
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directed her rage against a range of targets: from the abstract phenomenon of a fruitless, meaningless war to the Japanese government that had started it, as well as the men who put their allegiance to the emperor above the safety of their wives and children. Then t here was the Kwantung Army, which had shamelessly “betrayed the trust of the settlers.”86 In the narratives, there was undisguised anger at the Japanese men, as seen in Fujiwara’s seminal memoir, and this was where the civilian, gendered victimhood grew out of national victimhood. Although t here w ere no references, as t here w ere in defeated Germany, to men who silently looked on as Soviet soldiers took their wives away or to men who encouraged their women to go with the enemy to “sav[e] their own skins,”87 t here was righteous anger toward the men who were, albeit indirectly, responsible for the humiliating fate of the women and children. In the female-authored narratives of flight and repatriation from Manchuria, as in the case of German women who “invented themselves as both victims and heroines,”88 the Japanese w omen were the real heroines who crossed deserts and swam across rivers with their c hildren on their backs after the men had abandoned them to defend the empire’s lost cause. T hese stories centered first and foremost on the w omen and their world, counterposed to the world of men regardless of nationality. Often these men w ere the husbands who had been drafted against their w ill by the Kwantung Army and had readily heeded the emperor’s call. Other men were the group leaders (danchō), all of whom were male and who decided the fate of the group, often sacrificing individuals to save the whole.89 While many a memoir of Siberian captivity starts with the fall of Manchuria, that may be the only similarity that internee recollections have with civilian narratives. The events that surrendered IJA soldiers recount at the start of their journey to captivity are rarely described by civilian writers. The victimhood of over 600,000 young men sent to the Soviet camps from the same Manchurian cities and towns has been dissolved in the greater pool of civilian narratives. True, it was impossible for many civilian narrators to know the fate of these men: a fter all, the men had left Manchuria in Soviet cattle cars believing that they were being sent to Japan. Women—occupied first of all with the task of making it safely back to Japan, often with children or elderly relatives in tow—knew nothing about the fate of their male compatriots who had been captured by the Soviets, not to mention the ordinary soldiers who made up the majority of the internees. Yet the absence of the internees from repatriation narratives does not make the civilians the sole victims of the Manchurian debacle. To be sure, the emphasis on civilian
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suffering was not always a conscious choice of Japanese readers or interest groups, and it would be wrong to claim that their compatriots deliberately disregarded the victimhood of the Siberian internees. The latter, as w ill become clear below, w ere alienated from the mainstream Japanese society for a range of complex reasons. Nevertheless, the roots of the internment that could (and should) be traced to the Manchurian Empire were lost among the three general transformations in the narrative landscape of postwar Japan: the avoidance of the topic of the empire, the diversion of attention from the colonizing mission of the Kwantung Army and toward narratives of Japanese victimhood, and the prioritization of civilians in Manchurian victim narratives. These three interrelated processes, coupled with postwar and Cold War discourses that assigned various subversive identities to the returnees from the USSR, have distracted the collective gaze from the imperial beginnings of the internment. As Yukiko Koga argued, “Such portrayals of Manchuria effectively turned it into a land of Japanese suffering and victimhood, rather than the site of Japanese railway imperialism and settler colonialism that culminated in a formal puppet state and a full- fledged war. It was a process not unlike how the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed by the Allied occupation turned Japa nese imperialism into a story of Japanese victimhood.”90 In this transformation, civilians’ experiences took precedence over those of the former soldiers. As Lee Pennington notes in the example of disabled soldiers, “In postwar Japan, it was not disabled veterans but rather war w idows and war- bereaved families who came to command the national narrative of military sacrifice.”91 How the Manchurian narrative gave way to the Siberian narrative in internment memoirs—the latter branching out of the Manchukuo lore in a way distinct from civilian repatriation stories—is a significant transformation in itself. Moreover, the manner in which the Manchurian dream ended has been a source of controversy and speculation throughout the postwar period, adding more fuel to postwar allegations about the Kwantung Army’s disregard for the Japanese civilians and its own soldiers. Following the imperial broadcast announcing Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on 15 August, the Soviets disarmed Kwantung Army personnel and crushed the few groups that had continued their feeble resistance after the emperor’s call to lay their arms. On 19 August, a Kwantung Army del egation consisting of Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Hata Hikosaburō; Lieutenant Colonel Sejima Ry ū zō, a staff officer; Miyakawa Funao, the
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Japanese consul general in Harbin, who acted as an interpreter; and two other officers w ere put in a Soviet transport plane that took off from the Harbin airfield. About two hours later, it landed in the small settlement of Zharikovo in the USSR’s Maritime Province, a few kilometers from the Soviet-Manchukuo border. Sejima and his companions believed that they had come to Zharikovo to negotiate the end of hostilities with the Soviet Far Eastern Command, and a day before beginning their journey, they had drafted the Kwantung Army’s position in negotiations. In their draft, the Japanese demanded that the Soviet side (1) immediately stop all military engagements, (2) ensure the protection and repatriation of Japanese civilians in Manchuria, (3) repatriate Kwantung Army serv icemen, and (4) respect the dignity of the Japanese officers (for example, by letting them keep their swords while surrendering other weapons). However, the new realities were soon made starkly clear to the delegation, as Sejima recounted in his memoir. In Zharikovo, the Japanese delegation had been expected by the military leaders of the Soviet Far Eastern Command: Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevskii, the commander of the Manchurian offensive; Marshals Rodion Malinovskii and Kirill Meretskov; Marshal of Aviation Aleksandr Novikov; and the commander of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, Admiral Ivan Yumashev. In a telling show of power, the five marshals did not bother to stand up when Hata, Sejima, and Miyakawa entered the room, so the Japanese delegation started the “negotiations” on their feet. Vasilevskii was polite and attentive, but the whole meeting was more an occasion of “the victors instructing the vanquished, rather than negotiations,” as Sejima soon realized.92 Writing about the same meeting, Vasilevskii was surprised by the Japanese officers’ appearance, noting wryly in his memoir: “Hata and his companions looked despondent. No trace was left of the ‘samurai’ self-confidence. The haughty masters of Manchuria of yesteryear behaved like sacrificial lambs, nodding slavishly at our every word. I could see they were psychologically broken.”93 Three days later came Stalin’s secret order to intern half a million Japa nese soldiers in the Soviet camps. The internment started soon afterward, and so did the rumors about the secret agenda of the Zharikovo meeting. According to one conspiracy theory, the Soviets and the Japanese reached a “secret agreement” (mitsuyaku) a fter the Japanese delegation allegedly revived the offer of Japanese soldiers as a workforce originally prepared for the Soviet Union by Prince Konoe Fumimaro’s aborted July 1945 mission to Moscow.94 Proponents of this conspiracy theory made Sejima responsible
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for offering the Japanese soldiers as hostages to the enemy and thus bringing about the Siberian Internment, for the s imple reason that the text of the “offer” was in his handwriting. For the rest of his life, Sejima went out of his way to deny this allegation—both in his autobiography and in interviews with major periodicals.95 W hether it was true or not, this conspiracy theory did nothing to ease the deep antipathy t oward the Kwantung Army— and the military in general—among the general Japanese public, an antipathy that both originated from and informed the postwar narratives of victimhood. The Siberian Internment had begun with the Kwantung Army’s shameful defeat and was a direct outcome of a policy of imperialist expansion. ■ ■ ■
The Japanese narratives of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the accounts of the Siberian Internment contributed to the overall consensus about Japan’s role in the war, established during the Occupation years under the aegis of the GHQ and the fledgling Japanese government of Yoshida Shigeru.96 This contribution is most conspicuous in victim narratives, for in the encounter with the Soviet Union, Japan was the victim par excellence. Unlike in the narratives of Japanese conduct in China or Southeast Asia, here Japan was the injured party and the USSR the sole perpetrator. Along with the stories of victimization at the hands of the United States (in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Tokyo air raids), t hese experiences formed a seminal body of narratives and cultural references that were incorporated into the postwar “foundational narrative,” through which “Japanese society rendered its traumatic experiences of the war comprehensible through narrative devices that downplayed their disruptive effects on Japan’s history.”97 In contrast, the hierarchy of varying victimhoods dictated that, as seen above, the narratives of victimhood at Soviet hands became secondary to the stories of nuclear suffering, and the suffering of the civilians in the Soviet invasion of Manchukuo took precedence over that of the soldiers who found themselves in Siberian captivity. Put simply, in the postwar processes of rewriting the war, the United States was the more familiar and preferred enemy. Despite the enduring ill feeling toward the militarists who had pushed Japan into the abyss of war, destruction, and humiliation, the unfulfilled Manchurian dream was not fully excised from the Japanese public memory. On the contrary, as the memories of frenzied flight from the e nemy that
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raped, killed, and looted subsided in popular memory in later postwar de cades, the brief Japanese occupation of the Chinese mainland became a nostalgic, idyllic story of lost opportunity. In numerous cultural and literary depictions, as in tales with unhappy endings, Manchukuo acquired an exotic air of a lost paradise. Interestingly, the dream of Manchukuo was sterilized during the postwar period by separating it from the bitter stories of its—and empire’s—end. The paradise on earth had turned into hell when the Soviets came rushing across the border. But despite the popularization of the vivid narratives of an inferno, the tales of paradise did not disappear.98 What was the secret of this endurance, this persisting narrative of a lost dream? As I see it, the memory of Manchukuo has been kept alive thanks to its idealization: the sincere belief of the p eople who built the colony that Manchukuo was not a utopia, but rather a not-so-distant reality, has been kept alive even today by citizens’ groups.99 In this idealized history, Japan— Asia’s newest empire—could build an ideal country. This history’s survival was demonstrated when, more than two decades after the empire’s demise, two people who had played important roles in the establishment, planning, and governance of Manchukuo chose to title their joint memoir The Failure of the Ideal State: Truth about the Rise and Fall of Manchukuo. The authors were the familiar Furumi and Major General Katakura Tadashi, a prominent IJA officer who had led the Thirty-Third Army in 1944 but in his early career had served in the Kwantung Army under Ishiwara Kanji, the mastermind of the Manchurian Incident. In the first paragraph of his part of the book, Katakura lamented the disappearance of Manchukuo “as a nation” and claimed in all sincerity that its founding had “contributed to stability in East Asia and triggered the resolution of the nationalities problem in Asia and the world as a w hole.”100 Having spent a total of three decades away from Japan (1933–1963), including more than twenty years during which he lived in China as a statesman and prisoner, Furumi seemed unable to erase Manchuria from his memory, as the title of his book of recollections suggested.101 Unforgettable Manchukuo (Wasureenu manshūkoku) is filled with nostalgia for the lost paradise or ideal state. The same nostalgia is also clear in photographs of the young Furumi on various projects and locations, with fellow nation builders. Even his brief article on the last days of Manchukuo in the intellectual magazine The Literary Chronicles was written in the mood of poetic melancholia for the destruction of a state that he and his fellow Japanese
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civil servants had built with high hopes.102 Besides Furumi’s accounts, there are many memoirs in the natsukashii (nostalgic) genre authored by ordinary Japanese citizens, tourists, and settlers.103 Yet Furumi’s fascination with Manchuria is remarkable if one considers the fact that he also spent five years in a Khabarovsk camp as an internee and another thirteen years in the Fushun War Criminals Management Center in what is now Liaoning province in China, a prison he claimed to have helped build during his time in the Manchukuo government and which he joked he would have made more comfortable had he known he would end up in it one day.104 His memoirs are important in that they contain two sets of narratives that have largely developed separately during the postwar period: the Manchurian and Siberian accounts of suffering. And in Furumi’s work it is possible to see—besides the complex interactions between empire and subject, Manchukuo and home islands, and China and Japan— the spell the empire had cast on the Japanese collective mind that was strong enough to live for decades a fter its collapse. Tales of this lost dream, retold by prominent p eople and ordinary settlers alike, soothed the despair at the ignominy inflicted on the Japanese by the Soviets. The Siberian Internment, with its roots in Manchuria, was nevertheless excised from this dream because it encapsulated the shame of losing the war and falling captive to the enemy. Without understanding this magical dream, it is impossible to account for the rupture—neither temporal nor geographical, but imaginary— between Manchuria and Siberia.
C H A P T E R T HREE
BEDBUG COUNTRY CHRONICLES THE SOVIET UNION IN JAPANESE CAMP MEMOIRS
For Russian-language practice, I read a pamphlet titled Labor under Capitalism and Socialism. It claimed labor under capitalism was joyless and coercive, while socialist labor was delightful and creative. Under socialism there could be no forced labor. If that was true, I wondered, what should one call this labor of countless prisoners under the watch of guards with automatic r ifles? —Takasugi Ichirō, In the Shadow of the Northern Lights
What is known about the Siberian Internment today comes primarily from survivors’ accounts. In the decades following their return from the Soviet Union, many internees documented their struggles in Siberia and postwar Japan, producing more than two thousand individual accounts of the internment.1 Varying in length from page-long sketches in memoir collections to entire books, t hese testimonies form a trove of experiences of empire, war, and postwar captivity. They help re- create the internment through the eyes and in the words of those who survived it and thus reflect the image of the Soviet Union and its system of POW camps in early postwar Japan. While internee accounts are diverse and were written with varying aims in mind, their cumulative effect in postwar Japan has been to reaffirm Japanese national victimhood and—regardless of the original intentions of individual writers—to create or strengthen the image of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s to the early 1950s as treacherous, inhumane, and backward. This reimagining of Japan as a victim and of the USSR as the threat was in line with the broader remodeling of Japan as a US ally in the developing Cold War international system. 76
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An extensive reading of internees’ memoirs reveals the great diversity in their experiences in and impressions of the Soviet Union: not everyone played the victim card in their recollections. Therefore, the memoirs should be read with this diversity and complexity in mind. The internment accounts also vary according to when they w ere written. I distinguish three major periods, the earliest of which (1947–1957) roughly coincides with the internment itself. Memoirs from this period were committed to paper while still fresh in the writer’s memory, and their greatest value is in the immediacy lacking in later recollections. They are also less likely to carry influences of e ither the Soviet reeducation program or domestic Japanese ideas acquired a fter the writer’s repatriation. There are dozens of early recollections, with good examples being Futaba Kaname’s November 1947 Memories of a Siberian POW and Hashimoto Takuzō and Kimura Takao’s Praying to the Midnight Sun, which came out in March 1948.2 Takasugi Ichirō’s In the Shadow of the Northern Lights, cited in the epigraph above and perhaps the most popular internment memoir, also appeared in this period. The second period (between the late 1950s and the early 1980s) was longer and more barren. It coincides with the decreasing interest in the war and empire among the Japanese public during the decades of Japan’s high-speed economic growth and rising prosperity.3 Uchimura G ōsuke’s Japanese in Stalin’s Prisons is perhaps the most remarkable memoir to come out in this period; also memorable are the writings of Furumi Tadayuki, although t hose deal more with Manchuria than Siberia.4 The final and the most recent wave of memoirs started around the early 1980s, coinciding with the flood of testimonies of aging war veterans publicizing their experiences.5 This 1980s wave was augmented by the rising tide of historical and commemorative works in the early 1990s, enabled by the opening of Soviet-era archives after the USSR’s collapse. The archival windfall led to an expansion in the number of both memoirs and scholarly works, as the internees’ sacrifices finally emerged out of the shadow of the Cold War. The period also saw the popularization of extensive memoir collections: both the eight-volume Records of POW Experiences and the nineteen-volume section on Siberia in the Foundation for Peace collection trace their beginnings to the 1980s or early 1990s.6 I should briefly explain my approach to the formidable task of drawing meaningful conclusions from such a large body of accounts. The easy and effective solution for any historian facing such a task would be to concentrate
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on a few remarkable voices, produce broad generalizations, and claim that they apply to the w hole. The sample size should be small, for the larger the amount of material, the more difficult it would be to generalize. This approach has other merits: for example, it helps avoid overcomplicating the narrative or overloading it with loosely connected facts and interpretations. Its obvious merits notwithstanding, I do not use this approach, for the disadvantages of focusing on a few cases far outweigh the benefits of expediency. The chief victim of convenience is nuance, and nuance is central to the tasks at the heart of this book: to challenge the unifying primacy of nation-centered narratives and emphasize voices and exchanges that expose the often arbitrary nature of political, ideological, and other bound aries. In their multitude and diversity, the memoirs of Siberian internees demonstrate the multilevel nature of the internment (that is, its location both below and above the national level) and hence its potential to illuminate the transitions from empire to nation-state. Only by tuning in to the multitude of voices and allegiances—to humanity, literature, nature, and friendship—in internment accounts can we highlight, and challenge, the priority of the national community in contemporary history writing. Despite the ever-expanding nature of the task, therefore, I have tried to read and incorporate into this book as many diverse narratives as possible. Where relevant, I also cite memoirs by German POWs in the USSR to broaden the analysis and draw revealing comparisons. Over the past decade I have searched bookshops and libraries in Japan to locate and analyze over thirty book-length internment memoirs, in addition to hundreds of short accounts compiled into collections such as the abovementioned Foundation for Peace and the monumental Records of POW Experiences. While some of the best-known memoirs, such as Uchimura’s Japanese in Stalin’s Prisons and Takasugi’s In the Shadow of the Northern Lights, are featured prominently in this book, my aim is not to consciously generalize. If anything, it is the opposite: to demonstrate as far as possible the complexity and diversity of Japanese experiences in Soviet captivity. This reluctance to generalize is due less to any frustration at the impossibility of reading every internment memoir than it is to the realization that reading memoirs only to break them down into easy-to-digest messages amounts to misappropriation. A fter all, this is what the memoirs have been used for, when they w ere deemed useful, in postwar Japan: to reinforce political messages, legitimize nationalist views, or criticize communists or other rivals.7 The Siberian in-
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ternees’ writings deserve to be read in their own right, as a body of litera ture that provides insights into the intricate transitions in Japan in the early postwar period, the postwar reconstruction of the Soviet Union, and the new world order that took shape after WWII. Lifting the veil on this complexity, without any epistemological necessity to digest or dilute it, is as important as trying to portray the internment exclusively in familiar terms. Biases are inevitable in such an extensive body of writings, and I should mention two types here. First, memories and accounts of the internment were influenced by postrepatriation events the returnees experienced or witnessed. It is safe to say that all internee memoirs were written a fter repatriation: examples of smuggling notes out of the Soviet Union are so few that they are negligible.8 The enormous emotional and mnemonic baggage of captivity had to be transported to Japan entirely in internees’ heads, the only place out of reach of the Soviet officers who thoroughly frisked every Japanese before repatriation and the Allied officials who searched them upon their return to occupied Japan. The memoirs were thus written solely from memory, from a temporal distance that spanned anything from weeks or months to years and even decades. Few memoirists decided to put pen to paper immediately a fter their return, and not all who recorded their memories made them public. We should therefore consider the possibility of unconscious remodeling of internee memories. Contingent on when they were written, the accounts—stories that contain impressions about and perceptions of the Soviet Union and its p eople, political system, or ideology— inevitably were affected by the new circumstances the authors faced in Japan. This resulted in bias that is hard to measure and may not always have been intentional, and perhaps is related to the better-studied phenomenon of “weathering (fū ka) of memories.” 9 As the internment grew distant in memory, the line between original recollections and subsequent additions to them became more blurred under the influence of media and public opinion. Interestingly, this weathering also resulted in the softening of initial attitudes and emotions. Kondō Takeo, a former IJA officer, used a Japa nese proverb that can be literally translated as “once it passes your throat, you forget its hotness” to describe how with time, the hardships of the past lose their viciousness in memory and even turn into nostalgic recollections.10 Writing an afterword to his memoir a mere six years after its completion, Itō Masao also expressed surprise that all that remained in his memory of his captivity was nostalgia.11
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Another type of bias resulted more from external factors—the realities of postwar society—than the unconscious weathering of the survivors’ memories. We can perhaps describe it using the term “bandwagon effect” borrowed from social psychology.12 After returning from the USSR, many repatriates came under suspicion as potential troublemakers in the recovering and stabilizing Japanese society. Thus, they had to be sensitive to the spirit of the times—not least because many felt out of step with Japan’s postwar society. Eager to reassure their readers that they w ere loyal Japa nese citizens like everybody else, many jumped on the bandwagon of mainstream ideas and attitudes and edited their memories and testimonies accordingly. One example of an omission concerns memoirists who had shown interest in communist ideology in the camps but skirted around the subject in their postrepatriation accounts. The diversity and richness of the internment narratives are also evident in the fact that the memoirs are rarely only about the authors’ Soviet captivities. Despite the overwhelming focus on suffering—to the extent that the memoirs might be collectively referred to as a “literature of hardship”— they are not simply accounts of deprivations visited upon and relevant only to a specific group of survivors. They contain perceptive details on the momentous experiences of the broader Japanese society. Instead of condensing the memoirs into simplistic tropes, I have therefore chosen to highlight several important themes that are prominent in internment memoirs but do not exhaust the diversity and complexity of the experiences and encounters they contain. Each of these themes aroused strong and contradictory emotions in the writer, and their study may open a window into the diverse and unique experiences of the Siberian internees before, during, and after their Soviet detainment. Their study may also help shift the focus from the preoccupation with victimhood and suffering of defeated soldiers to the transformations they experienced, witnessed, and participated in while in foreign captivity and upon returning to Japan. T hese themes are central not only for the history of the internment but also for the history of the new Japan, the national community that was reshaped according to postwar realities—a reshaping in which the Soviet Union played an often-neglected role. The following sections deal with defeat and deception, as well as the trinity of cold, hunger, and labor that make up the so-called Siberian trinity of suffering. To challenge the popular perception that the internment was only about suffering, injustices, and deprivation, I also include a discussion on alternative experiences in the USSR.
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DEFEAT
The memoirs of the Siberian Internment are first of all narratives of the defeat and humiliation of a proud army. This once-vaunted army had become dilapidated by the time of the brief Soviet-Japanese War of 1945, and the proud Japanese nation had come close to despair toward the end of World War II. But t hose feelings had for the most part remained u nder the surface. The suddenness, harshness, and brutality of defeat at the hands of the Soviets came as a shock to the memoirists, as it did for the broader Japa nese nation. The Japanese soldiers and civilians in Manchukuo, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands were the first to face the Soviet troops and bear the brunt of their cruelty. As a result, the shock and humiliation of these Japanese were particularly acute. Their impressions and memories of defeat, as documented by the former IJA serv icemen about to start their captivity in the Soviet camps, are revealing about the internees’ unsettled state of mind. The ignominy of surrender was partly a product of ingrained military tradition that considered it disgraceful to be captured alive by the e nemy. The Field Serv ice Code stated: “Meet the expectations of your f amily and home community by making effort upon effort, always mindful of the honour of your name. If alive, do not suffer the disgrace of becoming a prisoner; in death, do not leave b ehind a name soiled by misdeeds.”13 Lee Pennington has described the code as “a reworking of bushido based on a romanticized interpretation of the relationship that was said to have existed between samurai and their lords.”14 Yet besides loyalty to the emperor and his commanders, the code instructed the soldier to remember his filial responsibility not to disgrace his family name by falling captive. This obligation goes a long way to explain why, when faced with the moment of truth, many commanders and soldiers chose to continue fighting despite the clear prospect of annihilation at the hands of a superior e nemy. Many units kept up their dogged resistance against the Soviets even after the 17 August 1945 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors to lay down their arms, and fought well into the first days of September. Resistance continued also because many soldiers remained unaware of Japan’s defeat: despite the quickness with which their fates had been decided, the news of Japan’s surrender took time to reach the battlefield. For example, the memoirist Owada Mitsu found out about the defeat only on 18 August, as he recounted in a chapter titled “What? Japan Lost?!” He wrote, “The day we jumped u nder Soviet tanks
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with bombs tied to our shoulders, when many soldiers became human bullets in the b attle—that day, the 15th of August, was in Japan the day of accepting the Potsdam Declaration, the day of the Imperial Broadcast, the day Japan welcomed defeat.”15 Following the surrender, the soldiers experienced the ignominy of being imprisoned for months a fter their defeat. Thus, on the evening of 23 March 1946, half a year a fter being captured by the Soviets, Lieutenant General Uemura Mikio, the former commander of the Fourth Army, hanged himself in his room in Camp No. 45 in Khabarovsk. He had used a brief window of solitude when his roommates had left the room for a walk. In his suicide note, Uemura wrote: “When I think about the present condition of our motherland, of the residents in Manchuria and my own family, as a former officer I feel a genuine sense of responsibility, and cannot bear the shame. I present h ere my profound apologies. Better to die in apology before the empire than to live on and increase the shame.”16 Uemura’s suicide was reported directly to Iosif Stalin by Interior Minister Sergei Kruglov. Even those internees who survived due to circumstances beyond their control, and who thus could not be accused of cowardice, felt the humiliation attached to their POW status. The emperor’s promise that he did not view surrendered Japanese serv icemen as POWs was no doubt made to achieve a quick end to hostilities and went a long way to soften the soldiers’ shame. Another emotion that many defeated serv icemen reported was stupefaction at the speed with which the Soviets had defeated the IJA. The Soviets’ progress south had been so quick that before many Japanese ser vicemen had any chance to confront Red Army troops, the fate of Manchuria had been sealed. The astounding turn that events took created apprehension and uncertainty among the internees. Ōki Tatsuji described his doubts about defeat even after he had received the imperial orders to end the hostilities: “Everybody knew the war was over, but no one had yet dared to use the words ‘we lost.’ Maybe this was because no sooner had the Soviets entered the war than the war had ended. We had traversed the space between life and death so quickly.”17 As the realization of inevitable defeat dawned on them, a sense of resignation took the place of the uncertainty, fear, and shame that had preyed on the minds of the former serv icemen until then. With their fate out of their hands, many accepted defeat passively, sometimes even meekly. Some wrote about feeling relieved that the war had finally ended and that they would now be able to return home. Many described the subsequent events—
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their disarmament by the victorious enemies who casually humiliated them and looted their possessions; the long marches; the sorrowful sights of Japanese civilians, especially women, disgraced by the Red Army troops; and the jubilation of the locals at the Japanese defeat—w ith the cool detachment of p eople who had given up all hope and determination to change their fate. Once again, Ōki clearly expressed the fatalism and despair of a disarmed and pillaged soldier: Our personal effects all taken, we stand fully disarmed, our shabby army uniforms our only possessions. Without our insignia, we cut the figures of vagabonds lined up and moving in a long procession, spurred on by the bayonets of Soviet soldiers. They frequently yell Skorei! Davai! [Faster! Move it!], pressing us on. We walk along with tanks and the groups of Soviet troops that pass one after another. Through the forlorn Manchurian expanses where the war has ceased the busy movement of people continues. The Manchus greet the Soviet troops with jubilation. Soviet w omen officers pass by, their chests puffed up with pride. Amid all this, like a bunch of beggars, a long line of Japanese soldiers hobbles on.18
This fatalistic attitude is also evident in German memoirs of defeat. The day he learned about the Third Reich’s fall, Captain Adelbert Holl, who by then had been a POW for over two years, wrote: “What we experience here is criminally nonsensical and yet we must remain silent. Germany has capitulated unconditionally and the Russians keep us permanently aware of it. For me, it seems pointless d oing anything against it.”19 Yet accepting defeat was not always a passive act, as we see in Kondō’s experiences. A graduate of the Tokyo School of Foreign Studies, where he had majored in Russian, Kondō had had a rich experience in intelligence work. He was initially attached to the Harbin Special Organization (Harubin tokumu kikan), which gathered intelligence on the Soviet Union, and later worked as an instructor at the IJA’s elite Nakano Intelligence School. On 15 August 1945, he found himself in Bei’an (now Heilongjiang province), China, as the commander of the 386th Infantry Regiment. Besides his own men, Kondō had under his command more than five thousand Japanese settlers who had escaped from northern areas in the face of Soviet invasion. Because he felt responsible for the lives of these Japanese, Kondō decided to dispatch a messenger to the oncoming Soviet troops to make clear that his regiment would respect the imperial order to end hostilities. He made this decision in spite of fierce opposition from several local commanders who
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wanted to meet the Red Army with fire. With no time to find a messenger and an interpreter, Kondō, who spoke fluent Russian, carried the message himself, accompanied by the head of the local police department and two soldiers.20 As this episode demonstrates, t here was hardly a unified or common experience of defeat: depending on the circumstances, commanders and their soldiers faced surrender in varying ways. While the chaos created by defeat inspired some commanders to fight on to the b itter end, o thers retained a cool head, realizing that the war was lost, and took steps to limit the damage to their men or civilians u nder their protection. The plight of high-ranking civilians shows how defeat meant different things to various groups of Japanese. Furumi’s experiences, in particular, are revealing of a leading statesman’s emotions at the empire’s demise, as well as of his attitude t oward the Soviet officers and soldiers. Furumi wrote that the Soviet officers who came to arrest him soon turned the occasion into open looting, marching off with his “camera, sewing machine, and gramophone.”21 He condescendingly wrote about the Soviets’ proclivity to appropriate, by deception or force, the personal belongings of their captives: “Whether this is b ecause of the hardships of the wartime or not, t here is no doubt that the standard of living of the Soviets is extremely low.” Yet clearly more than poverty was involved. Furumi knew that the Soviets had all received “propaganda education,” according to which all Japanese were “bourgeois and capitalist, whose belongings could be taken away with impunity.”22 The looting was not confined to high-ranking civilians’ possessions. More than simply a humiliating experience for an officer, the procedure of disarmament was almost always accompanied by the looting of personal effects. This plunder was sometimes dressed up as an authorized seizure of effects. The editors of a recent collection of Soviet archival documents on the Siberian Internment state, dryly and somewhat apologetically: “In ‘army reception points for POWs’ [in Manchuria] NKVD organs confiscated from the POWs all documents, diaries, and other records, as well as personal effects. These seizures were formally documented through appropriate deeds, with attached lists of POWs and information on what exactly was confiscated from whom.”23 The Japanese, in contrast, rarely mention any formal procedures. Uchimura wrote about the Soviet officer in charge of searching his belongings, who ordered a guard to cut the buttons off Uchimura’s army uniform “because the buttons of the Japanese Army uniforms are made of metal.”24 Futaba described the process in detail:
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It was our turn to be disarmed. As we crossed an earth-paved bridge and passed through an opening in a mud wall, I saw a mountain of r ifles, sabers, light machine guns, heavy machine guns, and swords. I took my sword off my belt and threw it on the pile, when the Soviet soldier keeping guard started a body check. First, he rolled up the left sleeve of my uniform. He was looking for a wristwatch. He wasn’t so thorough with the other parts of my body; he was just checking the places where the watch might be. He also checked the upper pockets of my shirt; fountain pens were often found in such pockets. I’d hidden my watch inside my cap, so that was saved, but lost the silver chain attached to my wallet.25
The memoirists were aware that the tendency to loot was not confined to individuals. The Soviet state had demonstrated a brazen readiness to confiscate whatever could be taken from the defeated and the occupied. Exactly a week after signing the 23 August 1945 order to transport Japanese captive servicemen to the USSR, Stalin ordered the establishment of the unapologetically titled “Committee on Exporting Trophy Equipment from Manchuria.”26 Alongside the cattle cars that moved humans, many cars loaded with inanimate war booty also traveled into the USSR from Manchuria— just like the many trains that had been used to transport trophies of the Soviet-German War from Central and Eastern Europe to the USSR.27 Stalin’s committee had “equipment” in its name, yet the Soviets did more than simply dismantle the industrial apparatus of Japan’s informal colony. They also emptied warehouses of food, clothing, and anything else that could be put to use in rebuilding the Soviet economy or, as we see below, to provide food or clothing for Japanese captives. Observant memoirists saw plenty of signs of this state-scale looting. Transported to a hospital in Birobidzhan— the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region, in the Soviet Far East—Ōki found German letters on his hospital bed. Surprised, he wondered if the Soviets had really taken hospital beds from Germany as war trophies, transporting them thousands of kilometers to the Far East. German memoirs are also revealing about the extent to which the Soviet authorities w ere ready to go in scavenging anything of use from defeated or occupied territories. Holl recounted with amusement that he and his compatriots once saw a Russian w oman who passed their worksite with a child in her arms. The w oman was wearing a dress “sewn together from the curtains of a German Reichsbahn railway coach.” Holl and the other Germans remembered the pride with which the woman walked past, wearing a dress
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with the railway company insignia.28 Clearly, not everything of foreign origin witnessed by the memoirists had been looted: some of the equipment and facilities had been sent to the Soviet Union by the Allies in the form of lend-lease aid.29 Ōki remembered: “We were sheltered in makeshift quarters—a tent with shelf-like beds in them. T hese tents had inscriptions ‘Made in the USA’ in English. From this, I imagined how scarce the Soviets’ resources were.”30 This poverty and scarcity, along with the brazen normality of looting and stealing on all levels, served to reinforce the unsavory characteristics attached to the Soviet Union. Yet as Ōki, Futaba, and other disarmed officers and soldiers soon found out, the humiliation of defeat, disarmament, and looting was just a start. Once the reality of captivity in Soviet hands had sunk in, many memoirists viewed the internment as one long and illegal act of deception, injustice, and treachery committed by the USSR.
DECEPTION AND INJUSTICE
For many camp memoirists, the internment started with a lie. Lying was a dominant characteristic (tokuchō) of the Soviets, they soon realized, and it was most conspicuous among army commanders, party bureaucrats, camp wardens, and political officers. Told by the Soviets that they were on the way to Japan, the memoirists soon discovered that their journeys would end instead in Siberia. Satō Kashio remembered that when their freight train had reached Lake Baikal, many of his fellow travelers thought it was the Sea of Japan: their superior officer had to spoil the excitement by telling them it was not.31 Many internees fell for the Soviets’ tricks. So ubiquitous are accounts of the deception about being promised repatriation but ending up in Soviet captivity that it received a specific name: Tokyo damoi. This phrase literally means “home, to Tokyo,” and apparently it conveys the words that Soviet officers or guards uttered to trick the Japanese onto the trains to avoid any unwanted resistance. One of the memoir collections, Returning Alive to the Motherland, even contains a separate section with the title “Tricked by the Promise of Damoi” (Damoi ni damasarete).32 Iitsuka Toshio remembered that the railroad carriages in which he and other internees left Mudanjiang, a town in northeastern China, “did not have windows and it was pitch dark and suffocating inside, but b ecause 33 I thought I was g oing back to Japan, it did not bother me.” Niibori Jūzō,
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who was also captured at Mudanjiang, remembered that the soldiers in his echelon w ere forced to march east for eleven days u ntil they reached Vladivostok, across the Soviet border, where they were told that they would sail to Japan: “When we learned that the following day we would reach Vladivostok, everyone forgot the terrible march of the previous days and was jumping with joy.” The next morning, following roll call, they saw their commander, Major Yamazaki, surrounded by Soviet officers. Yamazaki’s face betrayed distress, and his prized Japanese officer’s sword, which normally hung from his b elt, was missing. He stood alert next to the interpreter, ready to receive instructions from the Soviet side. The Soviet camp warden said something in Russian, and the interpreter whispered the translation into Yamazaki’s ear. A shadow crossed the Japanese officer’s face, he drew a long breath, and said: “We have all become prisoners of war. This place is a camp. From now on we w ill have to work here, e very one of us. Until when, I don’t know. I myself w ill be working. I’m told if our work is good, the pay w ill also be good. . . . I want every one of you to work. Some day we w ill be able to return home.”34 A similar account was given by Yokoyama Shūdō, who later became chairman of the Japan-Russia Friendship Association. Yokoyama’s battalion commander addressed his men with the following words, when they realized they had been deceived by the Soviets: “We have been fooled by Tokyo damoi into this forced labor camp. I don’t know how many years w e’ll have to toil h ere. But both the Japanese government and the countries of the world know that the Japanese soldiers in Manchuria have been interned. Hence, one day we w ill surely be able to return. But w ill our bodies be strong enough u ntil that day? That is my biggest worry.”35 A remarkable example of Soviet deception was documented by Takura Hachirō in his memoir, Chita: 640 Days in Siberia. Takura was a high- ranking official at the time of Japan’s defeat, serving as vice director of the Manchukuo Department of Communications (Manshūkoku kōtsū bu). On 1 October 1945, three Soviet officers visited Takura’s house and instructed him to prepare for a journey to “Chita or Moscow” with a group of Manchukuo ministers and generals. The trip was to last two to three months. This left Takura befuddled, but he started making preparations. “Even if this were not a joke,” he wrote, “and if we really were headed for the Soviet capital of Moscow, then, I thought, I should not disgrace my nation with my shabby appearance. So I prepared my best t hings for the trip: a suit bought in London, a trunk also purchased during overseas travel long ago,
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my fur coat and warm tall boots, a warm hat.” Then, Takura reasoned that if he w ere to be g oing on such a long journey, he should take with him some necessary items such as soap, a towel, toilet paper, medicines, a notebook, and a safety razor. “In Moscow,” he thought, “I would probably stay in a h otel room, though perhaps not a first-class one. The journey would be made either in an airplane, or in a sleeping car of a train.”36 Worried, Takura approached the Soviet security serv ices officer, who reassured him that they would be taking a train. When it came to boarding the train, however, Takura’s hopes were crushed. On 23 October, he was put in the back of a dark cattle car, while in the front Soviet soldiers loaded White Russians arrested in Manchuria. Takura later learned the White Russians had already been tried, and some had received death sentences. With new passengers entering the car, the seating space became tighter: twenty people sat in an area of about five tsubo, or around seventeen square meters in total, with each person allowed half a tatami—less than one square meter. When it came to sleeping, the lack of space became excruciatingly obvious. Takura described the sleeping arrangements poetically, writing that the passengers had to sleep “sideways as slices of sea bream and tuna lie together in a bowl of sashimi.” He acknowledged his initial delusion, confessing, “I was so naive . . . I wouldn’t have minded taking the train but had never imagined I’d be put in a car with convicts on death row.”37 Such quotidian acts of deception by the Soviets w ere received with contempt, condescension, or pity, and they contributed to the popular image of the USSR as a lawless, chaotic, and backward nation with no respect for law and capable of any injustice. Such indignation and mistrust w ere most evident in the preoccupation among Japanese writers—memoirists and historians alike—w ith the Soviet capacity for betrayal epitomized by their most treacherous attack on Japan in August 1945, when the neutrality pact between the two nations, first signed in April 1941, was still in force. That attack, of course, was what enabled the Soviets to intern the Japanese ser vicemen and civilians in their camps. Seen as an act of backstabbing, the attack contributed to the resentment toward the USSR in early postwar Japan that is best captured in the phrase kajiba dorobō (literally meaning “a thief who steals from a house on fire”). The illegal Siberian Internment— with the Japanese former serv icemen taken away a fter they had laid down their arms—is yet another injustice that was added to the betrayal of the invasion, which collectively formed the core of the Japanese national consensus on the Soviet-Japanese War, what can be called the “illegality dis-
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course.” While t here is no denying the internment’s illegal nature, the illegality discourse is a prime example of the selective application of international law to situations in which the victim is Japan. Granted, not every internment memoir adopts the same attitude. Nevertheless, even without the direct approval or participation of the memoirists, their testimonies provided a pool of facts that came in handy in the construction of the Soviet image in postwar Japan. Alongside claims of illegality, the most disturbing and memorable stories that have joined the canon of Japanese victimhood concerned bodily experiences. Among t hese, narratives of the so-called Siberian trinity of suffering—cold, hunger, and hard labor—form the core of the literature of hardship.
THE SIBERIAN TRINITY OF SUFFERING
Winter came early to the climatic zones where most of the l abor camps with Japanese internees w ere located. As a result, in an order issued on 1 October 1947, for example, Interior Minister Kruglov instructed his subordinates “to equip the train carriages with stoves (pech’) and provide them with fuel for the w hole duration of transportation . . . in order to prevent any deterioration in the physical condition and mortality rates among the Japanese POWs.”38 Remarkably, this order was issued with regard to the Japanese internees’ transportation from the USSR, from which it is easy to conclude that when they w ere transported into the Soviet Union two years before, there was neither heating nor fuel in the freight trains—and many of the Japanese w ere still on the way to their camps as late as November or December 1945, when temperatures in Siberia and the Far East often fell below 0 ˚C. Shimada Shirō, a former serv iceman, was on a month-long journey to a camp near the town of Rada, in the European part of Russia, when the cold caught up with his train as it reached Lake Baikal. The temperatures were below -30˚C, the lake was frozen like a big mirror, and those Japanese who were careless enough to grab the metal handrails in the train carriages with their bare hands lost the skin off their palms.39 Kurihara Yasuyo, interned in Zabaykalski Territory, was entrusted with fetching water for his camp. He remembered his surprise when in late October he saw that the ice on the river was already so solid that it could hold the weight of trucks.40 Tsuchibashi Haruyoshi remembered winter nights
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Figure 3.1. Entrance to Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka. GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
so cold that the internees could barely sleep. Due to heightened blood circulation in their bodies caused by the cold, internees had to urinate frequently during the course of one night. Latrines were often some distance from the barracks, and g oing outside for even a few minutes was torture. Moreover, in many barracks the internees slept close together in part to keep warm, but also because the barracks were often overcrowded. When an internee came back from the latrine, therefore, his spot among the bodies would usually have disappeared: t hose who had been sleeping at his sides would have simply moved their bodies into the warmed space.41 Work was canceled when the temperature fell below -35ºC, but the food given each internee daily consisted of only three potatoes.42 In a camp where Inomata Kunio worked as an infirmary attendant, his duties included burying the frozen bodies of his dead comrades in a graveyard outside the camp. Both the bodies and the earth were frozen solid, and even when Inomata made a big fire to thaw the earth before starting to dig, it was difficult to go deeper than half a meter. “Even if we buried them properly, joining our hands in prayer, we could only do as much as cover them with earth,” remembered Inomata. At night, inmates heard the howls of wolves, and bodies would be found scattered here and there in the morning.43
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Ubiquitous in memoirs are accounts of inconceivably low temperatures in Siberia. Often the memoirs use round figures such as “-40˚C,” “-50˚C,” or even lower. In the words of Seno Osamu, “-50˚C” was “a cold beyond any description. Even if you d on’t do anything, your mouth becomes tight and the teeth hurt. If you stay for a bit longer outside, bits of your exposed skin start freezing.” 44 Hashimoto and Kimura, interned in a camp near Biisk in Altai Territory, wrote in their memoir, Praying to the Midnight Sun, that they saw the mercury in a thermometer fall below the minimum mark of -60˚C as they w ere constructing a bridge across the Ob’ River. “If there was a lower mark on the thermometer, the mercury would probably go down all the way to -70˚C,” they wrote.45 In reality, the Soviet camps with Japanese internees were scattered across the vast territory of the USSR, in various climatic zones and surroundings. Weather conditions, therefore, were diverse. There were mining camps built in inhospitable northern expanses such as Norilsk and Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle, where temperatures in winter regularly fell below -50˚C. In contrast, there were also Central Asian camps, where summer temperatures could rise as high as +40 ˚C and the winters w ere as mild as in Japan. Needless to say, the impact of the weather on the well-being and morale of the internees was not always and only dependent on outdoor temperatures. Moreover, the winter of 1945–1946 was one of the harshest on record in Russia, and many of the camps designated for interning the newly arriving Japanese lacked heating. For t hese reasons, extreme cold became a central theme in postwar internment narratives and, through them, in the minds of the wider Japanese public, while Siberia became an easy cliché for all that was bad in the USSR. This cliché is used frequently even today, as seen in the name of a 2014 exhibition of internment paintings at Tokyo’s Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates (Heiwa Kinen Tenji Shiryōkan) titled Painting Siberia: The Land of Extreme Cold. In the harsh surroundings of the Siberian camps, nourishment was a matter of life and death. The relationship of the memoirists to food is a peculiar one: it is reflected in the gusto with which they recount their strug gles with their fare, or, rather, the lack thereof. At times of distress, fatigue, and despair, at the end of a long and hard day working in the cold, food was the only t hing to look forward to, as many a memoirist remembered. In a bout of nostalgia for his motherland, Yoshida, the protagonist of the 1952 propaganda film I Was a Prisoner in Siberia, spoke about the taste of miso soup in the same breath as he recalled the silhouette of his beloved mother
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in front of his eyes.46 Food was also a major source of indignation about the treatment afforded to the internees by the Soviet Union, for both the internees and their families in Japan. And almost all of the best moments of internees’ lives were related to having good—or merely sufficient—food. For example, Nakaya Masataka remembered how his fellow Japanese internees started singing all of a sudden a fter eating their fill of boiled potatoes—the result of an act of kindness from an old Russian warehouse watchman who saw that they w ere hungry and let them eat to their hearts’ content from the potatoes they had come to transport from the warehouse to the camp.47 Iitsuka remembered baring his buttocks in an outdoor latrine in temperatures as low as -40˚C several times a night when he was suffering from diarrhea after eating badly burned bread. Food, he wrote, “was the foremost matter of concern of our POW lives in Siberia”: b ecause both the quality and quantity of food w ere extremely poor, the internees ate “whatever they could find.” 48 Many died from eating poisonous mushrooms and herbs. Katō Ky ūzō, a celebrated archaeologist in later life, remembered a private first class at a worksite near Bratsk who “suddenly turned blue in the face and collapsed, with white foam on his lips.” Two doctors (one Japanese and one Soviet) puzzled over his illness until they found in his pocket a white shoot from a poisonous plant.49 In many camps, therefore, authorities had to ban the gathering of wild foodstuffs. In Iitsuka’s camp, each internee had a daily ration of a hundred grams of meat, yet it was rarely meat that they fished out of their soup bowls: “It was goats’ feet, hooves, [fragments of animal] heads chopped up with an axe. Imagine the genuine surprise of somebody who found a goat’s eyeball in his soup.”50 Surprised or not, t hose who found animal eyeballs could hardly have complained. Water was in short supply, too. Having finished the bowl of hot w ater distributed as part of the evening meal, Iitsuka had to scrape ice out of a frozen well with a bowl tied to a pole or fill his bowl with snow on the way back from work and melt it for drinking.51 Takura wrote how scarce water was on the train en route to Siberia: “They gave us each a small can of tuna flakes that looked like they were taken from the Kwantung Army ware houses. They w ere terribly salty. T here was no hot w ater or tea, only cold water in a bucket, but the White Russian who had been our translator took the bucket first and when he returned it there was less than the third of the water left. There were no cups for drinking the water either, so we drank from an empty tuna can, passing it around.”52
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Figure 3.2. Internees preparing food at Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka. GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
Continued scarcity of food was especially prevalent during the first year of the internment. The eminent Japanese sociologist Oguma Eiji recorded the recollections of his father, Kenji, about food in the first internment winter: For the first two months or so in the camp, the prisoners mostly ate thin kasha (porridge) made with sorghum. . . . In the following year they would occasionally have a stew of mixed grains with salt-cured fish, or soup using canned corned beef sent as foreign aid to the Soviet Union by the Americans, but during the first winter t here was nothing like that. Around the beginning of 1946, in addition to the breakfast and dinner porridge they began to be issued a ration of black bread to eat at lunch on their work details.53
The food situation inevitably influenced the internees’ mental state. For those who did not stay in the USSR long enough to witness the improvement in provisions around 1947, and who had to endure the additional discomfort of living in badly furnished barracks and witnessing the deaths of fellow captives, this traumatic state of mind became their prevalent memory of the internment. Kitagawa Nagayoshi lamented in his memoir: “When
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starving, a h uman being becomes an animal. Is it really possible [for a human] to become so decadent?”54 Hunger sometimes led to humiliation. Komatsuzaki Risaku, a contributor to the Returning Alive to the Motherland collection, remembered how the Uzbek w omen at a Tashkent worksite laughed at the Japanese internees. The internees were so hungry that they could not keep pace even with w omen—a blow to their pride as men— because their daily ration consisted of “thin soup and a slice of black bread.”55 Takahashi Takao, an internee from Iwate Prefecture, started his account titled “Mistaking Horse Dung for Potatoes” by claiming that while the Soviet Union had plundered all the rice, wheat, and sorghum it could find in Manchuria, the food given to the Japanese captives was barely enough to keep them alive. The daily ration of black bread was issued in the morning, and Takahashi, like many o thers, ate it all in one sitting because he was unable to appease his empty stomach otherw ise. It was also safer to eat the bread while you had it, rather than risk having it stolen. When lunchtime came, however, he and his fellow internees, tortured by hunger, collected pine bark and boiled it to make thin “soup.” Having savored what remained of his daily ration by eating it in tiny portions, Takahashi would fall asleep dreaming of the rice cakes his mother made back home. On the way to and from work, he would keep his eyes on the road, constantly searching for something that could be eaten. This is how he once mistook horse dung for potatoes. Even a fter realizing his m istake, he did not give up and decided to at least pick the undigested grains of wheat from the dung.56 Murata Jinsaku also remembered his fellow POWs stealing grain from a stable and, like Takahashi, washing grains out of horse dung to eat.57 While many internees, like Takahashi, complained about the scarcity of food, another pervasive grievance was the lack of variety in the diet. In a memoir titled “The Years I Was Treated like an Animal,” Tsuchibashi, interned in a coal-mining camp in Suchan, a town near Vladivostok, remembered that his diet had consisted of only four main ingredients: wild oats (karasumugi), potatoes, sorghum (kaoliang), and thin vegetable soup. This might sound like quite a variety to some internees, except that Tsuchibashi and his campmates never ate these foods all together: at any given meal, only one of the ingredients would be served, based on availability. Sekine Tadayoshi, who was interned near Chita, told me in an interview, “When we had millet, we had only millet. When we had soybeans, t here w ere only soybeans to eat.”58 Sekine did not suffer much because when he was growing
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up in a farming family in Saitama Prefecture, he had been used to food shortages. In addition, b ecause of his relatively small size, he could get by on the daily rations. However, he saw many fellow internees who added water to their rice gruel (ojiya) just to create a feeling of fullness (manpukukan) in their stomachs. The bad quality and lack of variety of the food often caused mass diarrhea among the internees, which further sapped their already scarce energy. Food, in other words, was served without regard to its health effects, just to fill the internees’ bellies. At New Year and on other major holidays internees w ere allowed to rest in the barracks, but because the principle of “he who does not work, does not eat” reigned supreme, food was given only once on these days and consisted of three small potatoes.59 Uchimura, who spent time in prisons as well as camps following his arrest in 1949 for espionage, testified that hunger was a daily feature of prison life, especially in the initial period of investigation and interrogations. Though he did not have to work a fter his arrest and transfer from a camp to a prison, Uchimura’s daily ration was extremely meager. He described breakfast as the feast of his prison day: “First, you get 9 grams—one matchboxful—of sugar, salted fish, the w hole 22 grams of it. Finally, 550 grams of your daily black bread arrives, bringing smiles to the f aces. You also get 5 grams of tea leaves and some hot water. Only the amount of hot water is unlimited, not subject to measurement in grams.” 60 The other meals were measly, with lunch and dinner consisting only of a thin soup. “The evening meal is the worst,” Uchimura remembered. “True, it is not so bad in the beginning, when the one-liter bowl of the soup, clouded with steam, is brought into the cell. But as I eat it, the soup disappears in my stomach as quickly as water vanishes into sand. The feeling of an empty stomach soon returns with greater force. I try to fall asleep, dreaming in advance of breakfast, and realize I have started to salivate profusely.” Yet the greatest torture of all was dealing with the bread: 550 grams of it was not just for breakfast; Uchimura had to make that daily ration last for twenty-four hours. Here he faced the toughest decision of his day, tougher than the tortures of interrogation and sleep deprivation that he had to endure at the hands of relentless Soviet prosecutors. The decision concerned what to do with the daily bread. Uchimura described how he cut it into pieces with his “knife”—a twisted piece of a thread pulled out of his shirt—arguing with himself about whether the pieces should be equal: “No, I shouldn’t really
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cut it into three equal parts. One hundred and fifty grams is enough for breakfast, lunch and dinner have to get 200 grams each. A fter breakfast there’s a walk—a welcome distraction. Moreover, during breakfast I have more than just bread, I also get sugar and fish. Lunch and dinner are too lonely.” 61 But for a hungry man, it was a torture to have all this bread in the morning and not be able to eat it. T here was so little bread that Uchimura described in excruciating detail, as a confrontation with himself, how he cut it into even smaller pieces: What the hell are you doing? Well, I’ll cut this bread into as many small pieces as I can. Why on earth would you do that? Well, c an’t you see? The smaller the pieces, the more I can relish the bread. I w ill start enjoying it even as I cut it. And when I put each small piece in my mouth one by one, the number of tastings is multiplied, and so is the time I can enjoy this bread! I make up for the bread’s insufficient amount by extending the time.62 The fact that the food was never enough to replenish the bodily strength the captives expended at various worksites in the postwar USSR, or to warm up those forced to spend hours in arctic conditions, created an impression of a hungry Soviet Union. This image, of course, was not inaccurate, especially in the first two years of the internment. However, while the Japanese, Germans, and other foreign captives endured hunger that many had never experienced before being taken prisoner by the USSR, the majority of the Soviet citizens, especially those in rural areas, had to endure worse conditions than t hose in the POW camps. Needless to say, knowing this did not help alleviate the POWs’ suffering, accounts of which created the image of a hungry Russia in Japan and elsewhere. Yet while the combination of bad food and extreme cold took its toll, it was work (rabōta) that was the source of most hardship. Stalin’s August 1945 directive that ordered the start of the Siberian Internment also set out internees’ use as laborers in various sectors of the Soviet economy and industry. The NKVD—the organization responsible for the POWs’ life and death from the moment of their capture to the end of their internment, including their transportation, accommodation, exploitation, and eventual repatriation—was ordered to divide the Japanese into “construction battalions” of a thousand people each. This followed the prac-
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tice of conscript labor units in use in the Soviet military since the 1930s. Most of the units w ere “road-construction battalions,” tasked with building automobile roads, railways, and “river crossings, bridges, trenches, etc.” 63 A fter being formed into labor units, the Japanese internees were sent to various regions of the USSR, mainly east of the Ural Mountains or in Central Asia, to work primarily at building railways, industrial facilities, and harbors, as well as in coal mining and timber production. This initial list of industries and areas was to be expanded according to the needs of rebuilding the war-torn economy of the USSR. A survey conducted in 1981 by the Aizawa Faction of the All-Japan Council for Demanding and Promoting Compensations for Forced Internees (Zenkoku Kyōsei Yokury ū Hoshō Yōky ū Suishin Kyōgikai, abbreviated Zenyokukyō) is informative in this regard. The researchers in this colossal endeavor collected data on 60,557 former internees from thirty-nine prefectures, including Tokyo. They found that their respondents had been employed in the following industries while in the USSR: “coal mining accounts for 15%, railways 12%, deforestation 33%, road work 7%, construction 13%, machinery 4%, agriculture 4%, medical serv ices 1%, and o thers 11%.” 64 In their memoirs, internees wrote about duties ranging from felling trees to working on industrial sites, and from laying railway or tram tracks to performing agricultural work on collective farms (kolkhoz).65 Some internees mined coal, metal ores, and minerals at major mines, while o thers wrote about felling trees in clearing the thick Siberian snow forest (taiga) for the construction of roads, railways, industrial plants, camps, and settlements. They were involved in light industry, such as factories that processed fish and other food, and in urban construction. The amount of work an internee had to perform depended on the geographical location of his camp; the ministry or industrial region the camp was affiliated with; w hether or not t here was sufficient workforce in that particular region or camp; his health, age, bodily strength, and relationship with camp authorities; and any number of other f actors. In some camps, the work was hard and daily quotas could not be met; in others, the healthy and hardworking internees finished their daily work by lunchtime. Despite this variation, work was almost always remembered in the memoirs as very punishing, often reducing the diverse experiences to easy clichés. Those internees who had endured the hardest labor exploitation spoke about Siberia as hell on earth, as did Takahashi Yoshirō from Niigata Prefecture, whose summary of his internment deserves to be quoted at length:
Alma-Ata (40)
Barnaul (128)
Yeniseisk
Rubtsovsk (511)
C H I N A
Bratsk
Zuunkharaa Ulanbaatar Nalaikh
0
0
M O N G O L I A
Kharaa
500 km
Choibalsan
(
B
A
Changchun (Shinkyō)
Harbin
)
Urgal
Vladivostok (13)
Mudanjiang
Lesozavodsk (47)
Izvestkovaia (4)
M
Yakutsk
Blagoveshchensk (20)
Never
Raichikha (19)
Shenyang
Sretensk (25) Nerchinsk
e
Other camps
Sea of Okhotsk
Oymyakon
Muli (1)
JAPAN
Nakhodka (9, 380)
Suchan (11)
Artyom (12) Hokkaido
Tetyukhe (10)
Korsakov
YuzhnoSakhalinsk
Sakhalin
Aleksandrovsk Sakhalinskii
Okha (22)
Nikolaevsk-on-Amur (21)
Komsomol’skon-Amur (18)
Prison
Other city
Capital city
Khabarovsk (14, 16) Khor (17)
Khurmuli (5)
Camps with Japanese internees: Number in brackets indicates camp number Major camps or camp complexes
Bukachacha (23)
Borzia
500 miles
Khilok Kyakhta Petrovsk-Zabaikalskii Suhbaatar
Chita (24)
Kadala (52)
u r - A m
Chernovskie kopi
Ulan-Ude (30)
Ugui nor
l
Lake Baikal
a
Aleksandrovskii Tsentral Prison
Svirsk
B a i k
Lena
Rail network
n l i M a i n
Timber production
Work at industrial facilities
U . S . S . R
Barrack construction
Construction
Chuna
Agriculture
Coal mining industry
Lena
Mining
Railway construction
Industrial facilities and worksites with a high concentration of Japanese POWs
Cheremkhovo (31) Irkutsk (32)
Taishet (7)
Krasnoyarsk (34)
Abakan (33)
Chesnokovka (36, Novoaltaisk)
Leninsk-Kuznetskii
Kemerovo (503)
Mariinsk (247)
Leninogorsk (347) Ust’-Kamenogorsk (45)
Biisk
Novosibirsk
Norilsk
isey
Tomsk Anzhero-Sudzhensk (526)
O b'
Dudinka
Yen
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In Buddhist teachings, humans are believed to have previous lives and current lives. T hose who did bad t hings in their prior lives have to suffer in their current lives. If you do good t hings in your current life, then you w ill go the Land of Perfect Bliss (gokuraku jō do) in your next life. In other words, people’s destinies are determined by their past behavior. I must have been deemed to have committed many sins in my previous life, since I received such a suffering in the Soviet Union that I don’t think one has to endure even in hell. It was the experience of internment in Siberia after the war, the experience of being forced to perform hard labor. Thankfully, I narrowly escaped death and returned to my dear old home. But I w ill not be able to forget this suffering till the end of my days.66
As Stephen Kotkin observed in his classic study of a Soviet industrial town, Magnetic Mountain, “in the Soviet context, work was not simply a material necessity but also a civic obligation. Everyone had the right to work; no one had the right not to work.” 67 Aikawa Haruki, a Marxist intellectual and Nihon shimbun editor, wrote soon a fter his repatriation: “Soviet p eople feel no contradiction between life and work. Therefore, the saying ‘He who does not work, should not eat’ is more than a simple rule, it is the mood of the people.” 68 T hese rules applied also to foreign captives, who w ere cogs in the machinery of the Soviet economy during their stay in the USSR. The Japanese captives w ere given a daily quota of work, which they called noruma in Japanese (from the Russian norma, meaning “daily work quota”) and had to fulfill as a brigade, come rain or snow. The amount of nutrition they received depended on their results: internees who did not meet the daily quota did not receive the full ration. Especially in the initial two years of the Siberian Internment, fulfilling the daily work quota was part of a hellish circle in which meager rations did not compensate for the calories spent working and the inmates’ bodies w ere pitilessly exploited for labor without regard for their feelings or comfort. This was the chief message that many internee writers conveyed in their recollections of work in a Soviet POW camp, where they were driven like work animals by camp chiefs and guards. Yet the Soviet camp wardens and guards were not the only demons that inhabited this hell. Initially, as Japanese officers refused to work citing international law, the power relations entrenched in the Japanese military carried over into the Soviet camps, where the conscripts and
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noncommissioned officers had to shoulder the majority of work duties. This arrangement was seen as the most convenient and least troublesome by Soviet camp chiefs in the early period of the internment. Unsurprisingly, these relations of oppression soon created resentment and divisions. Nakaya lamented that “the elderly officers could not work and all the duties fell on our shoulders.” T hose duties w ere various, but the one Nakaya hated most was unloading railway cars with coal: “The call could come at any time, and we had to go to the railway station even in the m iddle of the night, a fter a long day’s work.” Coal was unloaded through each car’s only door; inside the car, it was pitch-black and full of coal dust; and soon Nakaya’s body would be black as coal too, except his eyes that glowed white in the dark.69 While many internees, like Nakaya, went about their daily tasks without much resistance, the cruelty of some Japanese officers entrusted with keeping order among their compatriots led to tensions among the POWs. The authors of a 1949 pamphlet published in Tokyo by the League for Supporting the Livelihoods of Returnees from the USSR, a pro-Soviet association, blamed such officers for the initial backlash among ordinary soldiers that led to the start of the Democratic Movement in the camps.70 Despite substantial resentment t oward Japanese officers, memoirists not so persuaded of the virtues of the Soviet system w ere always aware of the forces that stood behind their capture and labor exploitation. For example, in his recollection titled “Hell on Earth: The Siberian Internment,” Minamiguchi Saichi wrote that the Soviets sent the Japanese soldiers to Siberia and subjected them to the “noruma system” of labor “to rebuild their own country.”71 Moreover, while accounts of commanders’ high-handedness in the IJA are well known, not all of the Japanese in charge of their compatriots in the Soviet camps resorted to violence. To provide one example, Nasu Tadao wrote about his unease at being commanded by the Soviets, who ordered him to drive a tractor at a Soviet collective farm. When he refused to do so, the Japanese brigade leader pleaded earnestly with Nasu, asking him to do it “for the sake of everyone, for the sake of repatriation in this year.” 72 It is in remembering the wearing amount of daily work that words such as noruma entered the Japanese of the memoirs, along with versions of tens of other Russian words used exclusively by the Siberian internees within their “language community.”73 The connection between poor food and debilitating daily noruma is evident in all memoirs. Iitsuka wrote about a dig-
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ging job with a daily quota of one cubic meter of earth, but the soil was so hard and stony that “it was impossible to complete one day’s work even in a week.” 74 Sawatari Hideo’s brief memoir, written in diary form, is nothing but a compilation of hardships: hard work, illnesses, and the numerous deaths he witnessed in several camps. He wrote about felling trees and sawing them into lumber (seizai), a taxing job that caused internees to die one a fter another. He briefly mentioned having jobs in a cannery and a boiler house before finally being repatriated in October 1949.75 Sawatari’s account demonstrates that in the course of their captivity, internees were often employed in a range of industries and performed a variety of tasks. Yamada Ichirō, a native of Tochigi Prefecture, considered himself lucky to have returned to Japan after helping build the BAM. Life in the camp had not been easy. “Using [the promise of] repatriation as a bait, the Soviets drove me like a castrated horse. My days consisted of waking up in the morning, working the w hole day, eating the meager daily ration, and g oing to bed,” he wrote.76 Whatever work they w ere involved in, many memoirists were often surprised by the crudeness of Soviet methods and tools, as well as the lack of skill, ingenuity, and care in completing work tasks. Yamada wrote that in his BAM worksite, internees would first cut trees to clear a path for the railway and then build wooden h ouses out of the timber, complete with wooden roofs and floors. A fter the houses were completed, they w ere furnished with handmade wooden t ables, chairs, and so on. Yamada wrote condescendingly that all this time-consuming work was accomplished using primitive methods. He used the Japanese term jinkai senjutsu (literally, “human wave tactic”) to describe how the Soviets threw humans at any problem and tried to achieve a result through sheer numbers. “In their eyes, the Japanese w ere a skillful race (kiyō na jinshu),” Yamada summarized.77 The exertions and suffering of the internees often led to them having depressing thoughts about their worth as h uman beings. The focus on the body and bodily functions in many recollections emphasized the internees’ bodies as mere instruments of l abor for the Soviet state, which was badly in need of workers following a deadly war. In this respect, the situation within Soviet labor camps brings to mind the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s observation that “necessity has no juridical form.” 78 Faced with the necessity of rebuilding, the Soviet state had to suspend the law—both the international conventions on the treatment of POWs and other norms.
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“International law? T here is no such thing in the Soviet Union. We only follow the o rders of the minister of internal affairs,” w ere the words with which Major Kutnyi, Takasugi’s camp commander and nemesis, answered the latter’s demand that he respect international agreements.79 Decisions outlined in archival documents all relate to the effective use of a workforce temporarily kept in captivity. However, as we see in Chapter 4, the Soviet officers cared much more about the well-being of the Japanese captive laborers than is depicted in the memoirs.80 The trinity of hunger, cold, and work had its most direct impact on the bodies of the internees. Even the Japanese word for experience (taiken), which the internees used in describing their time in the camps, consists of two Chinese characters for “body” and “mark” or “ evidence,” meaning literally “evident or marked on one’s body.” From the moment the Japanese memoirists woke up until the time they went to sleep after their daily work in the camps, their experiences revolved around their bodies. Their stories reflected this: the impression one often gets from reading the memoirs is that during the first two years of the internment, the internees’ camp lives were the h uman existence reduced to its bare bones. Each internee was constantly occupied with meeting his bodily necessities, except during the times when his body was put to use by his captors. Even some eloquent narratives often deal solely with the functioning of their authors’ physical selves: the work that depleted the energy from flesh and bones, the food that failed to replenish the bodily strength, and the cold that sapped the body’s warmth. Toilets were a common theme: Saitō Akira wrote about the latrine that was fifty meters away from the barracks and the hardship of making do without toilet paper by using anything that was available for the purpose.81 Encounters with camp infirmaries, where many of the doctors were women, added to the awkward stories about corporeal experiences. The abundance of female medical staff members was not part of a cruel plot to humiliate male internees: the USSR had lost 210,601 medical workers, most of them male, in the war—more than ten times the number of American medical casualties.82 Saitō wrote about monthly medical checks, during which internees had to strip naked before female doctors or nurses who would pinch the internees’ buttocks (denbu) to judge their physical condition and shave their pubic hair to prevent the spread of lice.83 Some artistically inclined memoirists drew pictures of these humiliating experiences, considering them memorable and worthy of retelling. Kitagawa remembered
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internees being divided into three classes by camp doctors according to the condition of their bodies (and their ability to work).84 Holl called the w hole procedure of examining the POWs’ physical condition a “slave market . . . just like in the M iddle Ages.”85 Comparing themselves to slaves was also common among Japanese memoirists. Tōjō Heihachirō wrote, “Every time the slave-like four years I spent as a Siberian internee come alive in memory, I think I was so lucky to come back alive.”86 Amaya Konokichi wrote about “the slave life in a Siberian penal colony after being left for dead in North Manchuria as a member of ‘honorable death corps’ (gyokusai butai).”87 Takeyasu Kumaichi’s account was the most vitriolic, recounting one of the harshest examples of mistreatment of the Japanese. The l ittle finger on Takeyasu’s left hand was frostbitten a fter he worked outside in temperatures of -50˚C.88 The finger went white, and Takeyasu lost all sensation in it. Although this was not unseen in the frigid Siberian climate, what happened in the camp infirmary infuriated Takeyasu so much that he remembered it for decades. The female camp doctor first cut off his finger with scissors and a saw and then said: “Your left hand is useless but you have your right hand. You can get back to work.” Takeyasu wrote: “There was no mercy in her voice, no sign that she felt sorry for me. So was this our fate, the fate of those who lost the war? We were nothing but slaves. Was this how a slave should be treated?”89 Heinz Konsalik, a German writer and former USSR POW, related a similar episode in his best- selling novel, The Naked Earth, in which a heartless Soviet female doctor named Kasalinskaya ordered back to work a German POW with a crushed thumb, shouting: “Do you think I’m g oing to tolerate large-scale malingering? T hose fellows get their thumbs crushed intentionally in order to spend the time loafing.”90 Memories of work also reflect Japanese attitudes t oward the Soviets, as well as German and other POWs. They are revealing as attempts of the authors to identify themselves as Japanese p eople, keeping unbroken their link to the home islands. Even when critical of their own people, as Matsumoto Yasujirō was when comparing the Japanese to the Germans in his camp memoir, their accounts demonstrated a sense of belonging that was expressed in various ways: longing for the homeland, one’s family members and other relatives, or Japanese food.91 One can argue that this was a way for the memoirists to reassure their readers that they had never ceased to be Japanese, even when surrounded, exploited, and brainwashed by the
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e nemy—an attempt to avert the suspicion felt by p eople in the home islands toward them.92 Nevertheless, despite the abundance of such narratives, camp lives w ere not only about slave-like suffering and humiliation. Not all memoirs presented stories from hell. Even in accounts critical of Soviet actions, readers can glimpse episodes of ordinary h uman happiness, which go against the flow of the literature of hardship analyzed above.
THE OTHER SOVIET UNION
Along with memoirs that focused on misery and hardships, there were accounts whose authors w ere willing to see the good as well as the bad. Many remembered the generosity of Soviets who shared their last food with the Japanese. Others wrote fascinatingly and nostalgically about the beautiful Russian, Ukrainian, and other Soviet w omen they befriended and could not forget even a fter returning to Japan.93 Nakamaki Yasuhiro’s memories of the twenty-year-old Russian girl Grushka, with her rosy cheeks and “milky- white skin at its prime of girlhood, almost transparent in its beauty, and the pride she took in her well-developed breasts” were representative of the excitement with which these Japanese young men, many of them yet unmarried, greeted the rare opportunities to fraternize with local w omen.94 Those lucky enough to be interned in warmer climate, such as Central Asia, wrote about the sweet melons, apples, and grapes they could buy with the allowance they w ere paid if they successfully fulfilled their noruma.95 Three Japanese interned in Tashkent (modern Uzbekistan) reminisced in The Literary Chronicles about the warmth of the climate, the kindness of the people, and the sweetness of the fruit grown u nder the abundant southern sun—memories in complete opposition to the trinity of suffering and victim narratives about Japanese captivity in the USSR. Kikuchi Toshio’s comparison of his own experience with that of the others is illustrative: “I really felt sorry for those interned in Siberia or Mongolia, for when I arrived in Tashkent, I thought, I’ve come to a good place!”96 Yamada Seizaburō remembered working in a state-owned apple orchard on the outskirts of AlmaAta, then the capital of Kazakhstan. “It was splendid,” he wrote. “The orchard extended over a hundred hectares, whole mountains covered with apple trees. As days go by, the memory of my working there in the 1946 harvesting season seems like something from a land of dreams. T here w ere
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Kazakh girls and Uzbek girls and Russian girls working there. There were also prisoners working in specified areas.”97 The mixing of prisoners with free citizens, foreigners with multiethnic Soviets, and young women with young men—all working for the good of the USSR—represented the good and the bad of the Soviet system that the Japanese came to experience during their captivity. Yawatagaki Masao was moved by the words of an elderly Russian man who said of the treatment of the Japanese prisoners: “We Soviets cannot treat you as slaves. You might be POWs, but you are h uman beings first of all.”98 Hatakeda Kan remembered the trips he made with Soviet officers to Khabarovsk to transport provisions and animal fodder to the camp. The train journey allowed him to experience the “niceties of h uman interaction” in conversations with his companions, who shared their makhorka (crude tobacco wrapped in newspapers) and bread with the internees, played Japa nese tunes on their guitars for them, and showed sympathy for their long separation from Japan. “Despite the differences in political system, the individual p eople in the Soviet Union demonstrated incredible humanity,” Hatakeda remembered.99 Of the works that present a relatively dispassionate, balanced analysis of Soviet realities, Takasugi’s In the Shadow of the Northern Lights stands out. It recounts the author’s camp experiences and at times reads like a collection of ethnographic or anthropological sketches. Takasugi was a naturally curious person and a humanist, and he had deep, almost scientific, interest in the Soviet p eople. Unlike many Japanese who saw their internment as one long torture, Takasugi carried a dictionary, never missing an opportunity to develop his Russian-language skills. But his interest was not simply linguistic: he went to great lengths to learn about the Soviet state and people. He once used his close rapport with his chiefs in the Bratsk camp office to arrange a visit to a Soviet school, where he observed and interacted with schoolchildren in Russian. He often struck up conversations with people in the street. While he never forgot the gravity of the Japanese predicament in Siberia, even in situations when o thers would feel angry or frustrated he tried to see beyond mere emotions and initial impressions and chose not to indulge in quick and convenient conclusions. A good example of this is his encounter with a Soviet foreman, recounted in a chapter titled “A Soviet- Style Man.”100 Vasilii Kaliamov was a party member and a bully, called “devil” (oni) behind his back by the Japanese. In his first encounter with Takasugi, Kaliamov ordered the internee to clean a toilet. Takasugi was
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responsible for equipment maintenance at the time, and cleaning lavatories was clearly a task below his standing. Well-educated and an avid reader with a good knowledge of Russian, Takasugi was a proud man. He made known his discomfort to Kaliamov. In another encounter, Takasugi crossed Kaliamov again, after the latter’s heavy winter gloves had disappeared from one of the barracks. When he learned about this, Takasugi sarcastically remarked, “What a cultured people!” His ridicule was pointed toward the fact that Kaliamov’s winter gloves had originally been provided by the Kwantung Army to Japanese soldiers and later confiscated by the “cultured” Soviets. This touched a raw nerve with Kaliamov, who furiously launched into a tirade about the global capitalist and bourgeois reactionary forces and enemies of the proletariat who would never succeed in subordinating the great Soviet people. As a punishment, Takasugi was transferred from his relatively easy job as a mechanic to work at a construction site. Despite this, Takasugi never held a grudge against Kaliamov. The whole encounter only aroused his interest and curiosity, as he considered his punisher a true “Soviet-style man,” few of whom he had encountered despite his long sojourn in Siberian camps. Some of his other encounters enraged and surprised him in equal measure: he bravely confronted a member of the Young Communist Movement (Komsomol) who tried to steal a spade from a group of Japanese internees, and he was humiliated by Major Kutnyi, who plundered Takasugi’s belongings in his presence and shamelessly appropriated some of his things.101 In Takasugi’s eyes, Kaliamov, who resorted to Leninist logic in a petty altercation with a Japanese prisoner, was different from those who used ideology as a smoke screen to conceal their cynical worldviews or dishonest self-interest. Despite calling Kaliamov a Soviet-style man, Takasugi did not attempt to classify Soviet p eople according to ready-made stereot ypes, or to define the Japanese solely as the Soviets’ victims. His memoir cut through the smoke screen of ideology that clouded the mutual perceptions of the Japanese and the Soviets. Through his camp experiences, Takasugi could see—and ultimately demonstrate to his readers—t hat the Soviet p eople were not all brainwashed automatons or stereotypical uncouth bears, and that the Soviet Union was not a “mysterious country” as it was described in Japanese schools. Equally, the Soviets’ judgment about the Japanese was shrouded in propaganda messages about militaristic samurai and American stooges. Takasugi’s often very candid memoir showed that “communist” or “militarist,” Soviet or Japanese, a human being is a human being: that stereotypes and propaganda were the self-serving resort of states
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and governments that did not genuinely want to achieve understanding and peace. In his foreword to Takasugi’s memoir, the literary critic and translator Watanabe Kazuo praised the book for pointing out that “depending on whether they are wise or foolish, political systems can be the h uman being’s life or death.”102 I favor a somewhat different view, one less dependent on political systems. In his tireless explorations of the Soviet p eople, Takasugi came to realize that, despite the lengthy lectures of the Democratic Movement about the advantages of socialism over capitalism, it was not always the political system that made h uman beings what they w ere. He reached this conclusion despite his b itter confrontations with representatives of Soviet power that another memoirist might have used to denigrate all Soviets. As someone who understood Russian, Takasugi saw his time in the camps as an opportunity to study the Soviet people, observing them with a keen eye of an outsider, and to build bonds and common understanding. A notable example is his friendship with Marusia, a young Russian w oman with whom he worked in a camp office. Marusia invited him to her h ouse and introduced him to her father. They discussed literature, politics, and philosophy and had many common topics to talk about: Marusia was a well- read student who knew some Japanese novelists, and Takasugi was familiar with the history of Russia and socialism. When the time came for them to part, Marusia gave Takasugi her photograph as a keepsake. Takasugi remembered this encounter for the rest of his life. In fact, Marusia was so kind to him that the somewhat perplexed Takasugi asked himself: “What was it that drew Marusia to me?” The encounter elevated Takasugi from his status at the time and made him feel like a complete human being: “When I was around her, I forgot I was a POW.” If there was any infatuation in their relationship, Takasugi, who was a married man, did not show it; instead, he concluded that it must have been “this indiscriminate affection that is a characteristic of the Russians,” an ability to feel sympathy with all h uman beings without distinction, that was behind Marusia’s humane attitude toward him. Was this the result of thirty years of Soviet rule? Takasugi doubted it. He surmised that this humanity had much deeper roots, in the humanism that was so abundant in nineteenth-century Russian novels.103 Perhaps Takasugi could discern this affection and appreciate it b ecause it was harmonious with his own attitude toward humanity, despite the cheerless circumstances in which he found himself. T here can be no doubt that such human encounters strengthened Takasugi’s own humanism. In Japan, where society had become more receptive to ideas of peaceful coexistence
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due to the misery of the recent war, Takasugi’s humanism found sympathizers. There was no shortage of critics, either. In a testimony to the atmosphere of political pluralism in the early 1950s that survived despite the GHQ’s increasing encroachment on the rights and freedoms of left-leaning groups, Takasugi’s work was criticized heavily by leftist intellectuals and lobbyists who saw “Soviet Russia as the ultimate paradise.”104 Those critical of Takasugi were not aware that even his scientific mind had come close to succumbing to the charms of Soviet community life. Deep in his memoir, Takasugi wrote about the despair he felt in a penal battalion, writing for the first time uncritically, and almost wistfully and enviously, about the internees who “sang loudly in chorus, released a wall newspaper, competed in the production contest.”105 Granted, Takasugi did not become a communist, but this brief mellowing is proof that even someone as well-read and inquisitive as he was could allow himself to sympathize with those attracted to Soviet life. Another point often made by internees sympathetic to the Soviet Union is the lack of racism there, which surprised them. Some of the internees who preferred not to return to Japan and requested Soviet citizenship in the late 1940s (discussed in Chapter 5) emphasized this as one of the reasons that had made them change their opinion of the USSR. This perceived lack of racism was in stark contrast with, for example, the situation surrounding the POW camps in the United States. Matthias Reiss has written about the irony noticed by the German POWs in the US South: “When the reeducation program started in late 1944, the Germans already had plenty of opportunity to observe the overt discrimination against African Americans in the United States. As one former prisoner put it, they were being taught the meaning of ‘democracy,’ while outside the southern camps no black citizen dared to step on the sidewalk alongside white Americans.”106 Since the Japanese internees were aware of the racial tensions in the United States and the plight of African Americans, which was a common topic of Soviet internal propaganda, the relative egalitarianism in the USSR must have contributed to their fascination with the Soviet model of social organization. ■ ■ ■
In his memoir of Siberia, Ōki wrote, “I cannot think of Siberia separate from bedbugs.”107 Better known in postwar Japan as an author of treatises on steel production, Ōki reminisced about his comfortable hospital life in Birobid-
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zhan, where he slept and slept b ecause t here was no other way to fill the time between meals. But even in the clean and comfortable environment of a hospital run according to the standards of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), there were bedbugs—which, though not as bad as the lice that had devoured Ōki in camp, were still a nuisance. “The bedbugs,” Ōki wrote, “could not climb up iron beds, but the wooden beds we had were nesting grounds for them. At lights out, these things came darting about and stung our bodies indiscriminately. We desperately tried to catch and kill them, but the damn t hings weren’t easy to catch either! They were resistant to cold too—even if you left them out at tens of degrees below zero, they wouldn’t die!”108 The resilient bedbugs and lice became an indispensable part of the Siberian internee folklore: almost e very memoir of the Soviet camps, Japa nese or otherw ise, mentioned them. The bedbugs attacked their victims mostly at night, but the lice lived and bred in clothes and fed on their hosts all day long. Many internees recounted having to squeeze the hems of their garments to crush the insects that hid there. Disinfection through heat was the only effective way to get rid of the lice, and the bedbugs were more difficult to eradicate. Sawada Seikichi used the phrase “war of extermination” to describe the struggle to get rid of the bedbugs in his barrack. The task was made especially difficult by the fact that the barrack was built out of logs, the cracks between which served as perfect breeding and hiding ground for the insects. In the morning, the Japanese soldiers woke up tired, having been deprived of rest by the tiny vermin. Initially, the Japanese did not even know how to deal with the bedbugs. “It was the first encounter we had had with bedbugs in our whole lives,” Sawada wrote, pointing to the exoticism of the experience.109 For many memoirists and their readers, bedbugs became the epitome of the savagery of Siberian camp life. Despite their small size, these creatures occupied a high position in the food chain composed of diverse yet equally desperate organisms that inhabited a Soviet forced labor camp and participated in a daily struggle for the scarce calories available. For the Japanese, bedbugs were not a small nuisance. Rather, they were yet another element of the system that aimed to suck the energy—literally, the blood—from the bodies of the Japanese. In a forced labor camp that was a microcosm of the greater Soviet system, the bedbugs represented many things: proof of the primitive and savage nature of life in the world’s first socialist country, and a measure of the Soviet Union’s backwardness and deprivation, with its lack
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of hygiene and cleanliness. The Japanese chroniclers of the bedbug country were not the only p eople to use the vermin to write about the communist power. Jacques Rossi—a French-Polish communist and a legendary prisoner in the Gulag for nearly two decades, who wrote The Gulag Handbook— provided the example of Emerich Poglitsch, an Austrian who had first been imprisoned in the tsarist prisons during World War I. Three decades later, in 1947, as a councilman in Vienna that had been occupied by Soviet troops, this man ended up in Russian captivity once again. “It would be difficult to suspect Emerich of sympathies towards Marxism-Leninism,” Rossi wrote. “He was integrity personified. Yet, he had to admit that there was one point on which the Soviet camps could be said to have improved upon those of the old tsarist regime, and that was that you were no longer devoured by lice.”110 Transported to the camps in 1947, Poglitsch may have been luckier than Holl, who hunted for lice in his underwear, or the Japanese memoirists deprived of sleep because of the parasitic insects. The Soviet camps might have been an improvement over the tsarist prisons, but in the chaos and misery of Russia during WWII and soon a fter it, these differences w ere not immediately obvious. Yet not everyone saw the USSR as backward. For Marxists such as Aikawa Haruki and Yamada Seizaburō, the Soviet Union was the model nation that had succeeded in reconciling the need for rapid industrialization with the preservation of social justice. Their ideological beliefs may have blinded them to the fact that both the promise of social justice and the impressive industrialization were built on the sacrifices of millions. However, the evils and horrors of Japan’s military pursuit of empire, which both Aikawa and Yamada had reluctantly served, might have made the Soviet experiment seem the more attractive of the two. In contrast, Takasugi’s wry view of the Soviet Union, finding humanity where it was least expected, is a testament to the complexity of both internee experiences and the lessons that survivors drew from their time in Siberia. Takasugi’s originality was in his ability to see beyond the clichés and his refusal to jump on the bandwagon of anti-Soviet hysteria despite the fact that his recollections were first published in 1950, a time of heightened anticommunist frenzy. The fact that his book stands out b ecause of these qualities in the sea of bedbug country narratives aptly demonstrates the ease with which simplistic, facile depictions gained traction in the atmosphere of Cold War anticommunism.
C H A P T E R F O UR
COLD, HUNGER, AND HARD LABOR JAPANESE EXPERIENCES IN THE SOVIET CAMPS
I frequently found myself locked up with Japanese. . . . I am totally amazed by something unusual and disarming: the dignity in their stares. In t hose eyes t here is no trace of that starving-jackal-like vacancy that dominates the Gulag. —Jacques Rossi, Gulag prisoner
While the significance of survivor memoirs for internment history is hard to overestimate, history cannot be written solely from a first-person perspective. We have seen the plentiful merits of individual memoirs, especially given the scarcity of reliable alternative sources during the Cold War. Yet however diverse or detailed they may be collectively, internee memoirs alone cannot paint a comprehensive picture of the interment. They are largely voices from a single dimension, rarely reaching beyond camp walls into the other facets of this vast, multidimensional event. Many writers’ eyes were primarily trained on the details of their lives in the Soviet camps, the daily ordeals and rituals that took boundless willpower and naive hope to overcome. Preoccupied with the brutal exoticism of their captive existences in the bedbug country, many memoirists often overlooked the fact that they, the Japanese, were one group among many in a vast camp system, and their experiences but one chapter in the long and tragic history of forced labor in the USSR. Like the authors of jibunshi self-narratives, memoirists of Siberia often left out the broader historical context and chose to focus on “thick description.”1 This negligence was rarely intentional, and it would be unfair to accuse the memoirists of deliberate distortion. Writing a comprehensive, balanced history of the event requires, among other things, access to the broadest 111
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possible range of sources as well as factual and linguistic knowledge, not to mention time—luxuries the camp memoirists simply did not possess even in the relative peace and prosperity of postwar Japan, let alone during their captivity in the Soviet POW camps. Their accounts are valuable for what they are—eyewitness records of a seminal post-W WII epoch in the Soviet Union and Japan—and not as impartial analyses of Soviet attitudes t oward and treatment of foreign POWs from WWII. Rather, bridging the gaps among hitherto unconnected dimensions of internment history is the task we should address here, now that archives on the Siberian Internment have been available for nearly three decades. Naturally, I cannot claim to provide a comprehensive account of the w hole system of camps for foreign POWs: I can hope only to open the topic for further research in the English language. Beyond their daily experiences, the Japanese in the Stalinist camps did not have the most basic knowledge about the real situation in the GUPVI, the extensive system of camps specifically created or converted by the NKVD for the internment of POWs of WWII. It was created in the image of another, more notorious NKVD branch, the Gulag. In the Soviet Union that the Japanese internees inhabited and that they described as lacking so many t hings—Chapter 3 mentions the memoir titled “Hardships of Siberian Internment, Where T here Was No Paper”—information was even scarcer than paper, bread, butter, or any other tangible resource.2 Unlike the scarcity of food, clothing, and other necessities all over the war-ravaged country, the dearth of knowledge was deliberate. We w ill see that the Japa nese and other foreign captives were allowed somewhat greater freedoms in the later years of their internment, but in the Stalinist era they w ere a lways under suspicion, and the supply of any knowledge to them had to be more tightly controlled than even the provision of food and other necessities. The Japanese experiences in the USSR, which over the past decades have been seen in highly charged terms of national victimhood, should be analyzed as part of the broader context of the Soviet camp system. The GUPVI was only one part of this behemoth forced labor empire, which dominated the Soviet economy between 1930 and 1953. This analysis promises at least two rewards. First, it makes obvious how the themes analyzed in Chapter 3, articulated by internment memoirs and pronouncements, helped create a nation-centric, narrow version of the internment history in Japan that went hand in hand with the mythology of national suffering.
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Despite the tales of unique victimhood in foreign hills, this analysis demonstrates that the Japanese internees—the last group to enter Soviet POW camps after WWII—joined an expansive forced-labor system whose population swelled during the war following defeats of Axis armies on Soviet territory. The 600,000 former IJA soldiers and Japanese civilians were one group among many that populated the Soviet camp system. The movements of former e nemy soldiers happened simultaneously with the transportation into the Gulag of a large number of new inmates from the USSR’s newly acquired territories and zones of influence. My primary goal in this chapter is to demonstrate the great diversity of camp experiences within this gargantuan system, which was an economy within an economy and a state within a state. Analyses of Japanese experiences in this broad context, rather than as an isolated and unique story of national suffering, have been largely missing from scholarship in both Japanese and English.3 Second, such an analysis sheds light on the GUPVI itself—a phenomenon almost completely unknown in Anglophone historiography, although there are studies of it in German and other languages.4 These junctions between memoir and archive, part and w hole, and national and transnational are revealing in questioning what is treated as unquestionable truth in contemporary Japan: that the Japanese citizens in Siberian captivity were victims who experienced a living hell. As a general claim, this statement is not untrue, but in the wider context of the GUPVI camps and especially in the circumstances of the postwar Soviet Union, it paints only a part of the picture. I therefore read the claims made in internee memoirs about the USSR and its camp system—taken for granted for many years by the Japanese public—against the background of hitherto little used Soviet archival documents from the period. This takes internment history beyond the narrow community of Japanese captives and into the larger system of foreign forced labor in the USSR. It is difficult to comprehend the Soviet camp system, which was dependent on the forced l abor of both Soviet citizens and foreign captives, without an analysis of the forced labor economy, the economic and political realities in the USSR during and immediately a fter WWII, and the plans and strategies of the Soviet leaders (importantly, some by Iosif Stalin himself) for rebuilding the nation following the devastating global conflict. I build my analysis here around the main themes that epitomize the Japa nese experiences of Soviet captivity, chiefly the Siberian trinity of suffering (cold, hunger, and hard labor). In contrast to Chapter 3, however, in this
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chapter I view them in the context of the conditions spelled out in Soviet archives. This reading of memoirs alongside archival material reveals that the majority, though by no means all, of the Japanese accounts, both prioritize the suffering of the Japanese in circumstances where hardship was widespread, and commemorate selectively, recounting mostly what was expected of them in the domestic Japanese society. In contrast, Soviet documents from major archives, analyzed h ere for the first time in English, offer bountiful reasons to scrutinize some of the rather simplistic complaints about Japanese internment in Soviet hands. There can be no questioning the horrid nature of the suffering inflicted on the Japanese by their Soviet captors. Nonetheless, we should elucidate, through the use of alternative sources, the circumstances that enabled this suffering in the first place. I start this chapter with a brief overview of the history and peculiarities of the Soviet penal labor system, with an emphasis on the history of the GUPVI, and I discuss the general conditions in the USSR during the internment. This overview, which relies on extensive archival material as well as recent Russian scholarship, is essential in explaining the complex reasons behind the treatment the Japanese received. I then present a case study of a camp for foreign POWs, a fter which I outline what I call the literature of hardship that informed popular notions of and attitudes toward the Siberian Internment in Japanese postwar, and especially post–Cold War, history.
PENAL L ABOR IN THE USSR: A PREHISTORY OF THE GUPVI
Like any other Soviet state organ at the time, the GUPVI was forged by a complex interplay of planning and circumstance. Unlike other state organs, however, the GUPVI was responsible for a colossal number of foreign captives, including their labor exploitation, reeducation, and well-being. This presented the Soviet state with both dilemmas and opportunities and accounted for the distinctions between the GUPVI camps and camps for Soviet citizens. It is therefore necessary to analyze the GUPVI as a network of institutions tailored to detaining foreign citizens that was unlike any system of POW camps in any other country. The term “Gulag” is used widely in modern English but often without any consideration of nuance. In the contemporary imagination, it evokes an epitome of state repressive power—the savage world of forced labor camps
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built with the blood and tears of millions. Ironically, the entry of “gulag” into English as a lower-case common noun further complicates our task by broadening the term’s scope. The definition in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, for example, reads: “the penal system of the U.S.S.R. consisting of a network of labor camps; also: L ABOR CAMP.”5 Even without the second definition, the first one is too broad for this analysis, acting as an umbrella term for all labor camps in the USSR. To a general reader accustomed to the lower-cased term “gulag,” this definition might sound thorough enough. However, strictly speaking the Gulag was not accountable for all labor camps in the USSR. Its sister directorate, the GUPVI, was an extensive system in its own right, although not as expansive as the Gulag. More than 4.3 million foreign soldiers including the Japanese captured after the Kwantung Army’s surrender in August 1945, passed through the GUPVI system.6 True, the GUPVI was created in the image and using the experience of the Gulag. Yet it was in many ways a different organization, with a different set of goals. Using the term “Gulag” indiscriminately to refer to camps with foreign POWs, therefore, confuses those camps with others hosting a wide range of Soviet citizens, including ordinary criminals and political dissidents, special migrants such as kulaks (rich peasants considered class enemies during the collectivization of the early 1930s) and recalcitrant members of ethnic and religious minority groups, Soviet POWs in Nazi camps who w ere arrested and sent to the Gulag upon returning home, and many o thers. Some of these groups had inhabited the Gulag archipelago since the 1920s. The claim that the Japanese and other Axis POWs w ere “in the Gulag,” while not completely inaccurate, is a simplification that does not say much beyond stating the fact of their captivity in Soviet camps. In other words, it deprives the history of the Siberian Internment and POW camps in the USSR of complexity and nuance. Moreover, even within the GUPVI camp system there existed significant differences. T hese w ere dependent on the climate and natural conditions in the geographical area of internment, the internment’s period and duration, and other objective factors, but the nationality of the foreign POW in question was decisive. Even under the same umbrella of the GUPVI, there w ere the “Siberian” camps in eastern USSR and camps in European Russia. There were camps mostly for conscripts and camps for senior officers. There w ere camps for POWs of only one nationality as well as camps with mixed populations—the epitome of which was Camp No. 188 in Rada, in the Tambov Region in western Russia. In short, even the brief
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history of the GUPVI provides plentiful examples of the dangers of oversimplification. While t here is not enough space in this book to highlight the distinctions among camp types and the experiences of the camps’ motley inhabitants, I analyze in some detail the plight of one such group, the Japa nese, within this multilevel camp network. Now let us return to the point at the beginning of this section and answer the question, What made the GUPVI camps different from POW camps in other countries? First, the GUPVI was not discontinued u ntil years after the war’s end, continuing to function as an integral part of the NKVD’s forced labor empire. This was in stark contrast to POW camps in most Allied nations, which were disbanded soon after the end of WWII in compliance with Article 75 of the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which dictated that “the repatriation of prisoners shall be effected as soon as possible a fter the conclusion of peace.” 7 Thus until 1949, when the Soviet Union signed that year’s Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (it had not signed the 1929 convention), it acted independently of international law on the issue of POWs. In fact, the continuing existence of its system of POW camps is evidence of the USSR’s peculiar attitude to captive labor. The analysis below reveals that the GUPVI captives were an important source of labor for the USSR in the immediate postwar period of reconstruction and revival. This is not to deny the labor exploitation of POWs by other nations. Nevertheless, the USSR was unique among the Allied nations in terms of its numbers of POWs and the share of the labor they provided in its economy. Another peculiarity of the Soviet POW camp network was evident in the slogan “Soviet power does not punish, it corrects,” which dates back to the 1930s and was used to justify Stalinist repressions.8 As Jacques Rossi pointed out, “One of the purposes of the Gulag in its entirety was to serve as a socio- cultural living laboratory and form of policing, so as to monitor experiments that might create the ‘perfect Soviet citizen.’ ”9 After all, “correction” was part of the names of the penal institutions that w ere most widespread in the USSR, the correction labor camps (ispravitel’no-trudovoi lager’). In following this Soviet custom, the GUPVI camps served not only to extract labor; they were also meant to be educational institutions, factories of the soul where former enemy soldiers learned about their part in the aggression and atrocities of their respective armies and were thus expected to wholeheartedly contribute to rebuilding the USSR. Moreover, camp reeducation programs were intended to help them take this repentance one step
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further by embracing the benefits of the Soviet model of political, economic, and social organization and implementing them upon return to their home countries. In the Gulag proper, as has been well documented by such veterans of it as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Rossi, Elinor Lipper, and others, this correction rarely bore fruit. If anything, the opposite effect was achieved, with the creation of a criminal society based on the principle of divide and rule that was bent on breaking the inmate’s spirit, compelling her to lose all hope in humanity or human dignity. In contrast, in the GUPVI, which dealt with foreign citizens temporarily detained in the USSR, the correctional component was handled with greater care and planning. There were three main c auses for this careful approach. First, as the Soviet authorities realized, the mistreatment and deaths of foreign citizens in POW camps would be an Achilles’ heel for the USSR’s image abroad, providing its international critics with convenient ammunition.10 Second, citizens of Germany, Japan, and other countries in Soviet custody could become a useful trump card in negotiating f uture relations with t hese nations on favorable terms for the USSR. Finally, if treated well in the camps, the returnees who had developed feelings of affinity toward the Soviet Union could help popularize its cause in their home countries a fter repatriation. Let us now turn to analyzing how the Gulag influenced the evolution of the GUPVI—in particular, the imprint its expertise and methods had on GUPVI practices of exploiting both the bodies and minds of foreign captives.
THE LEGACIES AND IMPRINTS OF THE GULAG ON THE POW CAMP SYSTEM
The special treatment of foreign POWs in the USSR meant that the GUPVI spaces of detention stood out from Gulag camps. Nevertheless, built on existing foundations, the GUPVI preserved much of what made Gulag so effective. Both the theoretical underpinnings of inmate control and practical considerations of using forced labor to achieve state goals came in handy in the treatment of the POWs, albeit with important exceptions and caveats. This is not to say that the GUPVI camp system had perfected its mechanisms of control by the end of WWII, when the Japanese were embedded in it. Chaos and bad planning remained a constant in the GUPVI—as they did in the Gulag and any other Soviet state organ—particularly in the day- to-day r unning of POW camps. Nevertheless, knowledge gathered over
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fifteen years since the June 1929 Politburo resolution “On the Utilization of Labor of Criminal Prisoners” (to which the start of the Stalinist forced labor economy is usually traced) proved crucial in formulating and constantly reevaluating Soviet policies toward foreign captives during and after WWII.11 In the imagination of Soviet leaders, the threat of foreign invasion hung like a Damoclean sword over the USSR in the first two decades of its existence. This menace dictated the staggering attempts at rapid industrialization of the backward nation, a task of epic proportions that required heroic sacrifices from the Soviet p eople. In this project of swift consolidation of the nation’s economic, military, and geopolitical security, forced labor was to play a crucial part. Its role—most notably in the period of the first five- year plan, starting in 1928—has been analyzed extensively.12 Here it w ill suffice to mention, briefly, the example of the BAM, a project with origins in the period when the Soviet Union was at its most vulnerable. Like other colossal undertakings built with penal labor, the BAM contributed significantly to the Soviet state’s addiction to forced mass mobilization in speedily executing mass construction schemes. The BAM is also directly relevant to Japanese internees, 150,000 of whom were deployed to work on the railway in Stalin’s directive of 23 August 1945 that started the Siberian Internment. In the foreword to the diary of Ivan Chistyakov, a BAM guard, the Russian historian Irina Shcherbakova explained how the Soviet government quickly resorted to coercion in mobilizing the workforce necessary to secure its eastern borders. The task of building the BAM, a strategic alternative to the Trans-Siberian Railway in the face of Japanese threat to the Soviet Far East, was initially entrusted to the transport ministry. The growing menace of Japanese invasion in Northeast Asia, reflected in the increasing “provocations” by the Japanese military along the Soviet-owned China Eastern Railway, and this railway’s forced sale to Japan in 1935, meant that the BAM had to be built quickly.13 The time allocated for the construction was three and a half years. Shcherbakova wrote: “It became clear very soon that realizing such an ambitious project in such a short timeframe was possible only through forced l abor. The construction was soon transferred to the OGPU,” the NKVD’s forerunner.14 Around this period the OGPU (later the NKVD and MVD, to list all the abbreviated iterations of the USSR’s chief organ of internal affairs) also became the most important holder and distributor of captive workers. Penal labor remained important throughout the Soviet-German War of 1941–1945,
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though both the number of inmates and the scale of NKVD construction declined for a time as the nation concentrated all its resources on the war.15 After the war Stalin focused the nation’s resources on consolidating Soviet power in both the west (Eastern Europe) and the east (East Asia). In the 1930s the young Soviet state had devoted all its resources to “catching up with the advanced countries and overtaking them” in terms of industrial output—a highly ambitious goal with its roots in Vladimir Lenin’s conviction that Russia, an industrially backward nation that had managed to stage the world’s first communist revolution against all odds, had to overcome this disadvantage as soon as possible.16 Following the Allied victory over the Nazi coalition, which came at an enormous cost for the USSR, Stalin revived this policy orientation. His Marxist beliefs about the imminent conflict with world capitalism were supported by the recent carnage of WWII. The new repressions a fter the war and the need to start a fresh phase of reconstruction once again led to an increase in the number of forced laborers. As the prominent Gulag historian Oleg Khlevnyuk observed, “The MVD remained the largest construction ministry” even a fter the war.17 This time also, after the economic powerhouses of the Old World had been reduced to rubble in the war, the United States was more clearly the global capitalist enemy of the USSR.18 Catching up with and overtaking the West now meant catching up with and overtaking America, a project launched long before it was turned into a propaganda slogan by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1957. To achieve this overarching goal, Stalin clearly prioritized industrial recovery over agricultural sustainability. The “mobilizing potential of the planned economy”—the Russian historian Irina Bystrova’s euphemism for the state’s ability to forcefully exploit millions of human beings, both Soviet and foreign, transporting them to areas and industries where they were most needed—was put to full use in rebuilding the nation’s industrial might.19 Plants and factories had to be quickly constructed or rebuilt in both the war-ravaged European part of the country and the underpopulated eastern regions. Food prices, which Stalin had promised to lower after the war, in reality increased significantly to support the production of food for export—the strategy that in the 1930s had caused devastating famines in Ukraine and other regions.20 Needless to say, the rapid reconstruction of the industrial base required millions of workers, a problem especially acute in the USSR, the Allied country that had lost the largest share of its population in the war. The foreign POWs, including the Japanese internees, together with the Soviet inmates and “special settlers”
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ere to compensate for the labor scarcity and supply the economy with w workers.21 How did the forced labor camps r eally work? How was the business of forcing people to work in extreme conditions, with few comforts and little hope of redemption, carried out? N eedless to say, despite its name, the forced labor system was not based on total and mindless coercion at gunpoint or constant physical intimidation. Rather, it depended on sophisticated methods mastered in decades of experiments on the human psyche, aimed at manipulating a human being to the ends of humanly possible exertion and desperation and crushing her spirit to extract, through enormous sacrifices, the commitment of someone who does not care any more about anything but survival from one day to the next. Shalamov, a prominent chronicler of the Gulag’s brutality, explained this better than anyone e lse when he described the cold-blooded efficiency of using the paika (the daily ration) as opposed to the palka (the stick) as the tool of coercion: What to beat with—the stick (palka) or paika, the nourishment scale according to production results? It immediately becomes clear that this scale, coupled with the record of workdays and the promise of early release—these are sufficient stimuli. . . . It is evident that with the help of this scale, and the promise of a reduced prison term, it is possible to force “the saboteurs” or “domestics” not only to work well, vigorously, and free of charge, to work without convoy; but also to inform, to snitch on their neighbors for a cigarette butt, for a nodding glance of the concentration camp chiefs.22
Besides using the carrot of larger rations and early release, and the stick of being subjected to the isolation cell and other punishments, the camp chiefs perfected the methods of effective persuasion. Principles of collective control, with their roots in the practice of mutual responsibility (krugovaia poruka) of tsarist times, w ere among such convincing methods, as the US Central Intelligence Agency interrogators pieced together from reports of German POWs repatriated in the early 1950s. Quoted below is a declassified report about Soviet political prisoners who had completed their prison sentences, becoming free citizens on paper. In reality, they were indefinitely exiled in the Krasnoyarsk Territory: When coming to the area, prisoners who had completed sentences had to sign a paper acknowledging that they understood that for any escape attempt they would be sentenced to 25 years at hard labor. They were then turned
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over to some industrial organization for work, and the local MGB [Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, or Ministry of State Security, a forerunner of the Committee for State Security [Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti] (KGB)]. The prisoners w ere no longer kept u nder guard but, if they w ere not in their beds at curfew or ready for work in the morning, their absences would be noted. In order to discourage escapes, prisoner-workers were made responsible for each other and were subject to collective punishment.23
Another effective principle was that of divide and rule. The Soviet camp chiefs pitted various groups against one another to ensure effective control over the inmates, as well as the success of communist education or correction efforts. On 19 October 1944, well before the internment of the Japa nese, Deputy Prime Minister Lavrentii Beria addressed a letter to Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Viacheslav Molotov, asking him to support the request made by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov “to separate in all camps the Austrian POWs from the German POWs, which would enable the Austrian communists to carry out systematic antifascist propaganda among the Austrian POWs.”24 Mastering h uman masses was easier when they were divided. Camp wardens in the GUPVI used the culture of denunciations among the inmates with exemplary efficiency, compelling them to report on their peers for rewards or to avoid punishment. The history of the Gulag and GUPVI told exclusively through the eyes of the inmates provides ample evidence of its quotidian brutality, but so does the much rarer view from the other side of the barbed wire. The diary that Chistyakov kept between 1935 and 1936 is instructive in understanding both the pervasive logic behind forced labor in the USSR from the early years of its expansion and the challenges faced by the repressive apparatus in compelling people to do what they would not do of their own accord, even when promised rewards and privileges. Conscripted into serv ice from Moscow, the city he deeply loved, Chistyakov supervised a team of guards at a camp for criminals along the BAM, but his status did not f ree him from feeling like a captive in a godforsaken forest camp in the Far East, thousands of kilometers from Moscow. Like the inmates u nder his watch, Chistyakov hated both the camp and his job. “My sole wish that torments my soul,” he wrote, “is to get rid of the BAM, of my shoulder straps.”25 He despised being responsible for criminals (urki) who waited for an opportunity to escape, as well as the job for which he was neither properly trained
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nor well compensated. He remembered his days in Moscow, with tram trips to the theater, that now seemed like a distant, almost unreachable, dream in the cold faraway corner of the vast Soviet Union. Chistyakov’s diary makes for depressing reading, providing a monotonous and candid account of the sadness and despair felt by someone often dismissed as a representative of Soviet power, but who was a victim of circumstance just as much as the inmates he was supposed to guard. As was often the case with the guards, Chistyakov had the misfortune of crossing to the other side of the barbed wire: he was arrested in 1937 for “negligence,” a sentence he had fully expected to receive in the chaos and despair of his remote camp.26 The Soviet society at the time when Chistyakov wrote his diary was riven by pervasive suspicion that would lead to the mass bloodletting of the Great Terror of 1937–1938. With the start of the Soviet-German War in June 1941, the situation deteriorated. Uchimura G ōsuke wrote about a guard in his prison to whom he became close and who, perhaps bored out of his wits, would knock on Uchimura’s cell door and share his experiences of the war. One night, pleading with Uchimura not to tell anyone, the soldier said that his father was also in the camps and that he did not know if the man was dead or alive. The guard also related how his unit had been brought to Siberia during the war, arriving in wilderness with nowhere to stay. “Build barracks,” they w ere ordered. “How about you give us some nails?” the soldiers asked. “Well, we h aven’t got any,” was the reply, “so make some out of the wire.” “Do we have any bricks?” “No bricks e ither. The war is on, isn’t it? Everything is for the war front. Every damned thing.” Following such candid conversations, the guard and prisoner would share a cigarette. “I’ll give you 40!” the guard would say, meaning he would smoke 60 percent of the cigarette and leave the rest for Uchimura.27 Even a decade a fter the events described by Uchimura’s guard, the oppression, destitution, and tumult had not eased up, although the USSR had emerged victorious and confident from WWII. Poverty was everywhere to see, as the foreign captives often noticed. Having just crossed into the USSR from Manchukuo, Itō Masao was astonished by the deprivation he witnessed in the border town of Blagoveshchensk. “So, this is the state of a victorious nation,” Itō wrote, while “on the other side of the river t here is an abundant country,” the defeated kingdom of Manchukuo.28 On the way to fetch potatoes for his camp, Adelbert Holl and other German POWs passed through a settlement where the local p eople tried to exchange some soap for portions of the POWs’ bread. Holl wrote of the locals: “The population are
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already standing in wait as we march in. We are greedy for the rare item soap, which we need more urgently than unwanted bread.”29 While critical of the conditions in his own camp, Holl was aware of ordinary Soviets’ daily struggles, as is evident in this episode from his memoir: When we look out of our window, the administrative area, which is outside the camp, lies before us. Next to it is the Russians’ shop. How well the people live here is shown to me by observing them from our room. A middle-aged Russian woman in the usual poor clothing has got some butter in a container and is sitting on a step opposite our block licking this expensive item of food, which was obviously not intended for her. Furtively she looks to right and left, anxiously hoping that no one has seen her. A fter she has refreshed herself for a good quarter of an hour, she gets up and goes off without noticing us.30
This context of poverty is essential in understanding the evolution of Soviet policies toward the GUPVI inmates and the hierarchy of priorities in the forced labor economy. It agrees with the prevailing principle in Soviet decision making, according to which the domestic population and its well- being could be sacrificed for international security and prestige. This principle defined Moscow’s treatment of foreign citizens in its custody and explains the tremendous efforts the USSR’s leaders expended to improve the conditions of foreign POWs, even while free Soviet citizens—not to mention inmates—struggled to make ends meet. This is also evident in the case study of the GUPVI’s camp at Rada, perhaps its most international one.
THE CASE OF CAMP NO. 188 AT RADA, IN THE TAMBOV REGION
Depicting their camp experiences primarily as stories of Japanese suffering, many Japanese memoirists often overlooked the plight of other foreign soldiers in the Soviet Union. The peculiar case of Special Camp No. 188 in Rada, in western Russia, highlights this one-sidedness. As a camp built solely for foreign POWs and one whose inmates represented diverse cultures, including the Japanese, Rada was a microcosm of the GUPVI. Its history is illustrative of Soviet policies t oward preserving POW lives and maintaining their capacity to work. That history also helps contrast Japanese experiences with t hose of other POWs in the Soviet Union, showing that the suffering of foreign captives during the war was worse than after it ended.
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Hastily built to accept German and other Axis prisoners following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943, Rada was characteristically described as hell by many early internees transported t here in the heat of the war. Their hell started well before their arrival at the camp. On 1 March 1943, Beria ordered the transporting of 110,000 POWs from the front line in the western parts of the USSR—among them, 78,000 POWs captured near Stalingrad— to a group of camps that included Rada.31 The order, for various bureaucratic reasons, came about a month late, by which time a large portion of the POWs, mostly Germans, had died or became fatally ill due to cold and maltreatment, including criminal levels of neglect by the Soviet officers in charge of looking a fter the prisoners while the latter awaited their fate. And when the transportation finally started, it proved disastrous: of the 8,007 POWs who arrived at Camp No. 127 in Pokrovskii in eastern Ukraine, 1,526, or nearly one in five, had died in the c attle trains. A further 4,663 prisoners lost their lives in the following six weeks, mainly from dystrophy (93 percent) and cold.32 These numbers corroborate the claim about the first prisoners in the camp enduring hell on earth.33 According to the archives, from 1941 to the spring of 1943 almost 59 percent of the almost 300,000 foreign POWs lost their lives in “camps, trains, admission centers, and hospitals.”34 This percentage was higher than the 57 percent that the authors of a Russian collection of archival documents attribute to Nazi extermination camps.35 Such neglect is surprising b ecause on 2 January 1943, two months before Beria’s order and as the battle of Stalingrad raged on, deputy defense minister Andrei Khruliov had signed Order No. 001, “On Regulating the Evacuation of POWs from the Front.”36 Both the timing and the contents of the order indicate that the Soviet leadership was utterly dissatisfied with the manner in which thousands of e nemy POWs had been captured, transported, and detained during the battle. In no uncertain terms, the document commanded Red Army group commanders and other top officers to preserve the lives and health of the POWs at all costs. The stipulations came in twelve articles, which included instructions about the conditions needed to provide the captives with sufficient food, clothing, and urgent medical care (using provisions and clothing captured from Axis armies); limiting the POWs’ daily walking distance to thirty kilometers; and evacuating sick, frostbitten, and otherw ise incapacitated prisoners to hospitals in the rear. This order had been issued before the deaths I mentioned in the previous paragraph. The horrendous POW mortality rates indicate that the order was not followed during the initial months of 1943. Nevertheless, its existence is evi-
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dence of the USSR’s principal attitude t oward the POWs. Without diminishing the effects of Soviet neglect and cruelty toward Axis POWs during and after the war, the Soviet treatment of enemy POWs was fundamentally different from the Nazis’ deliberate policies of exterminating Soviet and other captives.37 Whatever their plans for the millions of enemy captives in their camps during and a fter the war, the Soviet leaders did not have any interest in deliberately working, starving, or freezing these prisoners to death. Moreover, sources indicate that the Moscow authorities also tried to gradually improve the conditions of the POWs. Prisoners sent to Rada in the last year of the war remembered a totally different camp from the one described by prisoners interned in 1943. Robert Lutz, who arrived in June 1944, reminisced, “Everything in the camp breathed cleanliness and organization.”38 The accounts by Japanese internees at Rada who first arrived in the camp in late 1945 corroborate this view. Shimada Shirō, transported to Rada in the autumn of 1945, mainly saw beauty and wonder in the things and p eople he encountered: the steam bath that he and other Japanese enjoyed at a big station during the long train journey west was a delight, and the bathhouse was very clean; the women who came to the station to exchange goods were beautiful, although impoverished; and the lights of Tambov, the provincial Russian city nearby, appearing on the horizon during a work trip one day aroused deep nostalgia in him, now living in a forest. But what impressed Shimada most was the beauty of Russian nature, which he described in lyrical detail. The spring’s coming to the forest in which Rada was located reminded him of Ivan Turgenev’s novels. “Even now,” he wrote, “I can remember the beauty of the white birches, and the sound of the cuckoo calling in the morning forest.” Shimada’s account read more like a travelogue than a memoir of hardships and thus was in total opposition to some of the typical stories in the Foundation for Peace collection.39 Other memoirists interned in Rada, such as Nakaya Masataka, w ere not so susceptible to the charms of Russian nature and complained in their memoirs about the conditions, but even such accounts w ere more nuanced 40 than the ones published in the Foundation for Peace. Apparently, the NKVD had learned its lesson a fter the deadly year of 1943, as the archives demonstrate: on 6 October 1943, Sergei Kruglov, then deputy interior minister, issued a list of regulations titled “On Providing Sanitary Serv ice to the Prisoners of War and Special Contingents in Transit Camps and during Railway Transportation.” 41 This document
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Figure 4.1. Medical treatment of an internee at Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka. GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
was followed by a string of orders and directives from the NKVD and the Soviet health ministry (Narkomzdrav).42 A number of “rehabilitation camps” (ozdorovitel’nyi lager’) where captives could recuperate—a special camp category that had not existed before—were opened late in 1944. Medical treatment improved, and medicines were made more readily available. Surprising in this respect, however, are both the chaos and neglect remembered so well by the Japanese internees during their transportation to the USSR and the number of deaths during the winter of 1945–1946. If the NKVD had truly learned its lesson in 1943–1944, why was the transfer and internment of the Japanese former soldiers in the autumn of 1945 so disorganized? It seems that interning the Japanese had not been on the cards until Stalin’s change of heart in August 1945, which resulted in unpreparedness and chaos. However, were it not for the deaths and suffering of the European POWs in 1943, the neglect of the Soviet camp bosses during the transportation and accommodation of the Japanese internees might have been even worse. The comparison aptly demonstrates both the chaos rampant in the wartime and postwar Soviet Union and the value of Axis POWs and internees in the eyes of Soviet leaders. After the war ended, the Soviet Union was no longer
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bound by the “mutual hostage f actor” in its negotiations with any of defeated powers, so “utilitarian considerations . . . took precedence” over international law.43 Any concerns for morality on the part of political and military leaders w ere overwhelmed by the feelings of righteous indignation of a nation that had lost an enormous number of its own citizens to the war and now felt justified to do as it pleased with the enemy that, in the eyes of the leaders and the p eople, had caused t hese deprivations. Moreover, Nazi Germany had shot, starved, and worked to death 3.1 million Soviet POWs, according to conservative estimates: “The German prisoner-of-war camps in the East were far deadlier than the German concentration camps.” 44 If we take all this into account, it might not be such a far-fetched conclusion to say that both the leaders of the Soviet Union and its lower-ranking officials did not rush to show lenience to German and other Axis POWs who fell into their hands following the Wehrmacht’s defeat at Stalingrad and other crucial battles. Without justifying their behavior, one can conclude that Soviet officials viewed neglect as perhaps the least cruel punishment for the Germans and their allies in such circumstances. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Soviet officials were deliberately neglectful of and hostile to the last group of foreign enemy soldiers to fall into their hands, the Japanese. The latter occupied a position in the Soviet worldview clearly different from that of the Germans, who for the preceding years had been the Soviets’ principal e nemy, with whom the Red Army had fought a life-and-death war, and killing whom was not only permissible but also desirable.45 The Soviets might not have liked the Japanese, but they hated the Nazis. Contrary to claims made in Japanese memoirs about the nonchalance of Soviet camp chiefs concerning the welfare of their captives, the hardships endured by Japanese internees were caused more by the overall economic conditions and the general chaos in the wartime and postwar Soviet Union than by any calculated and deliberate Soviet effort to make a former enemy suffer. Neglect and outright cruelty were not uncommon, but t here was no organized, systematic, and intentional policy to starve or work the Japanese POWs and internees to death. Soviet negligence may make more sense if we consider that the history of the camp system in the USSR, where forced labor had been used for decades, is distinguished by a chaotic, negligent, and wasteful approach to running camps and managing human resources. Even a cursory study of the camp system in the 1930s and 1940s reveals indecision, miscalculation, incompetence, and mismanagement on many levels of the Soviet economic
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leadership of the camps. In fact, based on the analysis of the Gulag in t hose decades, it is tempting to substitute for the label “planned economy,” widely used to describe the Soviet economic system, the term “badly planned economy”: the examples of bad decision making are too numerous to mention. In recent studies, historians of the camp system have demonstrated that forced labor was never economically profitable, despite countless reports filed by camp chiefs about impressive economic achievements. It is not difficult to understand the reason b ehind this: in the camps with Soviet citizens, people w ere treated according to the principle “if this batch dies, another w ill be sent.” 46 And while cruel treatment of so-called criminal laborers was nothing out of the ordinary in the prewar and wartime Soviet Union, this became especially true as camp populations swelled following the Soviet victory in WWII, with the arrival of new inmates liberated from German POW camps as well as thousands of political prisoners from the newly conquered spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.47 Indeed, for the administrators of Gulag camps, the workforce—consisting of living human beings—was primarily a resource that was divided into four categories. Three corresponded to people who could perform “hard,” “medium,” or “light” physical l abor, respectively, and the fourth contained p eople too weak or sick to work. Eugenia Ginzburg, a Soviet political prisoner who spent almost twenty years in the Kolyma mining camps in the USSR’s far northeast, conveyed this well in her description of her penal colony chief: “He was simply oblivious to [our sufferings] b ecause in the most sincere way imaginable, he did not regard us as human. Wastage among the convict work force was to him no more than a routine malfunction.” 48 Camp chiefs w ere under constant pressure to keep the first two categories of the workforce well populated and the fourth as small as possible. They often had to move to the fourth category and subsequently write off thousands of people who could no longer cope with the onerous work. Writing the incapacitated off was important, because it would otherwise adversely affect the average productivity statistics of the camp. Death rates w ere high throughout the Gulag, reaching 40 percent in some camps. During very difficult periods, people literally died like c attle, unable to cope with the hard work, harsh climatic conditions, and malnutrition. But as long as the reports on paper looked good and plans were fulfilled, the fate of these unfortunate people rarely troubled the camp bosses. One can say that the camp economy, in this sense, was a report economy—no matter how absurd the plans of the Gulag bosses in Moscow were, reports w ere sacrosanct, and everything except the failure to fulfill the plan could be “understood and forgiven.” 49
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Propping up the system and justifying the exploitation of h uman beings was the illusion of cheapness: the availability of crude physical l abor—regardless of its efficiency—meant that the Soviet Union was fixated on the camp economy, even addicted to it. This was perhaps the ultimate reason for the USSR’s desperate attempts to retain foreign POWs for as long as it could, even if it had to use deception, denials, and blatant propaganda. Japanese camp doctor Yamakawa Hayami’s memoir shows that the addiction to forced labor extended also to camps with foreign POWs: “When patient numbers were high, the camp chief suddenly became sullen a fter seeing the daily report. This meant a reduction in his workforce, and it would naturally affect his performance. Ensuring that the labor battalions fulfilled their duties was imperative for him. In his position, t here is no other way but to raise productivity by using the 1,300 POWs at his disposal to the maximum of their capacity.”50 For the workforce itself, understandably, productivity was hardly a priority in the conditions where their very survival was in doubt. Yamakawa wrote about his Japanese patients in the camp infirmary who, knowing that only a high temperature could save them from work assignments, had learned to flick the tip of the thermometer with their thumbnails to raise the mercury level.51 Despite the Soviets’ righteous anger at Axis aggression and their efforts to teach a lesson to former invaders, methods of exploiting and classifying the foreign labor resources w ere fundamentally different from t hose used with domestic laborers. The Soviets w ere driven not so much by domestic economic and penal considerations as they were by a more complex combination of economic reconstruction; foreign policy aims; and, where possible, ideological education. In all this, the Japanese captives occupied a peculiar space. Unlike the European soldiers of the Nazi coalition, the Japanese did not fit the description of an aggressor, a difference that was reflected in the more lenient treatment of Japanese POWs compared to o thers. This treatment—and its perception by the Japanese—is thrown into sharp relief when viewed within the specific context of Soviet-era archives.
JAPAN ESE EXPERIENCES AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE ARCHIVES
Let us analyze what conditions in the GUPVI system meant for the day- to-day existence of Japanese internees and the ways they reported these experiences to their compatriots after returning to Japan. I make three
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claims in this section, based on reading Japanese memoirs in parallel with a broad range of items from Soviet and other archives. First, by virtue of arriving late in the GUPVI camps, the Japanese became part of a badly mismanaged system, but one in much better shape than in earlier years (1939– 1945). Examples from wartime GUPVI camps make clear that the internment of the Japanese, while illegal, cruel, and inhumane, started after the worst had passed, with the possible exception of the winter of 1945–1946. Second, Japanese experiences w ere shaped by unofficial hierarchies that existed among POW groups, in which they occupied a relatively favorable place. Put simply, the archives show that in many situations the Japanese received more lenient treatment in comparison not only to Soviet inmates in the Gulag, but also to foreign POWs from other Axis nations. Consequently, it is possible to claim that of all the groups in the GUPVI, the suffering of the Japanese was the least harsh. Memoirs analyzed in Chapter 3, while not inaccurate, often painted an incomplete picture that focused on Japanese victimhood rather than that of other groups. Finally, POW experiences were significantly influenced by problems inherent in the Gulag and GUPVI systems and the larger Soviet bureaucratic tradition. The most fateful of these was the constant competition, rivalry, and disagreements that occurred both among Soviet agencies and between national and regional officials. This observation helps debunk the myth about the Soviet Union as a quintessentially centralized state where all important decisions were taken in Moscow, while local authorities w ere mainly charged with implementing them. Indeed, there are numerous examples of lower-ranking local officials’ challenging decisions handed down from higher offices. While this competition was not always beneficial to the captives, the demands local authorities made to national ones were often about improving prisoners’ living conditions or increasing their rations—changes that w ere instrumental in making it effective to extract labor from the captives and fulfilling production quotas. When improvements w ere required to fulfill a plan or meet a quota, they could benefit the internees, but when the interagency rivalry got out of hand, it was the inmates who paid the price. I have argued that the decision to intern the Japanese in the USSR was hardly a premeditated one, although the prominent Japanese military historian Hata Ikuhiko has argued otherw ise.52 It resulted from a U-turn dictated by Stalin’s unsuccessful appeal to President Harry Truman to allow Soviet forces to land on Hokkaido and let the USSR play a more prominent role in the Allied occupation of Japan. Thus, within a matter of days the
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NKVD had to make hasty preparations to transport half a million p eople to the already overcrowded GUPVI camp system. When the Japanese entered the GUPVI camps, they overtook the Hungarians as the second most populous group of prisoners, a fter the Germans. The sheer number of Japa nese meant that even after the initial contingent of them was finally moved to Soviet territory, it took the NKVD u ntil at least the summer of 1946 to fully accommodate them in habitable conditions. This process required internal migration within the USSR, moving captives from one island in the GUPVI archipelago to another. Movements between camps thenceforth became a permanent feature of Siberian captivity for all POWs, dictated by a plethora of reasons. And in the initial months a fter being captured, many Japanese had to oscillate between dots on the GUPVI map before settling down for any extended period in a given camp. Once again, this was caused by the unpreparedness of the GUPVI camps in the autumn of 1945 to house an additional army of captives, feed and clothe them, and prepare them as quickly as possible for labor exploitation. It is difficult to substantiate the claim about the existence of a clear hierarchy of enemy POWs in Soviet eyes and to imagine the existence of documents that would explicitly spell out or justify such a pecking order. Nevertheless, t here are examples clearly showing that, while the Japanese internees might not have been favored over o thers in every situation, they often got better treatment. According to a declassified US intelligence report, likely based on interrogations of returning Axis POWs, in the summer of 1946 a group of Italian captives were evacuated from the Oranki camp, located in European Russia on the grounds of the seventeenth-century Oranskii Monastery to the south of the modern city of Nizhny Novgorod. This was to “make room for the Japanese PW [POWs] of the Army in Manchuria,” the report claimed. “Before the last Italian officer left the camp, the first Japanese units arrived.” B ecause of this, the Italian prisoners became aware of their place in the unwritten POW hierarchy: “The Italians immediately noted the difference in treatment shown the Japa nese which [sic] were definitely treated with respect, the Russians justifying this by the clauses of the surrender as opposed to the treatment to which they, and Rumanian and Hungarian PW had been subjected. . . . It is stated that some of the Russian officers claimed that the Japanese would eventually ‘be used’ by the Russians.”53 The report does not spell out the “clauses of the surrender” that guaranteed the Japanese more favorable treatment, nor does it clarify exactly how
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the Russians planned to “use” the Japanese or w hether this intended usage warranted special treatment. Yet the pattern of Japanese inmates being favored over o thers is repeated even in prisons, and even when Soviet military tribunals had convicted the Japanese in question of being war criminals who had committed offenses against the USSR. Testimonies from veteran Gulag inmates attest to this. Rossi wrote that, among other things that he remembered about the Japanese, “their civil demeanor, discipline, and cleanliness was such a contrast to this sordid world that each of these meetings was like a blast of fresh air for me, a calm and serene surprise. For reasons that I never understood, the Soviet authorities had decided not to mix the Japanese officers with the Gulag prisoners. Maybe therein lies one of the reasons why they [the Japanese] managed to keep their integrity and their culture, those values that the Gulag sought to destroy.”54 Hidden in Rossi’s words is an observation of paramount importance to the argument h ere: the NKVD had chosen not to place the Japanese officers in the Gulag proper, thus saving them from the most horrific experiences and encounters. What justified this special treatment? How do we explain the almost caring decision not to put the Japanese in the thick of the Gulag, the vortex that sucked all dignity out of even the most dignified humans? At the moment, little direct archival evidence is available that would provide simple answers to these questions. They might not even be answered if the documents surrounding Stalin’s decision to intern the Japa nese are made public in the future. However, from the evidence available to us, we can piece together the picture b ehind the real Soviet attitudes and plans toward the Japanese. Rossi knew better than anyone the “starving-jackal-like vacancy” of the Gulag inmate. Having spent almost two decades in camps and prisons all over the Soviet Union, he meticulously documented the horrors of camp life in his extensive oeuvre, at the heart of which stands The Gulag Handbook, the magisterial dictionary of Gulag terms—many of which have made their way into modern Russian vernacular. In the book’s preface Rossi mentioned some Japanese names among others: “Hamako, Misao, Mana- Ruri N.”55 At first glance, the names do not reveal much, their surnames shortened to a single letter “N.” However, one realizes that Misao N. must stand for Naitō Misao (Uchimura’s birth name) and that the other names must be those of his wife and c hildren. It turns out that in one of the most unlikely encounters, Rossi shared a cell with Uchimura G ōsuke in Aleksandrovskii Tsentral, a tsarist prison outside Irkutsk, and the two became
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lifelong friends. It was an improbable friendship between two men inhabiting completely different, even opposed, universes yet connected by the bitter fate of Stalinist inmates and a shared fascination with Russia. Such an encounter was possible only in the Soviet camps after WWII, at the intersection between the Gulag and the GUPVI—where foreign POWs shared cells with Old Bolsheviks, Comintern functionaries, or young Chinese communists. The commissars might have intended “to humiliate and punish” Rossi “by locking [him] up with ‘Oriental monkeys,’ ”56 in the hateful term used by his Soviet captors, but instead they enabled a unique bond between foreigners trapped in the bowels of the Gulag. The commissars had inadvertently put in touch the different worlds of the expansive Stalinist camp and prison system, exposing hierarchies as well as relations of power and, above all, humanity and solidarity among the inmates. Another Aleksandrovskii Tsentral inmate wrote about this humanity and the preferential treatment afforded to the Japanese. Karlo Štajner, an Austrian-born Yugoslav communist who spent, as seen in the title of his memoir, Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, wrote of his year-long stint at the prison in 1949. Brought to the point of starvation by the meager prison rations, Štajner and his cellmates had demanded and managed to secure the right to be sent money from the outside. However, “we noticed that since we received money, the soup had gotten very thin, with rarely more than two or three slices of potato in a bowl. When we asked the guard why, he said: ‘There are some Japanese prisoners next door; they’re not getting any outside support. We’re giving them the thick part of the soup, and you’re getting the thin part.’ We never again complained about the thinness of the soup.”57 The money Štajner received came from the modest funds scraped together by his struggling wife. Following a rule agreed on by his cellmates, he put part of the money into a common pot, which was intended to help those who could not receive any money. This was not a rule set by the prison administration but one established by inmates, a sign of the humanity that these Gulag prisoners had managed to preserve in the most inhumane conditions. The rule was common throughout the Gulag and GUPVI, and it was also mentioned by Holl in his memoir when he wrote, “As before, the few roubles that we earn every month are thrown into a pot.”58 Indeed, had the rule been dictated by the prison administration, the prisoners would probably have ignored or resisted it. Perhaps mindful of this humanity, the authorities used it as a means of countering prisoner protest and to justify the privileges afforded to the Japanese, and it worked without fail.
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The Yiddish poet Israel Emiot testified to a rather different experience of the Japanese in Soviet prisons. During his interrogation period, Emiot— accused of Jewish nationalism—found himself in a cell with three Japanese generals and a Russian thief, Volodya. The latter was a blatnoi—a member of a higher caste of professional prisoners in the Soviet penal system who often terrorized others. His b rother had been killed at the Soviet-Japanese border skirmish at Lake Khasan in 1938 and Volodya took every opportunity to harass the Japanese. Emiot wrote: “The three Japanese tried to live in peace with him. They overlooked the dirty names he called them, they treated him to their good cigarettes. But it was no use.” Eventually, to the g reat relief of the Japanese, Volodya succeeded in getting his demands met: “Get t hose Fascists out of there or move me to another cell!”59 Nevertheless, an odd episode such as this aside, Japanese prisoners were treated with dignity, if not respect, in interrogation cells. Even thieves like Volodya could not abuse them the way, say, thieves in Shalamov’s tales of the Gulag treated other inmates.60 Holl confirmed this careful treatment extended also to Germans: “The brutes rule here with fists, and I am relieved that the Bladnois [sic] generally h andle us Germans somewhat more 61 carefully.” When we consider this treatment, the contrast with the terms in which the Japanese survivors wrote about their Siberian ordeal becomes evident. Granted, the comparatively lenient treatment by the Soviets of the Japa nese did not make the Japanese suffering more bearable. There can be no denying the brutality of the experience, the overwhelming horror and suffering it inflicted on every inmate, regardless of nationality. Nevertheless, how do we explain the contrast between how the Japanese survivors described their experiences and how t hese experiences are reflected in Soviet archives or testimonies of non-Japanese inmates? As we have seen, themes ubiquitous in Japanese memoirs w ere connected by the thread of suffering, sacrifice, bodily pain, and malnutrition. This focus on hardship in many memoirs filtered into a popular view in the broader Japanese society, summarized h ere by the historian Abe Gunji: “Life in internment in Siberia was the worst in the world; internees w ere deprived of their basic rights as h uman beings and forced to live at the limits of human capacity.” 62 What I call the literature of hardship—a category that contains the majority of Japanese narratives of the Siberian Internment—explains the predominance of the national lens in writing the history of the internment, and the broader experiences of WWII, in Japan.
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LITE RAT URE OF HARDSHIP
Japanese internee memoirists might not have known about the policies analyzed above or of their favored position among the POWs. But in writing their accounts they used a certain amount of self-censorship, favoring the stories of suffering and victimhood. This is reminiscent of the “self-discipline” demonstrated by soldiers in the WWII field diaries analyzed by Aaron William Moore, with the difference that the Siberian memoirs were put to paper years and sometimes decades a fter repatriation.63 A soldier’s diary was a “crucible wherein the author attempts to reconcile through the medium of language often silent individual desires with the articulate demands of society, media, and the state.” 64 Similarly, in their memoirs the former Siberian internees often tried to strike a balance between what they wanted to tell and what was expected from them by Japanese society. For example, the editors of the Foundation for Peace collection who unified the accounts of military personnel, overseas repatriates, and Siberian internees into a mammoth, fifty-six-volume collection, referred to these accounts collectively as “Memoirs of the Experiences of Hardship” (kurō taiken shuki). The emergence of such narratives of hardship could not happen without some standardization, unification, and institutionalization—in short, nationalization—of memories. Memoir writing during the postwar period, like diary writing during the war, was a way for former internees to assert their subjectivity, the way they viewed society and constructed their own roles in it.65 It is true that for the majority of the memoirists, putting pen to paper decades a fter repatriation was a way to bequeath the truth as they saw it. For a few of them, it was a chance to confront what they saw as distorted history. Yet in the polarized world of the Cold War, the internees’ perceptions of truth and memories of the past w ere u nder the constant influence of narratives and norms that dominated the public debate. Therefore—at least in the early postwar years that coincide with the timeframe of this book—t he memoirs also reflect the pressure under which the returnees came once they w ere back from the country that was now Japan’s main ideological enemy. It is this rhetorical confrontation between the memoirists and the larger society and the necessity to reconcile individual histories with dominant discourses of the day that make internment memoirs such an interesting historical source. We saw above that food (or the lack thereof) was an important point of reference based on which Japanese readers of memoirs constructed opinions
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about and attitudes t oward the Soviet Union. Reading accounts in which the authors simply claimed that they had been hungry in the camps b ecause the Soviets did not provide enough food, without clarifying any of the reasons, a Japanese unfamiliar with the circumstances in the USSR at the time might have been justified in feeling indignation at Soviet authorities. It is this one-sidedness—a product of reporting something without fully explaining the circumstances or underlying c auses, and without regard to context and nuance—that I would like to address here. For example, the memoirist Inomata Kunio described the luxurious feast he and other selected “activists” were served at the antifascist school in Vladivostok: “For the first time in months, I ate warm black bread, thick soup, and salted fish. For me, it was nothing short of the food served at a formal reception (kangeishoku).” 66 Yet Inomata did not elaborate on the fact that it was thanks to his selection as a student at the propaganda school that he could enjoy such a sumptuous meal. Better and more abundant food was one of the powerful incentives used by camp political officers in making the Japanese more pliable to Soviet schooling. The more shocking memories also tended to live on longer in the public mind and w ere likely to attract readers, making it more difficult to revise them over time. Many accounts deliberately emphasized the miserable conditions experienced by the internees, perhaps to arouse the readers’ pity. We should therefore observe the problems and hardships of the Japanese within a broader context, without justifying Soviet decisions. The early years of the internment coincided with a period when Soviets were still starving in great numbers. The devastating famine of 1946–1947, research on which started only in the early 1990s, was decimating the Soviet population. Caused by a range of factors—the economic destruction of the war, a dramatic decline in agricultural production, the lack of h uman resources in agriculture, the drought of 1946, and Stalin’s economic policies that prioritized industrial over agricultural development—the famine took the lives of around two million Soviet citizens, most of them rural people.67 This number is only an estimate by Russian historians, yet it provides an idea of the scope of the catastrophe. Besides statistics, there are also reports of destitution of the Soviet p eople in early postwar years, perhaps one of the best of which is an episode provided by Takasugi Ichirō in his famous account. When Takasugi could not finish his portion of gruel (kasha) because of a bad stomach, a Soviet officer named Golubovskii approached him, saying, “If you are not going to eat it, give it to me.” Although Takasugi “was dumbfounded at the
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sight of a Soviet officer with first lieutenant shoulder stripes begging a POW for food,” he offered the remains of his meal to Golubovskii. The latter, a German POW camp survivor, ate the food before giving the watching Takasugi a comparison to contemplate: “You [Japanese] are lucky. When I was in the German [POW] camp, all I had for the whole day was fifty grams of bread and some watery soup. And some whipping, for sure. We were beaten at every opportunity.” 68 This revelation made Takasugi think for the first time about the Soviet officers’ daily struggles. Amid such widespread want, it was perhaps inevitable that the Soviet leaders faced difficulties in feeding foreign POWs and internees. However, few Japanese memoirs considered life outside the camp walls and the plight of ordinary Soviets. We should thus look elsewhere for the missing parts of this history. Unlike Japanese memoirs, Soviet archival documents reveal repeated attempts of camp authorities to meet, whenever possible, the Japa nese internees’ needs. This approach started as early as October 1945 in Manchuria, even before the transportation of the majority of Japanese to the USSR. In an example cited by camp chiefs as a sign of consideration toward the former enemy, many camps with Japanese internees substituted for 300 grams of bread an equal amount of semirefined rice, as well as replacing meat with fish and adding miso paste to the internees’ diets.69 They failed to mention, however, where this miso or dried vegetables, kelp (kombu), dried plums (umeboshi), and other Japanese foods came from. Of course, they had been appropriated from the Kwantung Army warehouses. There are memoirs of internees who had to enlighten puzzled camp officials as to the nature of these exotic products.70 Another report, by members of a commission investigating the conditions of camps in Mudanjiang, where the Japanese w ere kept before their transportation to the USSR, harshly criticized the efforts of their colleagues: “The POWs are h oused in half-destroyed sheds, which are dirty. The majority sleep on the bare ground. The POWs do not have the minimally human living conditions and live like animals.” The authors did not shy away from naming and shaming t hose responsible: “Head of Camp No. 1 Lt. Col. Kovalenko and his deputy for political affairs Zagorel’skii, and the head of Camp No. 2 First Lt. Liunitskii do not want to work, treating their duties with criminal negligence and keeping the camps in a chaotic state.” 71 Such candid assessments of other agencies’ work were common in Soviet-era interagency correspondence. As the USSR struggled to recover from the devastation and hunger of the war, pilfering of supplies by camp employees was common. This had a
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pernicious effect on the quality and quantity of the food served to the internees. The extent to which this affected the internees’ welfare and their ability to work can be seen in the 23 October 1945 NKVD order titled “On Improving the Measures of Utilizing POW L abor.” Article 2 of the order contained six detailed points on organizing the process of food distribution. Foodstuffs were to be weighed in the presence of a POW officer before being put in the cooking pots. Camp medical officers were to examine the quality of the food along with the POW officer, and a daily portion had to be preserved for quality control. Another stipulation was to shorten the intervals between meals to no longer than eight hours—in some camps it was as long as 12–14 hours.72 A comprehensive report sent by Lt. General Ivan Dolgikh, then head of the Khabarovsk Territory’s department of internal affairs and later head of the Gulag, to Moscow on 28 January 1946 analyzed all aspects and conditions of life in thirteen camps with Japanese POWs. It outlined in painstaking detail the food situation, among other issues, in each of these camps, concluding that “the provision of food in POW camps since their founding has been unsatisfactory.”73 The existence of such reports, while not necessarily conclusive, reflects official concern with the Japanese captives’ nutrition. According to Viktor Gavrilov and Elena Katasonova, the editors of a document collection on the internment, “In terms of food and medical supplies, the Japanese POWs were equated to the serv icemen in the logistical support units (tylovye chasti) of the Soviet Army.” 74 This supply standard was introduced in the spring of 1946, a fter the Soviets had learned the b itter lessons of the previous winter. An April report by Deputy Interior Minister Vasilii Chernyshov and Mikhail Krivenko, the GUPVI chief, acknowledged that the rations prescribed in August 1945 considered “neither the real needs, nor the national specificities” of the Japanese. It recommended increasing the rations from 2,501 to 2,895 calories per day.75 Needless to say, these calories often remained on paper, and in reality the inmates might have received less food. Nevertheless, their increase demonstrates the Soviets’ willingness to improve the living conditions of their foreign charges. Such an increase in daily rations was an unmissable propaganda opportunity for the camp authorities among their Japanese charges and in reports to higher echelons of power. In a 6 December 1946 report, the military official of the Soviet Thirty-Ninth Army who was responsible for the repatriation of the Japanese referred to his charges’ positive reactions to the change in rations, writing that it “significantly lifted their spirits. As a result
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of this change, many Japanese are now entitled to provisions much better than what they had when they first arrived. . . . Rallies have been held on the topic, where speakers emphasized the Soviet government’s humanism and its g reat care for t hose being repatriated, despite the difficult food situation and the drought in the country.” 76 Starting in 1947, when the Soviet efforts to improve camp conditions gradually began to bear fruit, food in the camps became both more plentiful and more nutritious. These improvements cost the Soviet economy. A string of orders and reports exchanged between Moscow and regional camp authorities demonstrates the urgency with which Soviet officials treated the issue of the Japanese captives’ nutrition, as well as a series of crucial mea sures taken in the first two years of internment. The Council of Ministers’ top-secret Resolution No. 828–338ss, on improving the conditions of foreign POWs and preventing mortality among them, was issued a fter the disastrous winter of 1945–1946. The document standardized the daily ration of food for the Japanese POWs: conscripts and noncommissioned officers each received 350 grams of bread, 300 grams of rice, 150 grams of cereals or flour, 50 grams of meat, 150 grams of fish, 800 grams of vegetables, and 30 grams of miso paste.77 These amounts constituted the minimum, and additions or extra amounts could be given according to the camp, industry, geographical region, or work performance of the internee. In addition to general foods, during the early years of internment supplements such as brewer’s yeast were provided to t hose suffering from dystrophy and malnutrition to supply them with the nutrients they lacked.78 Even after this resolution was issued, the situation was not completely u nder control. Gavrilov and Katasonova have written: “The leadership of the MVD was forced to introduce a temporary state of emergency in POW camps between January and March 1947. . . . A situation headquarters (operativnyi shtab) was created at the GUPVI MVD, and 70 percent of POWs in the third category of working capacity were admitted for the period of three months into rehabilitation teams, while the remaining 30 percent were to be used only for duties inside the camps.” 79 However slowly, these persistent efforts eventually bore results. The Soviet interior ministry’s Regulation No. 613 of 22 September 1947, for example, acknowledged the tangible improvements resulting from providing camps with more food and outlined further steps to take to eradicate the violations of the ministry’s rules.80 This improvement in conditions was acknowledged in Japan, too. Starting in 1948–1949, Japanese newspapers
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closely analyzed the physical condition and appearance of former internees upon their return from the Soviet Union.81 Even US Occupation authorities admitted in a 1949 report that food in the Soviet camps had become “more abundant and palatable. Living quarters, medical, bathing and recreational facilities were bettered.”82 Although the situation with food was critical mostly in the first two years of the internment and gradually improved a fter 1947, most memoirists still chose to prioritize these initial hardships in their accounts, writing about them with the fascination of someone who had survived them. One could think that stories of hunger would be limited to memoirs of early repatriates who came back in 1946–1947 and thus witnessed the worst period of internment. Yet such stories are also presented by those who spent four or five years in Soviet camps. Uchiyama Takashi’s testimony about “grown men all gathered in barracks talking proudly about their regional food” is an interesting example, b ecause he spent four years in the Soviet camps and must have witnessed the improvements described above. “It is hard to imagine another group of men who, sitting in a circle on their day off, remembered not their wives and children but food of their hometowns,” he added.83 Takeyama Takejirō remembered receiving only 150 grams or so of bread a day.84 While this could have been the minimum amount the internees in his camp received during the hungry months, it is hard to believe that camp kitchens could get away with giving internees less than half of their daily bread ration for any extended period of time. Experiences of hardship lived longer in memory than other experiences: Uchiyama confessed that “despite the improvements in the third year, even t oday I remember the ‘grudge about food’ I felt back then.”85 Another theme widespread in the memoirs was cold weather. Memories of frigid Siberia left deep scars in the imaginations of the internees and those who never experienced internment but read internee recollections. References to cold, hunger, hard work, and political education w ere exaggerated during the postwar decades, first by sensationalist newspapers and then by sympathetic essayists writing in monthly magazines, as well as many fiction writers who referred to the internment experience using the terms first pop ularized by the returnees. To provide one example, the temperature often cited by the internees in their memoirs is -50˚C—though some wrote, incredibly, about -70˚C.86 So ubiquitous is this number in the memoirs that it seems the authors themselves must have believed it. For the average reader in Japan, -50 ˚C is a temperature beyond comprehension. Yet while t here were camps in Siberia and the Far East where winter temperatures fell as
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low as -50˚C, this was hardly the average winter temperature for the w hole of the Soviet Union that could be mentioned as part of everyday reality. Even if temperatures did reach -50˚C, the internees had no thermometers at their disposal, so it is doubtful that they would have been able to establish every instance of such temperatures. The camp chiefs did not always publicize daily temperatures, for d oing so could be against their interest— especially when the temperature fell below -35˚C, the lowest temperature suitable for outside work in most camps, as established by regulations.87 This means that the temperature could only be felt by internees or judged according to other external factors. For example, Watanabe Nobuo remembered a cold and snowy day in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, writing, “With my skin I could feel the temperature was around -40˚C.”88 Granted, with some experience and knowledge it was not impossible to guess the outside temperature. Rossi described his method of measuring the cold: “It is already -40˚C, and any further drop in temperature will be felt immediately. No need for a thermometer. It is as if our bones w ere freezing. When it is -50˚C, one has to make an effort in order to prevent eyelids from sticking together and every time one takes a breath, it is as if knives were piercing your lungs.”89 But Rossi spent nineteen winters in the Gulag, some of them in Norilsk, above the Arctic Circle. While some Japanese w ere interned in Norilsk and other frigid areas such as Magadan, they w ere only a minority of all the internees. Therefore, perhaps it is not an exaggeration to claim that the ubiquity of -50˚C is most likely another example of retrospective memory, whereby writers furnished the fine detail a fter the real experience, relying on external information as much as on their own memory. Still, the cold in Siberia was something out of the ordinary for the Japa nese, even t hose who had spent years in northeastern China with its frigid winters prior to being captured by the Soviets in August 1945.90 And while extremely low temperatures alone could not account for the high mortality rates among the Japanese, they contributed a great deal to the deaths during the harsh winter of 1945–1946, causing extreme alarm among the Soviet interior ministry’s bureaucrats. In a February 1946 NKVD dispatch addressed to Beria and titled “Receiving and Accommodating Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union,” Kruglov, newly appointed minister of the interior, wrote that of around 300,000 POWs who had been medically examined, 19.5 percent w ere “weakened” and 5.9 percent were sick. Nearly a third (29.7 percent) of all internees suffered from marasmus—severe malnutrition or withering caused by the deficiency of proteins in the body.
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According to the chart included in the dispatch, more than 7,300 Japanese internees had died in the two months of December 1945 and January 1946 alone, while the total number of t hose sick and unable to work stood at around 25,000 in February. The minister candidly outlined the reasons for the high numbers of deaths and illnesses: marasmus was caused by “the insufficiency of the daily food rations, which do not compensate for the energy spent, especially for the POWs performing physically demanding duties in severe environmental conditions.”91 A senior Soviet official’s describing the cold as “severe” is a useful indicator of the winter’s harshness. In combination with the unpreparedness of facilities for accommodating hundreds of thousands of internees dressed in summer outfits, the winter produced deadly results. Kruglov wrote that despite a series of measures to improve the accommodation and sustenance of the Japanese POWs, their physical condition continued to deteriorate. Therefore, “to preserve the pool of labor and to effectively utilize the POWs in the industry,” Kruglov deemed it necessary to increase daily food allowance for the “weakened” and those involved in the hardest labor; create special food quotas for those suffering from malnutrition; transport POWs from Siberia and Far East to regions with “more customary climatic conditions”; and “repatriate Japanese POWS who are ill, weakened, and unable to work.”92 In April 1946, in an apparent response to Kruglov’s suggestions, the Soviet government adopted a range of measures to alleviate the situation of the Japanese POWs. Prominent among these was the above-mentioned Resolution No. 828–338ss, which, among other measures, ordered that weak and diseased Japanese POWs and other internees be transported to northern Korea and the Soviet republics of Central Asia—a reas with climates a lot more “customary” for the Japanese than the snowy plains and forests of Siberia. A 26 April 1946 report provided a table showing that 20,000 weak and diseased POWs had been selected for transportation to northern K orea from eight eastern regions of the USSR.93 Those who remained in Soviet territory were sent to “rehabilitation camps.” The effects of cold weather were made worse by the lack of clothing appropriate for the season. Captured in August and September 1945 in their summer uniforms, the Japanese w ere still wearing t hese light outfits on their way to the camps. By the time many reached their final destinations, the cold had already started, increasing the number of diseases and mortality rate during the first winter. Tsuchibashi Haruyoshi remembered that his clothes had not been exchanged until they had turned into “dirty rags,” their
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hems always teeming with lice.94 In reports to their superiors, regional camp officials candidly admitted that in the first two years of the internment, the situation with the POWs’ clothing was unsatisfactory. Even when trophy clothing captured in Manchuria was distributed, there was still a scarcity of shoes. In March–April 1946 the camps of the Khabarovsk Territory, for example, established the practice of repairing old valenki, Russian felt boots, to address this deficiency, and repair shops were set up in larger camps. By 1947, the Khabarovsk regional directorate for POW affairs was already providing an uninterrupted supply of clothing and shoes, according to a report.95 The losses of the first winter also meant that the GUPVI had to be better prepared for the winter of 1946–1947. To ensure this, the MVD issued Special Directive No. 4535, which ordered the closing of camps deemed “not ready to accommodate POWs” or too distant from transport networks. Thousands of POWs were transported to southern regions, and thousands more received warmer clothing.96 Documents demonstrate that despite the concerted efforts to improve the POWs’ conditions, the initial experiences of the Siberian cold, to which the Japanese were unaccustomed, lived very long in their memories and became yet another pillar in their stories of suffering. The documents also show that in memoirs, few internees acknowledged the improvements in the facilities and clothing that came as a result of intensive and expensive measures on the Soviet side to curb illness and mortality. This is also true for references to hard work in the memoirs, another theme in the Siberian trinity of suffering. As mentioned above, the NKVD divided the internees into four categories according to their physical condition and ability to handle work assignments. Three of these contained inmates deemed fit to work: first category consisted of people “able to perform any physical work, regardless of difficulty,” second category of people who could perform tasks of “medium physical demand,” and the third of people who could perform only light duties.97 Accordingly, p eople in the first two categories were assigned the more demanding tasks on industrial and agricultural worksites, whereas people in the third category w ere given more moderate daily quotas, often to be fulfilled within camp walls.98 A 28 September 1945 order from Chernyshov to local officials established an eight-hour workday for the internees in the first and second categories.99 In camps where nine-or ten-hour workdays were the norm, the internees too had to work longer hours. Those who could not fulfill their daily quotas in eight hours were forced to stay on after the end of the workday, but for no longer than two hours. Importantly,
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Chernyshov commanded that the local officials “establish personal control over the correct utilization of the POWs to avoid any degradation in their physical condition.”100 One day after the above document was issued, Ivan Petrov, the deputy head of the GUPVI, authorized the issuing of “The Regulations on the Utilization of POW L abor,” which detailed the rules of POW exploitation.101 According to this document, work was “obligatory for all rank-and-file POWs as well as noncommissioned officers.” It was through work that the POWs would “compensate for the expenses of their own maintenance in the camps.” The regulations obliged camp authorities to “compensate the state for the costs of maintaining the camp,” meaning that camp wardens and internees w ere all in it together. Article 17 of the regulations stipulated that “the daily routine should be established to allow no fewer than eight hours of uninterrupted nighttime rest and to guarantee the provision of hot meals three times a day.” However, even a cursory analysis of the memoirs of the Japanese internees reveals that many camps often failed to meet this requirement. The regulations also stated that “the POWs of the first and second categories should be employed only in industrial production” and that it was “strictly prohibited to divert them to other duties.” Not even a month after the regulations had been issued, however, the NKVD sent a telegram to the interior ministries of the u nion and autonomous republics titled “On Expediting the Harvesting of Vegetables,” which ordered those ministries to divert “the necessary number of POWs” from industrial sites to regions growing potatoes and other crops.102 The observation by the famous nineteenth-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin that “the severity of [Russian] laws is compensated by the non-obligatory nature of their observance” was apparently still applicable to the Soviet Union in the 1940s.103 There is a profusion of Soviet state documents that reveal bad planning on the side of officials who often acted in an ad hoc way, based on wishful thinking and in a general atmosphere of incompetence and lack of well- trained employees. General rules were often ignored by individual and impromptu decisions of local managers based on circumstances on the ground. The distribution of power among the Soviet agencies—whereby the NKVD (later, the MVD), the supreme organ with power to make life-and-death decisions about camp populations, rented the workers (both Soviet inmates and foreign POWs) out to state-owned concerns and companies—often led to interagency clashes that had both positive and adverse effects on the well-being and conditions of the internees.104 It is
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Figure 4.2. A Japanese internee working at an industrial facilit y. Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates, Tokyo, Japan.
true that, in this regard, even the foreign POWs and internees were looked at by camp heads largely as working animals whose value for the camp was, first and foremost, in the human-hours that could be extracted from them with minimal costs. Agency chiefs often engaged in bureaucratic warfare with each other for workers. Correspondence between them demonstrates that it was rarely the inmates’ interests that w ere at stake, but t hose of the state organs or industrial enterprises. Despite the demands of the report economy and the supremacy of national over local agencies, the latter enjoyed a level of autonomy resulting from the need to fulfill quotas. In the conditions of a relentless race to comply with state-imposed plans, the buck ultimately s topped with local managers, who rarely pulled their punches in ensuring the fulfillment of their obligations. Amid the chaos of the first winter of the internment, Dolgikh sent a forty- four-page report to Kruglov in which he complained that “70 percent of Japanese POWs transported to Khabarovsk Region in train No. 42360 w ere ill or weakened” and that other troop trains had lower but nevertheless quite high percentages of sick or weak workers that was “a result of unsatisfactory sorting and sanitary treatment of POWs at frontline transit camps.” Dolgikh also criticized the measures of ministries and agencies that were “the biggest consumers of POWs as workers”: the construction ministry (Narkomstroy),
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ministry of the coal industry (Narkomugol’), forestry ministry (Narkomles), and others. The report contained complaints about e very aspect of internees’ lives, including their medical treatment and clothing and the use of their labor. As much as bringing other agencies to task, the authors of such documents often sought to shift blame to o thers and avoid it themselves. To provide more examples, on 26 March 1946 Iosif Radchuk, the deputy minister of the cellulose and paper industry of the USSR, sent a circular letter to the heads of directorates and directors of enterprises about his ministry’s requests for POW labor: “[The MVD] has rejected our requests due to the absence of f ree contingents. Consequently, increasing the number of POWs attending the worksites can be achieved only by improving the physical condition of the POWs who have been temporarily enrolled in rehabilitation groups. Therefore, I order you to assist the camps in improving the wellness of the POWs.”105 Two months later Radchuk sent another circular letter, in which he warned his subordinates about impending inspections by the MVD of camps with POWs working in the enterprises under the control of the Ministry of Cellulose and Paper Industry. Radchuk offered to provide construction materials as necessary, and he then instructed his employees in no uncertain terms “to treat this issue with the utmost seriousness. If a camp is found to be unprepared for the winter, it w ill be liquidated. As a result, you w ill be left without a workforce.”106 In other words, while the MVD made decisions about the POWs’ allocation, ministries and enterprises using POWs as workers w ere responsible for their well-being and day-to-day sustenance. If found wanting, they would lose access to the precious workforce, and their overall performance would suffer as a result. Ministries could also be deprived of their workforce as a result of the MVD’s decision to mobilize the POWs for other objectives, often for other ministries or industries. Thus, on 2 November 1947, Kruglov instructed Yevgenii Chekmenev, the deputy minister of state-owned farms (sovkhoz), to “increase attendance of POWs in cotton harvesting to 1,300 p eople. Following the completion of harvesting, t hese POWs will be transferred to work in the coal-mining industry.”107 These POWs had been earmarked for a transfer earlier, but in a September letter Nikolai Skvortsov, the sovkhoz minister, had personally requested Kruglov “to issue an urgent directive to suspend the transfer of the POWs u ntil a fter the completion of cotton harvesting.” To demonstrate the importance of keeping the 1,300 Japanese, Skvortsov emphasized in his letter that the Pakhta-Aral cotton farm in modern Kazakhstan, where the POWs worked at the time, was the “largest
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cotton farm in the USSR with 5,000 hectares of cotton fields.”108 In the same month Skvortsov sent a similar request to suspend the transfer of POWs working in the rice-growing sovkhoz in Daubikhinsk, the Soviet Maritime Province, since “the significant shortages in workforce jeopardize the fulfillment of rice harvesting plans.”109 Despite—or perhaps b ecause of—this chaos and competition, we learn from the documents that the POW workers w ere treated with care. Foreign POWs and internees—even the hated Germans—often enjoyed better facilities, food, and care than the Soviet inmates did.110 It is hard to imagine the Soviet leaders expending as much effort and resources on improving the conditions of millions of their own citizens in the Gulag camps as they did to better the lives and housing of foreign captives. Of course, this is not to claim that humanist and moral considerations were behind this special treatment. Rather, the chief reason for this concern for the well-being of foreign POWs and internees lay in the need to preserve a healthy workforce and the Soviet leaders’ acute sensitivity toward the country’s image on the international stage. Pressure from the international community had a significant impact on Soviet decisions, forcing the Moscow leaders to improve the conditions of POW camps. Another important consideration was making the POWs more receptive to reeducation, as we see in Chapter 5. ■ ■ ■
On the last day of the summer of 2018, I boarded a late-night sleeper train in Moscow’s Paveletsky Station, and after eight hours I arrived in the old Russian city of Tambov. I spent the following day in a car, driving around the eastern outskirts of the city with my cousin, Botir Shaymardanov, who has lived in the area most of his life. My goal was to find the place where Camp No. 188, at Rada, had stood in the middle of the birch forest. We mostly relied on Google Maps, but we often had to ask people directions. It was easy to miss the International Memorial POW Cemetery at Tambov- Rada, hidden in the green woods just off the R208 highway, but a local person directed us toward it. At the heart of the memorial complex we found a marble inscription in Russian: “In memory of prisoners of war resting in the forest near Rada.” In concentric circles around the marble plaque were black crosses and disparate monuments erected by the governments of those resting prisoners’ countries and inscribed in German, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, French, or Italian. In the northern end of the cemetery, somewhat detached from the others, I found the Japa nese obelisk, erected in March 2017, inscribed with the large characters that read “A Monument to
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the Deceased Japanese.” Surprisingly, the obelisk did not mention “POWs” (horyo), opting instead for the more neutral term “deceased” (shibōsha). At the Rada railway station, described in many a Japanese memoir, I found the old wooden station building constructed in the late nineteenth century, the last of its countless layers of light blue paint peeling u nder the sun. This was the building that had welcomed the Japanese to Rada, and somewhere under the peeling paint was the layer of blue they had witnessed upon their arrival. Here I had a chance encounter with an elderly local person named Aleksandra Maksimovna Vorobiova. Born in 1933, she shared her childhood memories of seeing Japanese captives being marched to work in the mornings. The guards convoying the POWs, who did not want schoolchildren coming near the Japanese, would reproach them with the words, “Children, either you go first, or let us pass.” Vorobiova also remembered the trains loaded with rice for the Japanese at a time when the locals could only dream of eating rice.111 Shimada wrote in his memoir that he was greeted by the “camp entrance under a wooden arch emblazoned with the red star, the symbol of the Red Army, and decorated with fresh fir branches,” a fter marching through the birch forest from the Rada station.112 Remembering his Turgenevian depiction of the woods, my cousin and I tried to retrace Shimada’s steps, driving into the birch forest along a dusty and bumpy road. But a fter an hour of searching to no avail, we decided to return, having found no trace of the Rada camp. When their foreign inhabitants w ere all repatriated, the GUPVI camps were converted into warehouses, military garrisons, and in some cases even kindergartens, while the remote ones w ere demolished altogether. I could not find out what happened to the Rada camp, and I saw no trace of it besides the international cemetery across the highway. The cemetery, however, is more than simply a burial ground. It might not even h ouse many of those who died, as the memorial plaque specifies, “in the forest near Rada.” T oday it is one memorial among many that dot the place, including one to the victims of Nazism that stands directly opposite the Rada station. The ground around the Rada forest is no doubt strewn with the remains of the many German, Romanian, Hungarian, Japanese, and other captives, the remnants of a global war commemorated today by the national slabs of stone carved with inscriptions in various languages and scripts. The cemetery of multilingual monuments is a tangible reminder of how even the international conflagration that brought together in this Rus sian forest the men and women from the ends of the world is today told in national languages, through the lenses of respective national communities.
C H A P T E R FI V E
THE SKILLFUL APPLICATION OF PROPAGANDA PRINCIPLES POWs AND SOVIET REEDUCATION
How the Soviets accomplished the radical change in the thinking of a substantial segment of the Japanese people is a fascinating study of the skillful application of well-known propaganda principles. —US report on the communist indoctrination of Japanese POWs
The above quote is from a 1949 GHQ report, one of many put together by the US Occupation about the growing number of brainwashed Japanese repatriates arriving in Japan from the USSR and their potentially subversive roles in occupied Japan. T hese reports demonstrate the GHQ’s alarm about the threat to Japanese stability that t hese late returnees posed, mixed with a grudging acknowledgment of the remarkable transformation achieved by the Soviet propaganda chiefs. In hindsight, both their alarm and admiration w ere misplaced: however skillfully the Soviets applied the principles of propaganda, its effects wore off for the majority of the returnees soon after they rejoined Japanese society. At the time, however, the fruits of the Soviet propaganda education program seemed to be t here for all to see. They created a sense of alarm in Japanese society that was fostered in no small part by the rebellious behavior of some repatriates upon their return. This alarm, fueled by regular media reports that amplified social anxieties, contributed to the prevalent feelings of apprehension about the threat of a communist revolution in Japan. B ehind this anxiety was the belief that the USSR had turned the heads of the Japanese POWs, converting them into fighters for communism. How serious was this threat in reality? Was the Soviet reeducation program for the Japanese as effective and skillful as alleged by US Occupation 149
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documents and mainstream Japanese newspapers? What changes in mentality and behavior did this schooling engender, if any? More important, was the program solely a top-down Soviet undertaking, or did the Japanese play any part in its creation? How did the Japanese captives react to the Soviet efforts to transform their thinking? Answering t hese questions and understanding the suspicion the returnees faced in Japan require us to examine the origins, methods, and objectives of the Soviet reeducation program for the Japanese internees. Specifically, we should critically analyze the Japa nese participation in the program to reconsider the accepted—and widely perpetuated—belief that Siberian internees were passive recipients of forceful Soviet propaganda, just as they w ere obedient sources of labor. If the Siberian trinity of suffering attested to the maltreatment of internee bodies, the Democratic Movement—the shorthand the internees used for the camp propaganda program—targeted the Japanese captives’ minds. Trapped inside the Soviet b ubble with no accurate information about the outside world except for carefully edited and promoted propaganda messages, almost e very internee encountered the Democratic Movement in the camps. The propaganda program’s main objective was to turn former enemy soldiers into true democrats, in the Soviet understanding of the word. The Democratic Movement used persuasion, coercion, and an array of incentives to convince the Japanese captives of three things: the wrongs committed by Japan’s expansionist empire, which they had helped advance and protect; the dangers posed to Japan by its subjugation to American imperialism and associated forces, such as monopoly capitalism; and the advantages of the Soviet political and economic system as an alternative path for a different, socialist Japan. This indoctrination effort explains the predominantly negative and often openly scornful attitudes among the majority of the memoirists toward the Democratic Movement. Besides t hose internees who had stubbornly resisted the Democratic Movement, many who had had a brief brush with Soviet indoctrination in the camps chose to denounce it once they w ere back in Japan. Their stories about Soviet propagandists who took advantage of the internees’ insecurities, boredom, internal divisions, and—most importantly—impatience to return home as soon as possible helped deepen the aversion in Japanese society toward the communist Soviet Union. However, this view about the reeducation of the Japanese in the camps is too simplistic. Reading memoirs against the background of Soviet-era archives demonstrates that the contempt for the Democratic Movement that
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is so ubiquitous in memoirs was not universal in reality. Alongside opportunists who feigned participation in the movement for their own comfort and the many other Japanese who remained indifferent or uncommitted, there w ere those who had genuinely—miraculously, in their own words— found the Soviet way the best one to reorder and revive the Japanese motherland that had gone astray during the war. Through the experiences of Asahara Seiki, Aikawa Haruki, Itagaki Tadashi, and others, we see that the Democratic Movement was not simply a tyrannical Soviet experiment to entice or coerce the Japanese into socialist thinking, but also a struggle for power and control waged daily between the Soviets and their Japanese charges, as well as among the Japanese themselves. I argue that the obvious, if short-lived, success of the reeducation program should not be credited solely to the powers of persuasion and cunning of the Soviet instructors. Rather, the reeducation program should be understood as an undertaking that benefited both the Soviets and their charges. Far from universally resisting the charms of Marxism-L eninism, Japanese internees displayed a range of reactions toward the Democratic Movement. Camp conditions made it impossible for internees to detach themselves completely from participation in the movement. Moreover, the boredom, frustration, anger, and despair they had to endure in the camps compelled many to at least form an opinion of the movement. Therefore, the internees were more than passive recipients or resisters of socialist thought, as the press and memoirs in postwar Japan portrayed them: they w ere conscious actors. Some of them embraced the program, some resisted it bitterly, and the majority simply went through the motions, doing just enough to avoid opprobrium and censure. Their position was well summarized by Uchiyama Takashi, who wrote that “because we were regularly told the good Japanese would return home early, we had no other way but to submit to brainwashing.”1 Indeed, Japa nese memoirs complained more about what they called the “Japanese against the Japanese” spirit of the class struggle in the camps than about Soviet po litical officers who incited this division among the internees.2 The division between manipulative propagandists and reluctant recruits is a false one: we w ill see that even the activists so scornfully depicted in many a memoir hardly composed a united front of Japanese traitors who had sold their souls to the Soviets. They, too, w ere divided by rivalries and eagerly denounced one another to the Soviet authorities. Moreover, the Democratic Movement was not a Soviet scheme to cynically take advantage of the Japanese or for some Japanese to have their way
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with their fellow captives. Amid divisions and distrust, t here was room for a real attraction to the Soviet way of life, as applications for Soviet citizenship analyzed in the concluding section of this chapter certify. To explain this fascination, we should go back to the environment at the end of WWII and the internees’ experiences of defeat. In this respect, the Soviet political officers’ task had been partially accomplished and the groundwork had been laid for their transformative efforts even before the Japanese entered the Soviet camps. Crossing the gulf separating the Japanese imperial ideology from the Soviet socialist one was hardly easy, but it was helped by a confluence of at least three factors. The first was the dejection caused by surrender and e nemy detainment. The crushing of the imperial edifice made it easier to reject the imperial propaganda to which Japanese soldiers had been incessantly exposed during the years of total war. Coupled with the shame of defeat, the realization of the emptiness of that propaganda contributed to the rebellious rejection of wart ime ideology, making a clean start in the postwar world possible. Second, added to the humiliation of surrender was the continuing tyranny of the officer class, whose members refused to acknowledge their fall from grace and took the bitterness and indignity of their collective failure out on their Japanese subordinates. The third factor, the Democratic Movement—with its early emphasis on the struggle against imperialism and capitalist exploitation—made the rejection of imperial ideology smoother, providing ample fuel for resentment and a vocabulary to articulate that emotion. These three factors had a profound psychological influence on the Japanese soldiers, especially t hose who came from the lower classes and agricultural regions. These experiences and transformations are the subject of the following three sections. The first of these traces the Democratic Movement’s origins, particularly its emergence with Japanese participation and Soviet support and its derivation from earlier reeducation programs and antifascist committees for German and other European POWs. The second section digs deeper into the methods and means employed by the Soviets in carrying out political education work (politprosvetrabota) among the Japanese. These methods w ere numerous. H ere, I analyze the main vehicle of Soviet propaganda among the Japanese, the Nihon shimbun newspaper, as well as the divide-and-r ule tactics and carrot-and-stick methods that helped camp chiefs control their Japanese charges. In the third section, I examine Japa nese attitudes and reactions to the Democratic Movement, including the experiences of the activists like Asahara or Aikawa at the forefront of the
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movement, without whose participation it would never have achieved such a level of penetration and influence in the Japanese community in the camps.
ORIGINS OF THE DEMOC RATIC MOVEMENT
What were the true origins of the Democratic Movement, and was it solely a product of Soviet political and propaganda masterminds? Given the Soviet state’s scrupulous attention to propaganda and its attempts to reeducate the millions of European POWs captured and interned before the Japa nese set foot in the GUPVI system, the easy answer would be that it was a top-down initiative of the Soviet authorities. However, the reality was more complex. Takahashi Daizō, a former internee and editor of the prominent memoir collection Records of POW Experiences, claimed the internees themselves first called for “democratization” and antimilitarism.3 Aikawa, in an article published in the JCP magazine The Vanguard (Zen’ei), also described the Democratic Movement as a “mass movement (taishū undō) that emerged independently among the officers and soldiers of the Kwantung Army and other POWs, one that has no parallels in the world. . . . [I]t was extremely natural that this movement emerged quickly among us, considering the rapid improvement in the living conditions of the Soviet people.” 4 This view is echoed by another source with firsthand knowledge of the Siberian Internment and the circumstances surrounding the Demo cratic Movement. In June 1949, the cultural section of the pro-Soviet League for Supporting the Livelihoods of Returnees from the USSR (Sokidō), most of whose members w ere former internees, published a pamphlet ambitiously titled Appealing for the Truth (Shinjitsu o uttaeru). It explained the reasons for the start of the Democratic Movement: “There is an important consideration when speaking about the natural emergence of the Democratic Movement among us, about the cracks that gradually appeared in our militarist consciousness. One could generally take two paths to democratic consciousness: through rigorous theoretical study, or through real-life experience of working with Soviet workers or peasants, without any help of theory. T hose who took the latter path realized (taitoku) democracy in everyday experiences and, without knowing it themselves, w ere compelled to acknowledge the virtues of the Soviet socialist state.”5 This passionately argued “realization” of the democratic w ill may look implausible at first glance. Yet it was not impossible in the internee camps,
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and to disregard completely the POWs’ agency in the propaganda program would be too simplistic. Nevertheless, neither “rigorous theoretical study” nor “real-life experience of working with Soviet workers” was readily available to all internees in their daily camp lives. Instead, what facilitated the spontaneous emergence of democratic consciousness among NCOs and conscripts was a combination of officer tyranny and the realization that, in contrast to the days when they were all subject to IJA military discipline (gunki), now there was an alternative order available to them that they could build based on socialist principles and with support from camp chiefs. As Soviet propaganda chiefs realized the need to stimulate the potential for activism among the internees, they also became aware of personal reasons b ehind the w ill of some internees to organize. As early as May 1946, in a detailed report to Mikhail Suslov, the high-ranking Soviet official who later headed the CPSU Central Committee’s Department for Agitation and Propaganda, an editor at the Nihon shimbun named Major Tumanov optimistically reported on antimilitarist and “democratic” tendencies among mid- ranking officers, NCOs, and conscripts.6 Tumanov mentioned a powerful “fermentation” (brozhenie) of ideas and beliefs among servicemen who were increasingly resentful of the old hierarchies that privileged se nior officers. Encouragingly for the Soviets, some lower-class POWs were more receptive to initial stimulation, revealing critical views of the imperial system and old customs in Japan. Tumanov also talked about groups that emerged spontaneously among “progressively minded” Japanese soldiers and expressed surprise at the level of interest in the Nihon shimbun among Japanese internees. Such reports support Japanese claims that the Democratic Movement emerged first among the Japanese and was then formalized and shaped by the Soviets. In fact, Tumanov complained about the lack of an organized approach to propaganda that could channel the ideas and energies of the Japanese, and he included a list of recommendations: to establish the “Democratic League of Former Kwantung Army Soldiers and Officers”; organize more propaganda events; and engage more officers, especially those reluctant to participate. Even with a burning desire to take m atters into their own hands, could the Japanese have organized themselves to such an extent “without any help of theory, through real life experience,” as claimed by the Sokidō pamphlet, for their realization of democracy to be translated into the practical dimension of a complex indoctrination program? The answer has to be no, for
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without the sanction, sponsorship, and encouragement of the Soviet authorities not only would the Democratic Movement never have reached the state that the GHQ found worthy of praise in the late 1940s, but it would probably not have lasted long. The saplings of ideological zeal that the activists described in lofty terms could never have thrived without the fertile environment provided by the Soviet political officers, just as the efforts of the latter would not have been successful if conditions for them had not been ripe among the Japanese. In this mutual undertaking, the Japanese activists acted as locomotives of democratization amid their fellow POWs. It would be naive to credit the emergence of the program solely to the Japa nese, just as it would be to explain it in unproblematic terms as an harmonious interaction between benign propaganda chiefs and their willing charges. The Democratic Movement was a daily struggle, requiring everyone involved—Soviet political officers and Japanese aktiv members (activists) on the one side and Japanese resisters, nationalists, and saboteurs on the other side—to constantly adapt both tactics and strategy, refine their methods and adjust their goals. T hese constant b attles in the camps w ere where the Cold War struggle r eally started among the internees, where it was a prelude to the political and ideological storms they would experience after returning to Japan. How did the Soviets ensure the success of a reeducation program that had to depend on the active cooperation of at least some Japanese? First, like many cultural and educational initiatives in the USSR, the Democratic Movement relied on tried and tested Soviet methods of indoctrination. Peter Kenez observed in his seminal The Birth of the Propaganda State that “Bolshevik successes [in propaganda] followed from organizational strength, from dogged attention to problems, and, perhaps most importantly, from an ability of the political system to isolate the Russian people from information and ideas that would have undermined the message.” 7 All of these elements w ere easily discernible in the Democratic Movement, which depended on strong organization, meticulous planning, and the nearly complete isolation of the Japanese b ehind the camps’ barbed wire. This was, of course, a separation within a separation: even f ree Soviet citizens had already been cut off from the outside world, and the majority of Gulag and GUPVI camps were located in distant and inaccessible areas. Thus, even when the strict regulations banning contact between internees and local people were eased in the internment’s later years, allowing captives access to areas surrounding the camps, the contacts they
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had with Soviet citizens could hardly provide sufficient knowledge to challenge the Democratic Movement teachings (although what the internees saw often did). Second, besides the propaganda techniques developed over the preceding decades, the Democratic Movement benefited from what the GUPVI had learned in its experience with millions of Axis POWs months before the Japanese arrived in the Soviet camps. By the time the first Japanese crossed into the USSR, political officers in hundreds of camp units had acquired extensive knowledge of and experience with POW behavior and reactions to various reeducation methods. It had taken a long time and methodical observation to acquire this knowledge: the task of reeducating the former enemy was complex and time-consuming. Propaganda chiefs in Moscow and Khabarovsk, and t hose who implemented their directives in camps all over the country, faced a plethora of challenges. Implementing techniques of reeducation and control on such a scale was an undertaking commensurate with the vastness of the camp system for foreigners, but the Soviet state’s organizational power made it possible. The existing party apparatus was essential. In its first three decades, the Soviet Communist Party had ensured that “each construction area and factory shop . . . had its own primary party organization, which maintained a strong party presence through membership and meetings.”8 A network of these organizations spread across the offices and educational and industrial facilities of the w hole nation. Moreover, “propaganda,” a term that carries negative connotations in English, was an activity in which all state employees had to participate in matter-of-factly, and whose importance they never questioned. A good example is provided by Issa Pliev, the Red Army cavalry general who led the Soviet-Mongolian Cavalry-Mechanized Group during the Manchurian offensive. Pliev wrote an account of the relentless drive through the Gobi Desert and the Khingan Range, in which Soviets employed a strategy of lightning advances aimed at catching the Japanese by surprise. How quickly Pliev planned to advance was evident from the fact that, having inspected Mongolian horses, he insisted on having them shod, as “the operation involves such high speeds that for all their endurance the unshod Mongolian h orses could fall on their front legs.”9 Even in such conditions, however, Pliev devoted significant time to political work, having conversations with political officers about the mood among the soldiers, and organ izing seminars, with a “special emphasis on individual work with every soldier.”10 When the Soviet-Mongolian troops captured a Buddhist monastery in Inner Mongolia, a Mongolian political officer named Sodnomjamts “gath-
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ered the monastery monks and locals and told them about the Soviet and Mongolian troops’ liberation mission in Manchuria.”11 Granted, memoirs of Soviet leaders can be filled with what might be called party speak. Nevertheless, Pliev’s serious approach to political work is indicative of the importance he and other Soviet officials assigned to it. According to Aleksandr Kuzminykh, a Russian historian of the internment, the “ideological treatment of enemy soldiers and officers during WWII started even before their capture,” with attempts to weaken the fighters’ morale and persuade them to surrender.12 Efforts to indoctrinate the first surrendering POWs started as early as 1941, a few months into the Soviet-German War. The nationality of these first recipients of propaganda gave the program its name: since in the wartime Soviet Union the name “Germany” was almost always accompanied by the epithet “fascist,” the propaganda program for German POWs had the term “antifascist” attached to it. Thus in 1942 in the Oranki monastery Camp No. 74, the authorities started an “antifascist political school.”13 In 1943 Sergei Kruglov, then deputy interior minister, ordered the start of antifascist training courses at Yuzha Camp No. 165, about three hundred kilometers northeast of Moscow in the Ivanovo Region.14 The order dictated that Ivan Petrov, head of the GUPVI, select the first thousand students, whose rations would be set “according to norms for [members of the] officer corps.”15 Such privileged treatment in the m iddle of the war, when resources w ere scarce, demonstrated the importance of these f uture cadres for the Soviet leaders. Besides the opening of propaganda schools, 1943 also saw the establishment of “antifascist clubs” among POWs according to nationality: a National Committee for a Free Germany and the German Officers’ Union for the German POWs, the “Garibaldists’ Union” for the Italians, and a “Romanian National Bloc” and “Hungarian National Committee.”16 While the Yuzha camp h oused training courses for enthusiastic POWs selected from various other camps, the National Committee for a Free Germany and the German Officers’ Union specialized in training members of the officer class. They w ere based at Camp No. 27 in Krasnogorsk (a Moscow suburb), where the highest- ranking German POWs were interned—including Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the former commander of the Sixth Army, who had been captured at Stalingrad. In short, Soviet propaganda chiefs in 1942–1943 prioritized shorter-term goals, such as influencing the morale in Axis armies and, if possible, facilitating surrenders among e nemy ranks to ease the burden on the Red Army. The Soviets used high-ranking German captives in publicizing petitions to
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end the war and producing leaflets urging German POWs to surrender. Se nior officers were also used to write personal letters to their former colleagues. Thus in January 1944, Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, a former artillery general who had become a Soviet collaborator, penned a letter to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of the German Army Group South, urging him to “consider the future of the German people.”17 It is hard to judge the effect that such letters had on Nazi commanders, but their success in influencing the thinking and actions of Axis soldiers seems to have been negligible. The material superiority of the Red Army eventually proved more persuasive than propaganda leaflets or broadcasts. Their memoirs shed light on German POWs’ attitudes t oward the propaganda program. Adelbert Holl remembered that the Soviets used not only graduates of antifascist schools and high-ranking officer converts, such as the former Luftwaffe ace Heinrich Graf von Einsidel, but also German communist émigrés in educating the POWs in the camps. Holl, who vehemently resisted propaganda efforts, could barely hide his hatred of the émigrés, but he reserved his true indignation for his fellow officers who had joined the propaganda program following their capture. While the program took time to attract members, by the end of the Soviet-German War the number of converted officers was considerable. Holl wrote that his group of diehard resisters was in the minority. Some German converts to communism had succeeded in using the skills acquired in the Wehrmacht. Holl sardonically wrote about one Major Cranz, who “thanked the Red Army and the g reat Stalin for our liberation from Hitler’s yoke. His colleagues applauded again! This same Cranz who had previously been a ministerial head of department in the Propaganda Ministry! If only I had had a pistol, this creature would not have lived another minute!”18 Following the b attle of Stalingrad, as the war turned to f avor the Soviets, propaganda objectives also changed. Starting in 1943, reeducation work among POWs shifted its orientation, aiming for longer-term strategic goals: “(1) to achieve loyal attitudes of the majority of POWs toward the USSR; (2) to ensure the POWs understand their responsibility for the destruction their armies caused on Soviet territory and, consequently, display a diligent attitude to labor in the camps; (3) to educate steadfast antifascists among the POWs, who upon repatriation w ill be able to lead the struggle for the reorganization of their countries according to democratic principles and for the uprooting (vykorchevyvanie) of the vestiges of fascism; and (4) to expose perpetrators of atrocities and fascist elements.”19 In short, during the
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last two years of the war and in the postwar period, the GUPVI propaganda education programs aimed to achieve fundamental changes in the thinking of their recipients, changes that would last beyond the end of their internment and advance the longer-term strategic interests of the Soviet Union in their home countries. The set of policies and methods directed toward the Japanese also makes better sense when viewed through the prism of the above goals. The circumstances in which the internees found themselves, coupled with the efforts of the Soviet political officers and educators, produced impressive, if rather short-lived outcomes.20 Similar to indoctrination efforts with Euro pean POWs, the reeducation program for the Japanese initially had a pronounced antifascist and antimilitarist bent. The difference was in name only: if Germany and Italy w ere classified as fascist, Japan was labeled militarist, and the program for the Japanese was fittingly antimilitarist in nature. Seeking to undermine the core beliefs of the Japanese, the program aimed to break down the entrenched “samurai militarist ideology” and gradually replace it with an allegiance to socialism.21 It relied on scrupulous investigations of the m ental conditions and political moods of the internees of various ranks. Reports to the nation’s leaders about these investigations were no doubt optimistic, but they include some evidence for significant reeducation potential among the NCOs and conscripts. As early as 17 May 1946, once the horrors of the first winter of the internment were past, Kruglov, the interior minister, addressed a report to the supreme leaders of the state—Iosif Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Lavrentii Beria, and Andrei Zhdanov—t itled “On the Mood among the Japanese POWs Kept in the MVD Camps.” Kruglov quoted pro-Soviet statements from officers and ordinary soldiers, such as the speech by a person referred to as sergeant Nishimado, who urged his fellow soldiers “to demand our freedom and achieve it now!” The report also mentioned a POW initiative: “On 15 March 1946, Japanese POWs from the 7th unit of Camp No. 17 in Khabarovsk Territory issued an appeal to all Kwantung Army soldiers and officers, calling [on them] ‘to create antimilitarist democratic groups and start a decisive struggle with militarist elements.’ ”22 One might doubt the sincerity of such statements, but at the very least they are evidence that the Japanese took matters into their own hands in the new surroundings of the GUPVI camps. If we set aside the cynicism of opportunists, we can see that the Democratic Movement gave many internees a chance to critically analyze inter-Japanese relations.
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Figure 5.1. A pro-Soviet activist delivers a speech to other Japanese internees at a rally at a camp attended by Soviet officers. Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates, Tokyo, Japan.
The report is also a testament to how seriously the Soviet leaders took the antimilitarist element from the first months of the internment. Whether the initial impetus came from above or below, the Soviet propaganda organs identified the potential for reeducation among their Japanese charges, as well as the need to encourage and strengthen their rebellious moods. This encouragement did not remain on paper: t hose who demonstrated a willingness and ability to organize other internees w ere provided with support on the ground. In June 1946, the head of the security department of a major camp, reporting on the measures taken to organize the reeducation of its Japanese internees, requested his superior to send to the camp an instructor on antifascist education, three interpreters, and one projectionist to show propaganda films; literature in Japanese; and musical instruments, chessboards, and dominoes “to organize the cultural recreation of the POWs.”23 This standard set of personnel and equipment was representative of what each camp received in launching its own cultural and educational program. Besides the centrally printed Nihon shimbun, each camp had a wall newspaper (stengazeta) written and decorated by hand by the internees.
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Figure 5.2. A Japanese internee decorating a wall newspaper with Stalin’s portrait at Camp No. 255, at Mal’ta, in the Irkutsk Region. Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates.
Viktor Gavrilov and Elena Katasonova estimated that throughout the existence of the Democratic Movement, 21,137 Japanese internees—roughly one in thirty—passed through one or more of the various political propaganda schools and courses.24 This is a considerable number, demonstrating that the Soviets attempted to expand the Democratic Movement beyond the core of left-leaning internees and true believers. However, initial efforts to administer the sacrament of communist ideology w ere met with resistance from senior Japanese officers, who did all they could to put the soldiers and low-ranking officers under them on guard against indoctrination and to keep the imperial Japanese ideology alive among the ranks.25 The camp political officers expended considerable time and effort on what they called “explanatory activities” (raz’iasnitel’nye raboty), which took the form of roundtable discussions using various visual materials: “placards, slogans, montage, caricatures that illustrated the predatory goals of Japanese imperialism in whose interest the latest war had been started, the disenfranchised nature of the Japanese people and [in contrast] the life of the Soviet citizens under socialist form of rule.”26 The organizers took t hese activities so seriously that
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they counted—and meticulously reported—even the number of questions asked by people who attended the discussions.27 Following initial hesitation, the encouragement to debate and discuss soon led to disputations among the Japanese. For the first time, many of those with grievances felt confident enough to speak out against the emperor system and the repressive military rules still in force among the internees. These voices w ere prominently quoted by the Soviets in reports to their superiors, whereas the presence of so-called reactionary elements who resisted reeducation attempts was used to support requests for more resources to improve the efficiency and expand the scope of the program. In the summer of 1946, encouraged by the “progressive elements in the mass of POWs,” “committees of the friends of the Nihon shimbun” (tomo no kai) started to emerge among the internees of Chita Region.28 Committee members engaged in educational activities from collective newspaper reading to attending regional conferences, where the most active among the “agitators” took to stage to renounce militarism and advocate Soviet socialism. These activists constituted most of the internees who were sent to political schools to deepen their knowledge of communism and to further the propaganda message first among their fellow captives and later in Japan. They graduated as instructors and “agitators” who helped camp political departments in their day-to-day propaganda work. The messages conveyed to the internees underwent significant changes from the early days of the internment toward its end. If in the first years the emphasis was on antimilitarism—with peculiarly Soviet critiques of capitalism and imperialism—in later years the messages acquired a conspicuously antiemperor tone. This was consistent with the Soviet Union’s evolving international stance on Japan, which emphasized the need to try the Japa nese emperor for war crimes. This stance culminated in a 1950 Soviet proposal to the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and PRC to appoint “a special international military court” to try the emperor and several military officers for establishing Japan’s biological warfare program.29 Itagaki provided a vivid example of how this antiemperor standpoint translated into propaganda messages when he recounted a debate he had with members of the Youth Action Group (Seinen kō dō tai) in his camp in Khabarovsk in 1949. “What is the emperor?” his interlocutors asked him. “Wasn’t it the emperor who started the war? How many soldiers have been murdered in the emperor’s name?” Itagaki confessed he was lost for words and could do nothing but cast down his eyes.30
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Figure 5.3. An activist and a political officer at Camp No. 255, at Mal’ta. Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates.
Yoshida Kōhei described in stark terms the shift in some Japanese internees’ thinking and allegiance: “The aktiv members’ motherland was the Soviet Union, whereas the real motherland of Japan was in fact an e nemy nation. Moreover, they pledged their loyalty to Generalissimo Stalin; the emperor, to whom they had previously devoted their lives, was now the e nemy symbol.”31 Proletarians of the world w ere expected to profess loyalty to the USSR, the “socialist motherland of the world proletariat,” and similar allegiance was expected from the Japanese converts and their fellow captives in the Soviet camps.32 Initial efforts, therefore, sought to cultivate a recognition of the advantages of the Soviet system, which would gradually evolve into admiration for and loyalty to it. In the later years of the internment, the messages (mainly presented in Nihon shimbun articles) focused more on Japan itself, portraying the situation t here as desperate and decadent and putting the blame for both the past war and current difficulties on the emperor and what w ere called his American masters. As Cold War tensions increased, one of the main points of discord between the United States and the USSR—t he role of Emperor Hirohito in wart ime and postwar Japan—was soon translated into a propaganda message to the Japanese internees who would one day return to Japan. They were told that making
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Figure 5.4. A caricature on a barracks wall depicting the Japanese emperor as a many-armed Buddhist figure, with each arm representing different interests: the bureaucracy, landowners, financial conglomerates, banks, and so on. To the right of the caricature is a poster titled “This Is What the Emperor System Is.” GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
Japan democratic (that is, turning it into a workers’ and peasants’ nation) would be impossible without abolishing the emperor system. Political officers also used less militant forms of propaganda and persuasion. Culture was a crucial medium for inculcating the Japanese with the virtues of the socialist form of government. Following a long-established Gulag practice, POW camp chiefs saw the benefit of directing the captives’ creative energies into amateur performances and conveying propaganda messages through alternative media. “The main objectives pursued by amateur art activities include impressing in the minds of the POWs the spirit of democracy and the essence of Marxist-Leninist art, to ensure the POWs’ cultural recreation and to mobilize them for antifascist activities,” wrote P. Naumov, the Khabarovsk Territory’s chief political officer, in a July 1947 order to his local subordinates.33 The goal for cultural recreation was achieved more easily than o thers, with news about some activities reaching as far as Tokyo. For example, the 24 October 1947 issue of the Tokyo Times published an article titled “Forget Your Hardships and Longing for Home:
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Figure 5.5. A concert band consisting of Japanese internees at Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka. The slogan above the band reads “Long live the Soviet Union, the protector of peace and freedom around the world.” GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
A Siberian Vaudeville Contest among the Internees.” Remembering his camp experiences, the former lance corporal and recent repatriate Matsuno Hisayoshi told the reporter, “Life in the camp is something you have to experience in order to fully understand it. Amid the all-encompassing despair, the public performances w ere the best t hing.”34 The article reported on the regional musical and theatrical contests among the internee troupes organized by Soviet camp chiefs and received enthusiastically by the captives. Following the custom of using the talents of renowned Soviet composers, poets, and singers purged in the 1930s in organizing cultural activities in the Gulag, GUPVI bosses recruited professional musicians and artists from among the Japanese captives to help create “amateur art activities.”35 Many internees remembered attending a concert conducted or performed by eminent Japanese musicians such as the violinist Kuronayagi Moritsuna or the cellist Inoue Yorichika.36 Masuda Kōji, the author of the song “Ikoku no oka” (see the Introduction), first presented it to his fellow internees in such a camp concert.
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Sport was another medium for organizing the captives’ recreation and ensuring greater satisfaction with their camp lives. Years before the start of the Siberian Internment, Gulag authorities “organized physical exercise and sport and encouraged as many people as possible to participate” by arranging soccer matches between teams of inmates.37 This practice was continued in POW camps with the Japanese; not only did camp chiefs encourage the internees to play games common in the USSR, such as soccer or volleyball, they also allowed the Japanese to engage in traditional sports such as sumo.38 The internees were even allowed to play baseball, considered a “bourgeois” sport in the USSR, for engaging in which one could be arrested during the Great Terror.39 A story in the Tokyo Times dated 24 October 1947—included in a Soviet report about Japanese media reaction to the internment—quoted a repatriate named Narita Seiji, who had once been a pitcher in the Keiō University baseball team. According to Narita, who was interned in Rada and Elabuga camps, “A team of baseballers gathered [at the Elabuga camp]: two former members of the Waseda University team, and from Keiō — myself and Sakai. So we organized a Waseda-Keiō match.” 40 This rivalry, dating back to 1903, “was considered by the Japanese to be one of the three great collegiate sports events in the world—a long with the Cambridge- Oxford regatta and the Harvard-Yale gridiron classic.” 41 In other words, John J. Harney’s claim that “in 1963 Waseda and Keiō Universities imported their famous Sōkeisen rivalry to Taiwan, playing the games outside Japan for the first time” could be questioned; at least informally, the Waseda-Keiō rivalry had been exported to Siberia over a decade before being replayed in Taiwan.42 Rivalries aside, “baseball was an effort on the part of the prisoners to recreate on a small scale the world from which they had been separated.” 43 Among the internees was the baseball player Mizuhara Shigeru, a “former Tokyo Big 6 star third baseman and member of the Tokyo Giants’ 1935 and 1936 U.S. tours.” Mizuhara’s internment caused much anguish among his fans in Japan, and upon his repatriation in July 1949 he was unexpectedly presented to the crowd at a G iants game: “His sudden appearance on the Kōrakuen diamond and teary greeting over the microphone—‘I, Mizuhara, have finally come home’—stunned the crowd and e tched into the minds of the Japanese . . . [the] image of the benevolent American occupier and protector and the ruthless Soviets who were still keeping Japa nese nationals in captivity in Siberia’s frozen wasteland.” 44 Yet even cultural activities and sports competitions were not always sufficient in effectively managing the mass of POWs and helping them pass the
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time. Other methods were required to increase the number of the propaganda program’s adherents, overcome resisters, and ensure that the Demo cratic Movement had a truly mass character. Strategies of division and taking advantage of their charges’ weaknesses and emotions proved useful, as the movement had revealed the discord among the Japanese internees.
DIVIDE AND ENTICE, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH
Three methods augmented the efficiency of the Democratic Movement: rationing the POWs’ information supply and providing tailored propaganda materials; exploiting divisions inherent within the Japanese community in achieving propaganda and other goals; and skillfully employing a combination of rewards and sanctions to entice prisoners to use desirable behavior and demonstratively punish those who did not heed the rules. This three- headed approach does not cover the complete arsenal of means and methods used by the GUPVI chiefs in Moscow and camp authorities, but collectively, these three methods produced results. In the camps, vehicles of information were of foremost importance. The newspaper Nihon shimbun, edited and published in Japanese from the early days of the internment using the skills of a group of internees, was the centerpiece of the Demo cratic Movement. Ivan Kovalenko, a Japanese- speaking CPSU bureaucrat in charge of reeducating the Japanese internees, managed the editorial process. Specifically, Kovalenko was entrusted with selecting the editorial team, which at its peak numbered fifty Japanese writers and editors and fifteen Russians.45 Prominent among the Japanese editors were Asahara Seiki and Aikawa Haruki, who are discussed in more detail below. Kovalenko’s career was closely tied to the Siberian internees. During the Soviet-Japanese War of August 1945, he had become, by chance, a personal interpreter to Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevskii, the commander of the Manchurian offensive. From t here he r ose rapidly through the ranks of the Red Army’s political directorate to fill prominent positions in the higher echelons of the state and eventually in the CPSU apparatus. Having masterminded the propaganda program for the Japanese, in subsequent decades Kovalenko became the most important Japan hand in the Soviet Communist Party, credited with shaping Moscow’s foreign policy strategy vis-à-v is Tokyo in the 1960s–1980s. Anatolii Koshkin, a Russian historian of Japan, evaluated Kovalenko’s role in the so-called Suslov Doctrine—t he Soviet
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policy toward Japan—as greater than that of Suslov himself: “Ivan Ivanovich [Kovalenko] had the reins of power, in a good sense of the word, over all aspects of relations with Japan, be it political, economic, [or] cultural links or even exchanges in the sphere of sports.” 46 However, Kovalenko’s first feat had been to establish a propaganda newspaper for the Japanese. Nihon shimbun was born on 1 September 1945, when the CPSU Politburo decided to “accept the suggestion of the Red Army Chief Political Directorate” and establish the newspaper in Japanese. The initial print run was set at “60,000 copies, printed thirteen times a month, on four pages in the half-format of Pravda.” 47 The paper started as a publication of the Red Army, and in its initial weeks it mainly disseminated instructions and announcements for the captives. As the Democratic Movement took shape and expanded, the paper’s contents changed to include articles on topics covered by the Soviet press: the cult of the October Revolution, USSR’s sacrifices in liberating the world from fascism, heroic victories of the Red Army in WWII, and critique of the capitalist camp. The paper also published editorials critical of the political and economic situation in Japan. For example, on 29 November 1945, when some trains with Japanese internees were still en route to camps, the newspaper had a banner headline saying, “Eradicate the Japanese Militarist and Financial Cliques (zaibatsu)! Educate Yourself about the Conspiracy of the Militarists and Financiers Who Dragged the People into War under the Pretext of ‘Holy War’!” A headline on the front page on 28 May 1946 issue— published six days a fter Yoshida Shigeru became prime minister and formed his cabinet—read “The Reactionary Yoshida Government Formed: The Situation in the Whole Nation Turns Violent, Protests Start.” 48 Such articles, along with propaganda pieces on the advantages of the Soviet style of government, aimed to transform the Japanese internees’ fundamental views. Few camp memoirs fail to mention the newspaper, yet it was a mystery to Japanese audiences for decades. In 1985 Murai Michiaki, a former returnee from Tokushima Prefecture, made public ten issues of the paper he had managed to smuggle out of the USSR in 1946.49 In March 1989, the Asahi shimbun announced that it had acquired copies of 616 issues of the Nihon shimbun, or almost all of the newspaper’s 650 issues.50 The Nihon shimbun’s success was partly due to the persistent efforts of the Soviet side to force-feed it to the Japanese internees. Camp propaganda chiefs w ere instructed to promote the newspaper and ensure that the POWs read it, and officials whose efforts w ere found lacking w ere accused of neg-
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ligence. For example, a report by Major Kazankov, a political officer newly appointed to Camp No. 2, in Khabarovsk Territory, found serious problems in the camp’s political education work. He wrote that his predecessors had “distributed the Nihon shimbun mechanically, without making sure the newspaper reached the POWs. . . . Collective reading sessions (at [the] platoon or company level) have not been organized.”51 In other words, simply giving out the newspaper to the POWs was hardly sufficient. This approach, apparently, was how the newspaper ended up as cigarette paper, as many memoirists claimed had happened. Political officers had to make sure that the Japanese read and understood the newspaper’s contents. The best way to do so was to form reading clubs and organize collective reading sessions. While many memoirists mentioned the newspaper in their recollections, few admitted to taking it seriously. In Chapter 3 I mentioned Saitō Akira’s memoir (titled “The Hardships of the Siberian Internment Where There
Figure 5.6. Internees during a study session with a camp political officer at Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka. This is one of the rare images of Japanese women interned in the USSR. GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
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Was No Paper”). The paper he had in mind was toilet paper, which was a precious resource in the camps.52 The scarcity of paper was evident in the fact that on the day an issue of the Nihon shimbun was distributed, the internees immediately used it to roll cigarettes.53 Reducing the propaganda paper to cigarette and even toilet paper may have been a way for memoirists to demonstrate their contempt for Soviet indoctrination efforts, but it was also proof of resource scarcity. Interestingly, Soviet documents conceded the newspaper’s unpopularity among Japanese officers, but saw it as a result of the publication’s role in freeing the POWs from the influence of Japanese militarist ideology. The authors of a pamphlet summarizing reeducation efforts w ere not surprised “that the officers got up in arms against the newspaper,” and quoted several of these officers’ criticisms of the paper. Thus Captain Watanabe, interned at Camp No. 7 in Irkutsk Region, said “I do not believe the articles in the Nihon shimbun, because they are written by Russians or communists of Japanese nationality,” while Captain Nishimoto from Camp No. 31 in the same region said “There is no truth in Nihon shimbun.”54 Nevertheless, this in itself does not completely discredit the newspaper’s importance or effectiveness. While internees might have disagreed with the contents of the newspaper or claimed to have used it only to roll cigarettes without so much as glancing at the articles, it is hard to take seriously the claims that the newspaper was never read. A fter all, the internees were human and hardly immune to basic curiosity. The fact that t here was nothing else in the camps that those who did not know Russian could read naturally increased internees’ curiosity about the newspaper. In volume 8 of Rec ords of POW Experiences, Takahashi Daizō wrote about the survey his organization, the Association for Recording the Life Experiences of Japa nese POWs in the USSR (known as Kirokusuru Kai), conducted among former internees about their attitudes toward the Nihon shimbun. The sample was made up of 224 subscribers to the association’s newsletter, Aurora. Some respondents denied reading the paper due to mistrust or reported ignoring it since they had more important concerns in their daily lives than paying attention to a newspaper. But a few confessed to perusing and even enjoying the propaganda paper. For example, Kamiya Kyōhei wrote, “Because I was starved of anything written in Japanese, I d idn’t feel any antipathy t oward the newspaper.” Kōno Akira echoed this feeling, admitting that he “really waited anxiously for it. It was a time when I was
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starved of the printed word, so I didn’t care if it was one-sided information or inaccurate reports. It went a long way toward comforting my soul.”55 Those who tried to organize opposition to the vestiges of Japanese militarism viewed the paper not only as a source of comfort, but also as a crucial vehicle for their calls to action. Remnants of so-called reactionary behavior were prominent in the early days of the internment, when the Soviets entrusted the Japanese officers with the day-to-day management of the rank- and-file POWs. According to Takahashi, the indignation of the “democrats” against the “reactionaries” started to brew after one egregious incident in November 1945 that involved Takayama Noboru, an internee who had been an assistant professor at the Tokyo Agricultural University. Interned at a camp in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Takayama had had the misfortune of provoking the ire of a young company commander named Motomiya, who was dissatisfied with how Takayama saluted the officers. Following an altercation, the officers beat Takayama to death.56 Asahara claimed Takayama’s death had been the straw that broke the camel’s back, leaving the lower- ranking serv icemen no choice but to confront the officers’ tyranny.57 On 4 April 1946, over a month before Kruglov’s abovementioned first report to Stalin on the Democratic Movement, members of one “Kimura Battalion” published a petition in the Nihon shimbun calling for antimilitarism and democratization. The article contained the following verse: The success or failure of building a new Japan Relies on a united democratic front. Comrades in arms, show courage!58
Such calls show that the newspaper was not simply a Soviet mouthpiece but a reflection of a growing consciousness among the lower-ranking Japa nese serv icemen. While on its own the Nihon shimbun could hardly have had the effect desired by its publishers, in the information vacuum in the camps, this carefully edited newspaper—carrying translations from Pravda and Izvestiia as well as articles written by the Japanese editorial staff— proved essential in turning the tide of internee sentiment toward the Democratic Movement. Thus, besides publishing messages to stand up to tyranny, the paper helped carry out Soviet information policies among the POWs, for complete control over information in the camps was the first prerequisite for the reeducation program’s success. The policy of strictly regulating printed material was surely not something reserved only for foreign
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POWs. Elinor Lipper, who spent eleven years as a political prisoner in the Gulag, described the importance of information control there better than anyone else: Soviet citizens are able to read only what the state censors deem healthful. What would become of the “bulwark of socialism” if its citizens began constructing their own independent picture of foreign countries and contrasting it with Soviet misery? There must be no grounds for comparison whatsoever, for only then can the Soviet rulers convince the Soviet masses that strictest censorship of e very word of printed matter in the Soviet Union is true freedom of the press; that it is a sign of true freedom of opinion when a man is shot for printing an illegal leaflet; that shooting striking workers is proof of a true democratic spirit; that confirming the choice of the sole candidate on the slate is true electoral freedom.59
If information starvation and the lack of alternative publications turned the Nihon shimbun into attractive reading material for many internees, discussion groups and reading clubs organized by the tomo no kai and carefully guided by camp political officers ensured that the themes and keywords in each issue of the newspaper were familiar to the internees. Led by instructors and aktiv members, t hese activities supplied the participants in meetings and rallies with the rudiments of communist theory and vocabulary. Political officers kept detailed accounts of propaganda events, calibrating the reception of the ideological schooling by the Japanese, gauging the success of varying methods, and singling out the most ardent and reliable from among the activists for promotion or privileges. The methods employed by camp political officers were rarely confined to observing rallies and promoting loyal activists. The ancient practice of divide and rule was crucial in managing the foreign POW contingent. If the bitter testimonies of internees lamenting the readiness with which the Japa nese POW community allowed itself to be divided are anything to go by, Soviet camp chiefs must have employed the principle with cold efficiency. They skillfully exploited the rifts between officers and ordinary soldiers by “sift[ing] and classify[ing] prisoner groups [and] . . . taking advantage of the perennial ‘caste system’ gripe of the enlisted men against his officers [and] cultivat[ing] schisms between officers and troops.” 60 Class was a significant dividing line, and making the Japanese aware of their class identity was a major feat of the Democratic Movement. Having perfected class warfare methods in social experiments during the past three decades, the Soviet po
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litical officers were well placed to succeed in pitting members of the Japa nese officer class and the rank-and-file POWs against one another. While the ideological schooling and convictions of aktiv members came in handy in this task, the Soviets did not really have to resort to complex theories of class war to separate the factions from one another: the brutal practices of exploitation and division already in existence in the IJA made this task easy. Overall, one can say without exaggeration that the Soviet efforts to sow division among the Japanese were successful, judging at least from the number of memoirists who decried the way in which the Japanese betrayed their brethren for the benefit of the Soviets. Several memoirists have devoted their recollections exclusively to this theme: Yoshida Kōhei alluded to such backstabbing and betrayals in the title of his memoir, Siberian POWs’ Thought War: The Tragedy of Intra-Japanese Rivalry, while in his analysis of the intra-Japanese camp struggles, Komatsu Shigerō lamented those of his compatriots “who had sold their souls” to the Soviets.61 Kagawa Yutaka of Hiroshima Prefecture wrote, “Japanese comrades who were supposed to help each other in a foreign land sold their fellow Japanese to the Soviet political officers in their own interest.” 62 However wily and skillful the Soviet organizers, their efforts would never have gone far in the Japanese ranks had the divisions among the internees not made them ripe for the fomentation of class warfare. Besides increasing the class consciousness of the long-exploited conscript and NCO class, the camp authorities succeeded in instilling in the Japa nese one of the most peculiar practices on which the Soviet police state relied in the heyday of Stalinism: the culture of donos, denunciations or secret accusations.63 These acts of “citizenly initiative” had been encouraged from the early days of the Soviet state but reached an apogee during the terror and purges of the 1930s, when someone could be arrested for a careless remark made in a public conveyance or during a conversation overheard by a neighbor, colleague, or even family member.64 No one was trustworthy, even one’s own relatives. For example, in 1932 a boy named Pavlik Morozov denounced his own father as a kulak. For this, Pavlik and his brother were murdered by their relatives, which turned them into martyrs in the Soviet press. Soon a full-blown propaganda cult was formed: “Stories, films, poems, plays, biographies and songs all portrayed Pavlik . . . as an example for all Soviet schoolchildren.” 65 Camp political officers, many of whom had been Soviet schoolchildren at the same time as Pavlik, had been raised within this culture. In managing the foreign POWs u nder their control, they relied
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heavily on informants, using the information supplied as a barometer of the mood in the camps. Internment memoirs attest to the quickness with which the Japanese adapted to Soviet methods of control and started to report on each other. Members of the democratic aktiv w ere the usual suspects, allegedly acting as the camp authorities’ eyes and ears. Hama Toshikazu, for example, wrote: “It was the aktiv members who pandered to the communists. They acted more like the members of the Soviet Communist Party than Japanese citizens, and a small number of them w ere spies. . . . Their job was to search among the internees for those who harbored hostile thoughts toward the Soviet Union, and to sell them to the authorities.” 66 In a book of short recollections, Komori Kiyoo wrote: “Among the Japanese soldiers whom we considered war comrades there w ere many spies. They listened to every thing going on inside and outside of the barracks and passed it on to the Soviets. Japanese w ere selling their war comrades for a pinch of tobacco or a piece of black bread.” 67 These acts of “selling” their compatriots to camp authorities supplied the latter with precious opportunities to nip in the bud any attempts at resistance and to single out reactionary elements. A detailed report in the archives to Ivan Dolgikh, the head of the Khabarovsk internal affairs department, from Major Bukov and First Lieutenant Shkrobit, the political officers of Camp No. 19, provides an interesting example. According to the report, Japanese officers tried to find out the number of “democratically inclined” POWs in their battalions by organizing a secret ballot, in which the respondents would mark the names of those people they thought w ere collaborating with the Soviets. As expected, two collaborators, named Kuwabara and Nakanishi, quickly informed the Soviets about the forthcoming vote, and the camp officers intervened to stop it.68 For their troubles—which contributed to their image as traitors to the Japanese nation both in the camps and a fter their repatriation—the Demo cratic Movement activists received a number of privileges. They w ere given easier work assignments, working within the confines of their camp and often comfortably indoors, while other internees walked every day to and from open-air worksites. They had more and better food, which in the early days of hunger and malnutrition was an attractive incentive. Perhaps most importantly, they enjoyed a measure of power and influence over other Japa nese, which was liberating—especially for those from lower-class backgrounds who had suffered under the yoke of officer power in the IJA. Not everyone used t hese privileges in an exemplary fashion: quite a few of these activists used their newfound power to s ettle old scores. The memoirs in a
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small collection titled Nihon shimbun abound with examples of dishonest activists who abused their advantaged position to embezzle and ensure a comfortable life for themselves. Inada Yoshio remembered how the aktiv members in his camp appropriated the parcels sent to the internees through Red Cross channels: “If there was a single m istake in the characters of our names on the parcels, we w ouldn’t get them. When it came to the activists, however, they could rob even the parcels sent to t hose who had already been repatriated, without any letter of attorney.” 69 In camps where even after food situation improved the fare was hardly luxurious, parcels from Japan were precious prizes that dishonest activists saw as their reward for collaborating with the authorities. The sense of power that membership in the aktiv provided must have been even more attractive than the material gains. More than being the masters of their own fate, the democrats had power over their fellow POWs and felt an obligation to reeducate the reactionaries among them, often through violent means. Komatsu was unforgiving in his judgment of such methods: “While they changed their title to ‘antifascists’ from the e arlier ‘democratic group,’ their actions were extremely fascistic, in complete opposition to their name.” 70 One of the most notorious means of public punishment w ere the so-called people’s courts (obshchestvennyi sud in Russian, and jinmin saiban in Japanese). T here w ere public criticism and condemnation sessions complete with an elected board consisting of a chairman, a prosecutor, and several witnesses. While Democratic Movement members referred to the practice formally as people’s courts, the majority of memoirs called them “kangaroo courts” (tsurushiage) and complained about their fierce, merciless nature and the mass indignation they unleashed. Fiery speeches by the prosecution dominated the proceedings at t hese show trials. A September 1947 memo by the political instructor of Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka, reports one such trial of eleven Japanese quartermasters: “In his speech, the prosecutor emphasized that despite the care of the Soviet government, which in difficult postwar years continues to supply us with large and good-quality rations, some Japanese officers act dishonestly in the distribution of food products. T hese quartermasters are not democrats, and upon return to Japan they w ill care only about themselves and not the construction of a democratic Japan.” 71 One such people’s court was discussed even in the Japanese Diet. This example provides a colorful testimony about the mob rule instigated by the most ardent Democratic Movement activists. The p eople’s court in question was related to the Prayer at Dawn (akatsuki ni inoru) Incident, which
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derived its name from a 1940 hit song. To the Japanese parliamentarians in 1949, the case demonstrated vividly the extent of the division among Japa nese in Siberia. The incident has been detailed elsewhere.72 Briefly, it involved a violent company commander who called himself Lieutenant Yoshimura Hisayoshi (real name Ikeda Shigeyoshi) and punished so-called slackers in his brigade by leaving them tied to a post until dawn (hence the reference to the “prayer at dawn”). Less known was the fact that just before his repatriation, Yoshimura came close to being lynched by a group of Demo cratic Movement activists at Nakhodka. Tsumura Kenji, whose portrait appears in a propaganda album as a “senior member of aktiv group” of Transit Camp No. 380, played a central role in the people’s trial of Yoshimura.73 Tsumura was summoned to testify in the Diet in 1949, and he published a book titled The People’s Court at Nakhodka in the same year.74 While Tsumura justified the actions of the people’s court, Kasahara Kinzaburō, who also testified in the Diet, explained Tsumura’s role in the kangaroo court: here were about 2,000 p T eople gathered at the square. Then the members of Tsumura’s “democratic group” went up to the stage. . . . They said, “Expose everything in front of everyone and let us resolve t hese grievances while we are in the USSR. . . .” Members of the Yoshimura unit w ere still afraid of Yoshimura, and t here was no one who pointed him out. Perhaps they thought, “We’ve come all the way to Nakhodka, we can already see the sea in front of us, so instead of letting t hings get rough h ere, let us leave it to the day when we return to Japan.” But at that moment members of the democratic group came among us, asking “Is there anyone here who ‘prayed to the dawn’? T here must be someone!” Eventually they managed to stir up the weak among us. One a fter another t here came voices saying, “Yes, t here were soldiers who prayed to the dawn, they were all made to do so by commander Yoshimura! Bring Yoshimura to the stage!” Yoshimura was duly brought onto the stage, and there were a few soldiers with personal grievances who pointed him out. He was made to stand there as his crimes w ere all made public. And then they all proceeded to the question of what to do with Yoshimura. The overwhelming majority of voices from the soldiers called for his head. I remember the vote was repeated three times, and in the final call the voices that demanded Yoshimura’s execution swelled to a roar. At that moment Tsumura asked to entrust the issue to him. “Leave it to me,” he said, “and Yoshimura w ill be sent back to a camp inland in the USSR, to return to work logging trees or some similar job.” 75
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Yoshimura was not beaten up by the crowd of fellow POWs frantic with fury, though he would receive a five-year prison sentence after returning to Japan. Yet the righteous anger of the mob set in motion by activists frothing at the mouth to exact justice on reactionary elements proved hard to resist, even a fter the internees had departed for Japan. In July 1949, when increasing numbers of red repatriates behaved defiantly after arriving at Maizuru, the captain of the Shinyō -maru reported that the Japanese former POWs returning aboard his vessel had subjected the ship’s crew to a “kangaroo court,” having found “a worm in the crackers they were served.” 76 Based on his statement, the Kyoto District Prosecutor’s Office arrested four repatriates. A few days later these four admitted having used arbitrary justice against the ship’s crew but “denied this was an unlawful act for it was routine practice in the [Soviet] camps.”77 The ability to subject any dissenters to a “people’s court” proved addictive. Aside from giving activists the authority to control the POW masses and marginalize the resisters, the Democratic Movement had a more pragmatic function for the Soviets: helping each camp achieve its immediate goals. Among these, the fulfillment of production quotas was paramount. After decades of mobilizing so-called “criminal labor” for a variety of industrial and economic tasks, the Soviet camp authorities knew well that productivity could hardly be achieved through sheer coercion.78 The Democratic Movement had to contribute to workforce control by helping incentivize the daily work and increase the productivity of POW labor. Of all the incentives, the most persuasive was the promise of early repatriation. While Soviet attitudes to repatriation evolved according to changing domestic and international circumstances, the dream of returning home alive remained the internees’ most powerful motivation. Lack of clarity about the length of their captivity and the frequent deaths and suffering in the early internment months bred pessimism about making it back alive. Amid such gloom, the temptation of repatriation was too powerful to resist. We have seen how this hope helped many captives cope with the taxing daily routine of camp life, which in the psychology of captivity is called “barbed- wire disease”—a term coined in 1917 to describe the depressive state of POWs in custody.79 In the words of Hashimoto Takuzō and Kimura Takao, “Only the hope of repatriation kept our hands and legs moving in the daily work assignments.”80 Political educators and Japanese activists w ere well aware of the power they held over t hose desperate to return home and used it to test the effects of their democratic reeducation on the internees. Hama
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Figure 5.7. Internees chant “Long live Comrade Stalin!” at a rally in Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka, before their repatriation. GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
remembered a period of waiting for repatriation at a transit camp, when his group was sent into the surrounding hills to gather firewood and the aktiv members made them loudly sing the communist “Internationale.” Hama confessed, “There, with our motherland, Japan, before our eyes, we involuntarily raised our voices to sing b ecause we all r eally wanted to return home.”81 Another way to make sure that the internees devoted themselves wholeheartedly to daily work tasks was to draw them into what was called a “socialist competition.”82 The preferred way to win in this competition was to engage in “shock work”: “Predicated on the belief that vastly higher productivity could be achieved through a combination of labor exploits and better work organization, shock work was facilitated by the generally low level of mechanization and was carried out in gangs or brigades.”83 These daily contests had been invented as a way to mobilize the Soviet population for the task of making up the “hundred years” that the nation was b ehind “the advanced countries” in ten years, following Stalin’s 1931 call.84 Lewis Siegelbaum wrote that keeping workers on their toes and making them sacrifice everything to fulfill the daily quota required “a situation of continual emergency.”85 This constant need to fulfill or overfulfill output norms was epitomized in the 1930s by the feat of Aleksei Stakhanov, a coal miner
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elieved to have fulfilled his daily quota more than ten times in a single shift. b Stakhanov became a celebrity, appearing on the cover of Time magazine’s 16 December 1935 issue, and the Soviet Communist Party launched “the Stakhanovite Movement” of “shock workers” in the hope of significantly raising productivity by encouraging industrial and other workers to outperform one another—and themselves—on a daily basis. The Stakhanovite Movement became a cornerstone of Stalinist ideology, portrayed as having been “initiated by some advanced workers who were moved by the desire to accelerate the construction of socialism and who sought to raise productivity against the resistance of conservative managers and engineers, including ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs.’ ”86 Tanaka Kin’ichi described the Stakhanovite movement to his Japanese readers: “While the noruma system is based on forced labor, this movement called each individual to positively and actively contribute to increasing the Soviet production.”87 This spirit of working selflessly for the construction of socialism in the face of opposition from hostile elements was something the Democratic Movement also aimed to instill in the Japanese POW workforce. Members of the democratic aktiv took center stage in inculcating the spirit of socialist competition in their peers. Perhaps to inspire the Japa nese by an example more familiar to them, the Hiratsuka Movement was started in the Soviet camps. This was named a fter the Hiratsuka Brigade in the Komsomolsk area, whose members had achieved 200 percent of their work quota.88 While the Hiratsuka Movement was promoted, camp authorities did not rely solely on myths of such heroes and continued the work on the ground. According to a May 1946 report by the political officer of Camp No. 16, in Khabarovsk, “The compulsory work plan is conveyed to POW officers and soldiers at meetings and discussions; work results are assessed every day in most units; information stands are designed to reflect the fulfillment indicators for the day; excelling workers are recorded in wall newspapers, their sketched portraits are displayed in information stands along with the percentages of their fulfillment of the production target, while the neglectful workers are publicly criticized.”89 The communal daily race to fulfill the work quota served to divide the Japanese community into toilers, whose achievements w ere publicized for all to see, and slackers, who w ere named and shamed. As we have seen, the efforts of political authorities, coupled with the communal living conditions in the camps, ensured the Soviets’ control over the large number of foreign POWs. How the POWs reacted to the propaganda program and the varying methods of managing the
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internee populations is a good reflection of the Democratic Movement’s efficiency.
JAPAN ESE REACTIONS TO THE DEMOC RATIC MOVEMENT
ere Japanese reactions to the Democratic Movement predominantly negW ative, as many internment memoirists would have us believe? A s imple answer would be that attitudes w ere as varied as the experiences of the internment. If we rely solely on Japanese recollections of the Democratic Movement, the predominant impression of the program we get is of a set of alien principles and ideas thrust upon a group of Japanese who refused it outright and consistently, or at best tolerated the brainwashing just to return home alive. True, the prevailing attitudes in the memoirs t oward the Democratic Movement, and to the communist ideology it attempted to instill, ranged from open contempt to proud indifference, with a large number of internees who went with the flow in between. In his 1949 memoir, Ishiguro Tatsunosuke candidly admitted to devoting himself to the Democratic Movement: “To achieve repatriation, I donned the red mask of a communist and threw myself enthusiastically into researching and debating [communist theory].”90 Ishiguro’s example shows that for many internees, g oing with the flow was better than actively resisting the reeducation attempts. The conditions in the camps, where internees had little control over their fates, made accepting the Democratic Movement more palatable. Moreover, as Ishiguro confessed, doing so could also help change one’s fate, hastening one’s repatriation. Yet there were also voices that reflected favorably on the experience. One example was the abovementioned pamphlet Appealing for the Truth. Couched in a vocabulary similar to that of Soviet propaganda statements, the book betrays the imprint of the Democratic Movement.91 At first glance, there seems to be little m iddle ground between these two extremes. However, some memoirs—Takasugi Ichirō’s once again prominent among them—illuminate the gray area between the two extremes into which the Japanese POW community found itself divided. In short, Japanese reactions varied from the zeal of true democrats to the resistance of reactionary ele ments and included the opportunism or indifference of those in between. Let us start with the Japanese who even before their fall into the hands of
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the Red Army had viewed the USSR with admiration and hope, and on whom the camp propaganda chiefs relied most in proselytizing Japanese captives to accept the Soviet version of communism. The Democratic Movement was without a doubt one of the largest-scale conversion attempts in recent history. However, there were already converts among the mass of Japanese prisoners—those who had found the Marxist path to governance attractive well before they had a chance to experience its Soviet implementation firsthand. These Japanese contributed greatly to the success of the Democratic Movement. Identifying and empowering them was a natural first step for the Soviet propaganda chiefs. Through patient work and ceaseless instruction, these chiefs achieved the conversion of even the unlikeliest among the Japanese, such as Itagaki. But it is difficult to imagine the launch of the Democratic Movement in the difficult early months of the internment without the active participation of what Gavrilov and Katasonova called “politically literate Japanese with procommunist attitudes.”92 One role assigned to these politically literate POWs was that of agitator. Agitators occupied a crucial position linking the Soviet antifascist instructors, who rarely had any knowledge of the Japanese language, with the POWs. They helped in the day-to-day r unning of educational activities, assisted with the translation and interpretation of orders and exchanges between camp authorities and internees, and fulfilled other duties as required by the camp political office. Sekiguchi Zen’ichirō, for example, remembered the activists’ help in organizing an exam on the tenets of Marxism-Leninism for the internees in his camp: the activists distributed the exam papers and collected them after the exam.93 The scope of the activists’ duties, in other words, differed from camp to camp. A July 1946 report about the early po litical education work in Camp No. 20, in Khabarovsk Territory, provides a glimpse of an agitator’s day: For a positive example of antifascist activities, one could point to the work of the antifascist instructor Lt. Comrade Nozhenkin in the Third Camp Unit. Ten POW agitators have been selected here from among the most democratically inclined Japanese soldiers, and eight from among Koreans. Every agitator receives an individual assignment and works with his group of soldiers. Following the conversation with the soldiers, he informs the instructor about the mood in his group, the work that [Japanese] officers conduct among the soldiers, and how they are all performing in production.94
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The usefulness of activists for antifascist instructors and camp authorities went beyond the help they provided in day-to-day political education activities. In some camps t here w ere Japanese who not only displayed “procommunist attitudes” and were “politically literate,” but who were also equipped with knowledge of Marxism and sometimes even good Russian skills. A 1946 folder from the Russian State Military Archive titled “Notes on the Japanese POWs’ Wall Newspaper” is illustrative in this regard. The folder contains draft material prepared for a wall newspaper at Camp No. 64, in Morshansk—not far from Rada, in the Tambov Region—by the POWs. One can see their authorship in their neat pencil handwriting and the occasional grammatical errors in their Russian. The folder starts with a six-point list of measures necessary “to establish democratic order in the Japanese zone.” The authors recommend that Soviet camp authorities order the removal of all military insignia from the Japanese, “expel all lieutenant colo nels from the list . . . , since they are all active military reactionaries and will conduct antidemocratic propaganda among young officers . . . ,” and dismiss a Colonel Toda from his post as commandant of the Japanese zone. This last demand reflects the shift in Soviet policy: if in the initial months the management of the POW body was left to Japanese officers, it was soon transferred to the Democratic Movement activists. Another demand was that “each barrack, including the infirmary, kitchen, bathhouse, and workshop” elect its own deputy, who should be a capable man and “an active demo crat, or have a profound understanding of democracy.” Surprisingly for a document calling for democratic measures, the list stipulated that “senior officers of the Japanese Army do not have the right to be elected.”95 The fact that just a few months into their internment in the USSR, a group of Japanese activists could draw up such a document in good Russian is nothing short of remarkable. The list also demonstrates the strong agency of the Japanese in deciding their affairs, which went a long way toward convincing them of the superiority of Soviet form of government. The folder contains a colorful selection of other material, most interestingly articles written by Lieutenant Hayashi Mutsuo, the managing editor of the wall newspaper, and translated by the conscript Minami Nobushirō. Judging from Minami’s age (he was thirty) and the level of his Russian proficiency, he must have received some instruction in Russian prior to his internment, though it is not clear where and when. Remarkably, he was only one of three translators in the Morshansk camp, which boasted a Japanese cultural group containing thirty-seven members, and another twelve aktiv democrats who
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ere not part of the cultural group. This shows that this was an especially w successful reeducation camp. Recently publicized relics from the past partly lift the veil on this success. A family member of Aleksandr Zavedeev, the Morshansk camp’s po litical officer (zampolit), has made public several letters sent to Zavedeev by foreign POWs. Ernst Buchegger, once a captive at the camp, sent a letter from his hometown of Neunkirchen, Austria, in November 1947, two months after his repatriation to his motherland—which was under the control of the four Allied powers at the time, with Soviet troops stationed in its territory. In fluent Russian, Buchegger wrote about the welcome he had received in Austria, a Soviet film he had recently seen, and his forthcoming speech at the local branch of the Austrian Communist Party. He then summarized the political situation in Austria before signing off with a promise “to inform you about the outcome of the factory committee elections.”96 A Japa nese aktiv member, Tanabe Minoru, opened his letter by sympathetically asking about Zavedeev’s eyesight, and he then said that “the Japanese POWs, especially the aktiv, are eagerly waiting for your return.” Tanabe wrote that he had chosen not to take his first chance to return to Japan, “even though we were allowed to repatriate. I am helping comrades Kobayashi, Kaiwa, Shimomura, and o thers in the Democratic Movement.”97 He reassured Zavedeev: “You need not worry about the Tambov Democratic Movement among the Japanese, b ecause Matsuoka and Suganuma are ardently and energetically working there. Currently they are deploying the shock-worker movement and organizing a production competition among the Japanese POWs.” Reading these letters, one is struck by the loyalty the political officer commanded in his charges, and affection the latter felt toward him. The work of activists like Tanabe, skillfully selected from among the POWs, was responsible for the conversion of thousands of other internees. However, political officers like Zavedeev w ere crucial in identifying, training, and winning the trust of those activists. At the Russian State Military Archive, I found the names of Tanabe and Kaiwa in a folder about the Morshansk activists: the former was listed as a “news commentator” in the “Name List of the Japanese Cultural Group,” and the latter appeared simply as “Lieutenant Colonel.”98 Archives show that Morshansk was not the only place where political officers achieved impressive results in reviving the sympathies of Japanese POWs who had had a brush with Marxism in the 1920s–1930s but renounced those views and performed a recantation (tenkō) under pressure from the
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thought police in the 1930s. Perhaps the best example is that of Yamada Seizaburō. The Russian State Military Archive contains a candid and reflective letter from him, written in Russian before his repatriation and addressed to the officials of Camp No. 19, at Raichikha—in the Amur Region of the Russian Far East.99 As a young Marxist, Yamada had been active in the proletarian literature movement in the 1920s–1930s but after his arrest, recantation, and release from prison, he had turned his productive pen to the service of imperial propaganda. He became, in Annika Culver’s description, “an incredibly prolific author on behalf of the Manchukuo regime, professing a right-w ing proletarianism that differed from his earlier ideas in that it did not criticize the Japanese Empire and its paternalism toward Chinese and Southeast Asians.”100 In his long missive to his Soviet instructors, Yamada expressed “profound gratitude to Lt. Col. [Ivan] Kovalenko, Lt. Col. Naumov, and other representatives of the Soviet Army for the opportunity to resurrect my old self, at a time when I could build comradely relations with many young people.” Remarkably, Yamada’s was not another sycophantic letter of thanks to Generalissimo Stalin, like those signed by thousands of other internees. Instead, his message was imbued with genuine remorse, and those unfamiliar with his past would probably wonder about the reason for his apologetic language. Yamada was without doubt asking forgiveness for his wartime recantation when he declared: “I w ill not betray the working p eople of Japan again. I know that my remaining life belongs not to me, but to the Japanese people, and only through this it can be truly mine again.” He promised to “consistently subject myself to self- criticism and, if allowed, to rejoin the [Japanese Communist] Party.” Regardless of whether or not he would be allowed to reenter the party, Yamada made four solemn pledges that deserve quoting in full. He promised: 1. As an honest and conscientious writer, a genuine ally and friend of the people, to convey confidently the truth about the USSR, its true reality. 2. To denounce the atrocities of Japanese imperialism in Manchuria and the top brass of the Kwantung Army, who during capitulation left the Japanese on the edge of d ying and tried only to save their own f amily members. To consistently try to eliminate the fantasies of rapacious “patriotism” and any illusions toward militarism. 3. To ruthlessly b attle American-Japanese reactionary culture. 4. To fight for defending the rights of demobilized and repatriated soldiers.101
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After returning to Japan, Yamada kept at least the first of his promises. A prolific writer before and during the war, he titled his first postwar work From Socialism to Communism: The Realities of Soviet Civic Life. In the preface to this book, published in 1952 soon after his repatriation, Yamada wrote: That I—who had from long ago wished to walk on that land even once in my life, to witness the Soviet society with my own eyes—was given this opportunity to go t here as a victim of the war, as an internee, was deeply moving. I did not go as a tourist who sees—or is shown to—the main entrance, the drawing room. I spent a long time at the socialist worksites of the Soviet Union, worked up a good sweat t here myself and, in close contact with the toilers, saw many times the side that no ordinary foreigner can even hope to glimpse.102
Culver, who has produced the most detailed account of Yamada’s disavowal of his serv ice to Japan’s empire, uses the recantation metaphor to describe his postwar activities: “No doubt indoctrinated during his imprisonment, Yamada performed a new tenkō to conform more to his e arlier ideals.”103 This return to one’s e arlier self under Soviet influence, following a forced renunciation of Marxism during the period of imperial repression, was not uncommon in the Soviet camps, as we can also see in the example of Aikawa discussed below. The experiences of Itagaki, also analyzed below, represent an oscillation of a different if no less remarkable kind: from Japa nese nationalism to communism, and back. Such radical moves across the ideological spectrum are another proof of the powerful if ephemeral pull of the Democratic Movement. Besides the devout m iddle group of activists and instructors like the Morshansk internees, a cohort stood above everybody e lse in the hierarchy of Democratic Movement champions. These were the thinkers and strategists who supplied the midlevel aktiv members with inspiration and material: an elite group of Japanese POW intellectuals selected by Ivan Kovalenko and employed primarily in the editorial activities of the Nihon shimbun or in helping Soviet political officers educate new groups of activists. We have encountered Asahara, the newspaper’s second editor-in-chief, from the Japanese side, in earlier chapters. Like many activists, Asahara had had prior experience with Marxism: he had been arrested in the early 1940s as a student at Tokyo Imperial University for his involvement in a plot to reestablish the banished JCP.104 However, during the Soviet internment it was Asahara’s class more than his credentials as a Marxist intellectual that helped
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him rise to prominence in the Democratic Movement. Asahara’s predecessor at the Nihon shimbun had been Munakata Hajime, a second lieutenant in the artillery, and the Soviets reasoned that a communist newspaper should have an editor from a lower-class background.105 Still, the Democratic Movement did not lack theoreticians either—one such thinker, Aikawa, worked alongside Asahara in the Nihon shimbun editorial office. Born Yanami Hisao in 1909 in Niigata Prefecture, Aikawa became a student organizer in the late 1920s and an active participant in the proletarian culture movement in the 1930s. In 1933, he published his first book, Rural Communities and Agricultural Crisis, with the reputable Iwanami publishing company, and in subsequent years he became a prominent representative of the Kōza-ha (Lectures Faction) in the Japanese Marxist movement. However, like many Marxists, Aikawa came under pressure from the imperial government and had to perform a tenkō. In subsequent years, he turned his thinking to the service of the empire: in the words of Aaron Stephen Moore, he “abandoned class as the primary lens to analyze and orga nize society in favor of an idea of society as a complex mechanism of actively mobilized subjects and institutions that revolutionized all areas of life.”106 If Yamada devoted his creative energies to hailing the pioneers of Manchukuo, Aikawa extolled the virtues of the new Japanese modernity. His writings on the uses of technology in creating a new society, influenced by the Soviet idea of modernity, w ere used during WWII by the Japanese government to promote its imperial expansion and the construction of East Asia. When this imperial modernity crashed with the Soviets’ entry into the war against Japan, Aikawa surrendered to the Red Army in Manchuria in 1945. He was put in a camp along with other Kwantung Army serv icemen. There he came to Kovalenko’s attention and was recruited into the editorial offices of the Nihon shimbun. The more than four years that Aikawa spent in the camps, when he must have witnessed the deprivations of his fellow Japanese and the clash between Soviet propaganda and harsh reality, did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment. Quite the opposite: in an article titled “On Soviet Humanism,” published soon a fter his repatriation, Aikawa claimed that “the Soviet people have strived extremely hard under the leadership of the government and party, as a result of which living conditions have improved rapidly since 1948.”107 In another article published around this time, Aikawa provided perhaps the best summary of the goals of the Democratic Movement, goals in which
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he passionately believed: “The mission of the movement was raising the self-consciousness of the masses, as well as stimulating their class and proletarian consciousness, through an emphasis on systematic education and propaganda of socialist democracy.”108 Aikawa believed, according to Moore, that “Soviet humanism formed the basis of the Soviet Union’s rapid recovery from wartime devastation,” and he remained active in the JCP a fter his return to Japan until his death in 1953.109 That is a remarkable assessment of the USSR’s postwar reconstruction from a man who must have witnessed the sacrifices the Soviets and foreign captives had to make for it. If Aikawa and Asahara embraced the Democratic Movement, many Japa nese serv icemen, especially officers, needed exposure to the full extent of the movement’s persuasive power before they could be swayed by it. Of course, some internees remained unmoved by it till the end. But before we analyze their dogged resistance, it is worth looking at the miraculous conversion of Itagaki Tadashi. His story is illustrative of the Democratic Movement’s efficiency, the breadth of influencing mechanisms at its disposal, and the ways in which movement activists took advantage of the internees’ predicament and weaknesses to achieve their goals. But it also reveals that the movement could not have been effectively administered without the central role played by activists from among the Japanese. Itagaki’s long life—he passed away in December 2018 at the age of ninety- four—was so eventful that it is possible to study much of Japan’s twentieth- century history through his experiences alone. His internment is testament to the extraordinary pull of the Democratic Movement, while his postrepatriation life provides a perfect example of a returnee’s renouncing his Soviet past and embracing the new Japan. Born in 1924, Itagaki was the second son of General Itagaki Seishirō, a prominent leader in the IJA and one of the masterminds of Japan’s expansion on the mainland, who was later sentenced to death at the Tokyo Trial and executed as a class A war criminal in December 1948 along with Tōjō Hideki and five other wartime leaders. Like his father, Itagaki Tadashi had chosen a military career: in March 1945 he graduated from the IJA Academy (Shikan Gakkō). Soon after graduation, Itagaki was dispatched to northern Korea with a hundred fellow graduates for training, in his own words, as a member of tokkōtai (kamikaze units) for the last and decisive b attle of the war (kessen). He stayed in Korea until the war’s end. The Soviets captured Itagaki and his fellow officers in 1945 and transported them to an officers’ camp in Elabuga, a town
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in Tatarstan about a thousand kilometers east of Moscow, where Itagaki spent the first period of his internment—as recounted in his 1950 memoir, tellingly titled “I Was Reborn in Siberia.”110 Unlike the experience of ordinary soldiers in the camps, Itagaki’s time in Tatarstan was hardly an ordeal. On the contrary, Japanese experiences in Elabuga w ere akin to life in a holiday camp. The day’s most important activity was the distant prayer (yōhai) delivered in the direction of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. This filled Itagaki with nostalgia, but the rest of the day was spent at leisure filled with boredom. “I cannot think of a more relaxed, carefree period in my life,” Itagaki reminisced. “We did nothing but lie on our beds in warm, pechka-heated rooms and talk about repatriation and food.”111 To kill time, the POWs played board games such as go, mah- jongg, and shōgi, the boards for which they made themselves. Tournaments were held, with prizes such as tobacco rations and bread. Such was the liberty afforded these Japanese that everybody ignored the lights-out call, and even the warnings of Colonel Petrov, the camp commandant, often went unheeded. Itagaki wrote: “The officers still pretentiously wore their collar and shoulder straps and maintained the strict military discipline (gunki).” This was the appearance, at least. Inside, “the camp resembled a gambling house.”112 The atmosphere was one of decadence, and Japanese officers, the pride of the nation, forged their meal coupons. When some of them used their swords for chopping firewood—keeping his sword was part of the officer’s honor and pride that Sejima Ry ūzō had so ardently defended in 1945—even the Soviet camp commanders issued a warning: “We hear the Japanese officer’s sword is his soul. Why d on’t you take better care of your swords?”113 Perhaps to put an end to this overindulgence, in April 1946 the camp heads demanded that the officers contribute to felling trees. Some refused, quoting international law, but the Soviets did not demand more work than necessary, and timber was required to meet the camp’s own needs. So the Japanese unit heads decided to agree to the Soviets’ demand— or at least this is how Itagaki described it. Holl, interned in a nearby camp for German POWs, presented a contrasting image of the Japanese at Elabuga, who “perform their work in a leisurely way. There is no urging them on by their own p eople. When a Russian once failed to hit a Japanese sentry, the team leader, a Japanese colonel, gave the order [to his own men] to do it, despite the offensive cursing and threatening by the sentry at the baffled Germans watching.”114 Despite Holl’s surprise at the voluntary nature of the Japanese participation, Itagaki claimed that for his higher-ranking fellow of-
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ficers, working alongside ordinary soldiers was the greatest humiliation possible. However, unable to disobey their superiors, they felled trees in the morning and spent the afternoon enjoying themselves. To Itagaki’s g reat surprise, the p eople who lived in nearby villages, especially elderly ladies, not only did not hate the Japanese but treated them with sympathy. “These Rus sians are hopelessly good-natured!” he exclaimed, adding, “No m atter how hard we tried to explain this behavior, it was completely different from the stereotypical ‘red country / mysterious country’ narratives taught at the military academy.”115 However, neither the lenient camp commanders nor the kind locals could change Itagaki’s attitude toward the Soviet system in Elabuga. When some Japanese started flirting with the Democratic Movement, Itagaki and his friends expressed their contempt, tearing down the Nihon shimbun from the wall as soon as it was hung up and using it to roll cigarettes or as toilet paper, and even intimidating the activists by shouting insults at them. When on May Day in 1948 the activists organized a parade, singing the “Internationale” and waving red flags, Itagaki asked his friend Hidaka Makoto, “Why on earth would anyone want to be involved in this horseplay?”116 The Elabuga idyll was to end soon. With it ceased the first period of Itagaki’s internment, which he spent within a bubble of wart ime army culture preserved by the Japanese officers and tolerated by Soviets, who kept the Japanese at arm’s length. This officer lifestyle is reflective of the arrogant indulgence that provoked the ire of the lower ranks, contributing to the emergence of the Democratic Movement. If any doubts had arisen in Itagaki’s mind during the first three years regarding responsibility for WWII or the Japanese officers’ honor, they w ere a result not of Soviet efforts but of his repulsion toward the depraved lifestyle of his fellow POWs. Yet these transformations were nothing in comparison to what awaited Itagaki in Camp No. 14, in Khabarovsk, where he was transferred with 270 officers in 1948. When they arrived at the camp they were greeted by the slogan “Overthrow the Emperor System!” written in large characters over the camp gate. In Itagaki’s room, another slogan proclaimed that there was “No victory for democracy without a fight against the fascists!” Itagaki was still unaware that he had arrived in a place where he would become a completely changed man. Itagaki did not become a new man overnight; instead, his views on the Soviet Union and its system of government changed gradually. Many of these changes came as a result of subtle nudges from both other Japanese
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internees and Democratic Movement activists, helped by the tested methods of persuasion and propaganda. Still, it was not simply the Soviet persuasion and Itagaki’s susceptibility to it that eventually changed his mind. Rather, a combination of circumstance and schooling did this, and his fellow Japa nese played an important part in his conversion. One episode demonstrates this. Unlike at Elabuga, at Camp No. 14 the majority of internees were ordinary soldiers. The latter had apparently learned how to hold their own in dealings with the officer class during the preceding three years of internment. During their first, “welcoming” meeting with the Elabuga officers, the soldiers of Camp No. 14 addressed the issue of work: “We understand that you are officers. Because of this, we shall not force you to work with us. As in the past, we do not mind if those who have sat cross-legged on our shoulders continue to do so. However, if among you are those who volunteer to work with us, please come forward.”117 The class-warfare rhetoric about “those who have sat on our shoulders” touched a raw nerve with the officers. All of them signed up for work with the words, “We are all Japanese. If the soldiers are working, we should too.”118 Next to go were the shoulder insignias. Takayama Hideo, the chief Democratic Movement activist for the Khabarovsk Region, paid a visit to the camp specially to meet with the 270 internees from Elabuga. He urged the officers to think about what the insignias represented, “what you have perpetrated wearing them, how many soldiers you have killed.” The officers became very angry at this, but many begrudgingly took off their insignias. Slowly but surely, Itagaki was waking up to the transformations around him. A combination of disillusionment with his fellow officers and persuasive propaganda methods started working on his mind. And the Soviets had another card up their sleeve. During the lunch break on 3 December 1948, the camp’s Democratic Movement chief summoned Itagaki to his room. “I have wonderful news,” he said, and taking a piece of paper out of his pocket, he emphatically read the sentence of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial: “Itagaki Seishirō, sentenced to death by hanging.” Understandably, on hearing this news, Itagaki was crushed. His father’s impending execution made him think about war responsibility: “Was it only my father who was a war criminal? . . . True, my f ather had a big role to play in the war, but he did not do this out of his own selfish motives.”119 Deep in t hese thoughts, Itagaki lost any appetite for life and was soon hospitalized. His time in the hospital proved to be a turning point. Democratic activists paid regular visits to the hospital, bringing him books such as A His-
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tory of the CPSU, Historical Materialism, A Brief History of the JCP, and A Short Biography of Stalin. With time on his hands and seeking distraction from the traumatic fate of his father, Itagaki immersed himself in these tomes. He reconsidered all that was sacred to him and mustered enough courage to denounce his father’s role in the war. In his remaining eight months of internment, Itagaki became active in the propaganda program. He was soon entrusted with leading the Youth Action Group (Seinen Kōdōtai), and he traveled to other camps where he spoke to activists, as well as delivering fiery speeches urging his campmates to “strengthen our resolve in order not to shame ourselves before the Nakhodka comrades,” alluding to the democrats at the Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka, who were awaiting repatriation and who would serve as the final judges of the internees’ ideological readiness for repatriation. In January 1950, when Itagaki was recommended for repatriation by po litical officers, he felt that he had not yet achieved the level of knowledge and conviction befitting a true democrat. Nonetheless, he was sent home. In the National Diet in April of that year, he underwent a grilling as harsh as that inflicted on Kan Sueharu, an interpreter who committed suicide (see Chapter 6). Unlike Kan, Itagaki had a passionate belief in Marxism and the merits of the Soviet system at the time. This conviction was perhaps what gave him courage to face the deputies’ captious interrogation. On 12 April 1950, Itagaki testified before the Lower House Special Investigative Committee, facing the questions of committee members who attempted to get to the bottom of Itagaki’s astonishing transformation from militarism to communism, often invoking the memory of his executed father. Itagaki emphasized that nobody had forced him to join the Democratic Movement and become an activist: it had been his own decision, one that, although not taken lightly, followed from his thorough critique of the emperor- centered worldview. To many pointed references about his father, Itagaki replied: “As his child, of course, I did cry over the death of my father.” But he depersonalized his relationship with his father and pointed to the latter’s “huge role in Japan’s war of aggression.”120 The effect of the Demo cratic Movement on Itagaki, to the great disbelief of the Diet members, seemed to be more powerful than either filial love or a sense of national belonging. Itagaki’s transformation was especially incomprehensible for the deputies because it meant moving from one extreme to the other within only a few years. It was perhaps the difficulty of explaining this metamorphosis that led Representative Naitō Takashi to proclaim, “There must clearly be
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Figure 5.8. An internee making a speech at a rally at Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka, before being repatriated. GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731.
something common between the Soviet system and the Japanese militarism, or fascism, that made your entry into the former so easy.”121 Yet in a few years, Itagaki changed his mind again, for despite the determination he demonstrated in defending the Soviet form of government in the face of questioning in the Diet, he decided to leave the JCP in 1954. Once again, the pendulum of his allegiance had swung to the other extreme. After this, however, he never looked back at the period of his life when he had been reborn as a communist. In 1972, Itagaki became head of the secretariat of the conservative Japan War Bereaved Families Association (Nihon Izokukai), serving until 1980—when he was elected as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to the upper chamber of Japan’s Diet, the House of Councillors. In subsequent years Itagaki became a prominent nationalist and a vocal supporter of prime ministerial visits to the
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Yasukuni Shrine, at one point storming into Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s office to criticize him for refusing to visit the shrine due to diplomatic considerations related to China.122 While he eventually cut his ties with the JCP, Itagaki’s defiant perfor mance at the National Diet was proof that he had, if only temporarily, put his faith in the communist ideology. His story of conversion as an impressionable young man is testament as much to the pliability of the young Japa nese captives in strenuous conditions and the attraction of a new, Soviet way of life as it is to the efforts of camp instructors and their Japanese collaborators. Focusing only on the artful Soviet propaganda masterminds who took advantage of the helpless Japanese, in other words, once again paints the internees solely as victims. Still, Itagaki’s case demonstrates how propaganda chiefs exploited the internees’ backgrounds in getting the best of them. Besides using well-educated POWs as propaganda instructors, there was an advantage in selecting activists from the lower classes who had only a basic education and who eagerly assumed the mantle of disseminators of the communist message to the broadest mass of Japanese internees. While not all activists were opportunists, there were those who benefited from the class warfare that unfolded in the camps. A semifictional account by Komatsu, who authored several books on the Siberian Internment, presents a vivid image of one opportunist. Komatsu’s account of Sergeant Kitagata in a memoir titled The Men Who Sold Their Souls is full of bile and condescension—common internee attitudes toward low-level collaborators who joined the Democratic Movement out of pragmatic considerations. Komatsu pointed out that even before their internment, people like Kitagata had been opportunistic in joining the IJA: if Kitagata had not enlisted, “he would be g oing about neighboring towns, d oing piecework jobs. Compared to such a life, a military lifestyle with three meals a day and an allowance was heavenly. If, in addition to this, he managed one day to become an NCO, it would be like a foot soldier becoming the lord, the tenant farmer turning into the g reat landowner.”123 In Siberia, Kitagata, who had received only the compulsory school education, “was using his cunning and behaving like a dog (sobaka).” He had just come back from taking antifascist courses in Khabarovsk, and he gathered together all the internees, “formerly his comrades-in-arms but now targets of his sadistic efforts to Sovietize (sekka).” He then delivered a speech loudly espousing the great Soviet Union’s ideology and achievements. Listening to the speech, Komatsu’s protagonist had an epiphany:
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Many of these activists w ere former NCO candidates or NCOs. Combining this knowledge with Kitagata’s metamorphosis (henshin),124 it is easy to understand the profound stratagem of the Soviets: in choosing candidates for the aktiv, they had selected only t hose who had completed just compulsory school education. . . . If you wanted someone who would adhere to Marxism- Leninism, making slogans out of their sayings and believing it all uncritically, then there was no one better than a Japanese who had never received any higher education.125
Such contempt for t hose who took advantage of the new balance of power among the Japanese serv icemen in the Soviet camps is not uncommon in internee recollections. In fact, Komatsu’s description, while condescending, is rather kind compared to some depictions of contemptible behavior of the more opportunistic aktiv members. The memoir collection Nihon shimbun, mentioned above, abounds with stories of injustice and discrimination experienced by the internees in the Khabarovsk camps. Writing about a Stakhanovite competition in his camp, Kagawa Shōichi remembered the favorable treatment afforded to what he called the “Party History Study Group” (tōshi kenhan). Regardless of how hard everybody else worked, the activists received 200 rubles, while the o thers got no more than 150 rubles for their efforts.126 Writing about the emergence of the nationalist Rising Sun Brigade (Hinomaru Teidan) in his camp, Inami Kiyoshi remembered that a combination of intimidation and incentives had swept the majority of his fellow captives into the Demo cratic Movement. Like Itagaki, Inami had been transferred to Khabarovsk from Elabuga in 1948. His group was greeted by Takayama Hideo, the chief activist for the Khabarovsk Region who had played such a role in Itagaki’s conversion. According to Inami, Takayama asked the 280 new arrivals: “Who do you support, the emperor or Stalin?” Eighty internees professed allegiance to the emperor and were marked as “reactionaries,” and an “around-the-clock struggle started against us.” After months of wearing down the resisters’ resolve, the camp activists achieved their goals: “Many converted, joining the Democratic Movement. About thirty continued to resist until they were nothing but skin and bones. Many considered suicide.”127 Prominent in the memoirs of resisters was the personality of Asahara Seiki. As a Democratic Movement leader in the Khabarovsk Territory and
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editor of the Nihon shimbun, Asahara became legendary among the Japa nese captives in that region and was the subject of many an angry recollection about his reign as the so-called emperor of Siberia. The initiative with which his name was most commonly associated was the campaign to sign letters of thanks to Generalissimo Stalin, which spread across the camps in the Far East in the late 1940s. Yet resentment toward Asahara was caused not only by what was seen as his sycophancy t oward the Soviet propaganda masters, but also by his apparent disregard for the welfare of anybody but himself. Kagawa Shōichi wrote about a medical examination of POWs following their transfer to a new camp in April 1950. Asahara was among those who were moved. When the camp doctor assigned him to the second category of labor, involving tasks that made medium physical demand of the inmates and included work outside the camp, “Asahara pleaded repeatedly with the camp authorities, telling them ‘I cannot do any work. I am very weak in the body (jakutaisha).’ When this wasn’t granted, he cried to the camp unit chief, First Lieutenant Milovanov, who allowed him to work within the camp limits.”128 This was apparently in stark contrast with Asahara’s treatment of others. For example, Furuhashi Shinzō accused Asahara of providing false testimonies about other internees,129 and Ninomiya Jōbu wrote that Asahara subjected to a “kangaroo court” those who refused to participate in his campaign of signing letters of thanks to Stalin.130 Asahara’s downfall in the summer of 1949, when he was arrested and given a twenty-five-year sentence for counter-revolutionary activities, was greeted not without some schadenfreude by his fellow Japanese. Matsumura Shōzō, who witnessed the arrest in Camp No. 13, in the Khabarovsk Territory, wrote that Asahara had “overestimated his own power and held the public in contempt.” About Asahara’s eventual fall from grace, Matsumura opined: “It is hard to believe the powerful Soviet investigators did not know about Asahara’s past. Rather, they simply used him in the puppet show of the Democratic Movement until he made a mistake and convicted him. In my opinion it was an example of craftiness typical of the communists.”131 While Matsumura’s conjecture that the Soviets used Asahara rings true, Asahara’s own testimony points to a more complex picture. His revelations provide insights into not only the workings of the Democratic Movement, but also the relationship among the Japanese members of the aktiv. In his memoir, Asahara revealed that he had first come under suspicion by officers of the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) in 1947, who interrogated
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him on his role as a sentry in the Military Protection Agency (Gunji Hogoin)—a minor fact he had omitted while being vetted for his role as an editor of the Nihon shimbun. Asahara wrote that he had considered this biographic detail so minor that he had forgotten to mention it to the Soviets, which he also explained to his interrogators. This initial suspicion was successfully addressed, but Asahara wondered how the MGB had managed to obtain such a minute detail about his past. After the interrogation Asahara offered his resignation to Kovalenko for neglecting to reveal this fact earlier. Since no one could be confident of his own safety, Aikawa, who was also present, “presented his self-criticism for his wartime recantation (tenkō).”132 Asahara suspected that it must have been Hakamada Mutsuo who had denounced him to MGB. Hakamada—a Democratic Movement leader in the Chita Region, another person nicknamed the emperor of Siberia, and the b rother of the JCP leader Hakamada Satomi—had had serious disagreements with Asahara. Kovalenko, with whom Asahara was working closely at the time, denied Hakamada’s involvement, claiming it was the former officers of the Harbin Special Organization who had been the informers. Asahara retold this story partly to clear his name and partly to insinuate that several high-ranking Japanese officers had ingratiated themselves with the Soviet leadership, supplying intelligence to curry f avor and settle scores. Thus, Asahara’s memoir reveals not only the discord among Japanese internee groups, each of which tried to take advantage of the situation, but also the factionalism among the Democratic Movement activists. Interestingly, while Asahara was portrayed by many as the Soviets’ handmaiden, he claimed that there were significant differences between his “Nihon shimbun group” and the Antifascist Movement Section of the GUPVI’s Khabarovsk branch. Asahara had advocated “immediate and full-scale” elections of antifascist committees in camps and the transfer of camp management to them. His efforts to “overthrow the militarist system” were also seen as detrimental to the authorities’ preoccupation with the decreasing productivity rates.133 For the Soviet authorities, even a valuable cadre such as Asahara could take things too far and be a distraction from the objectives of maintaining control and ensuring high productivity—and such a distraction eventually contributed to Asahara’s downfall. While activists such as Asahara viewed their newfound power of self- government as a true sign of Soviet democracy, such independence often resulted in chaos. Hayashi Teru, interned in the Jewish Autonomous Region, remembered:
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fter the old system of military rule (kyūgunsei) was overthrown by the tides A of democracy, committee members advocated abolishing the positions of chairman, vice chairman—t he highest leadership. Group leader Ōkawa’s idea of governing relied on excessive zeal, which only resulted in more pain [for the internees]. The new leader Saitō’s concept of democracy was one of quiet contemplation, which left unaddressed the most basic tasks and led to complete chaos. All the while the Soviets relentlessly demanded increasing productivity, and work assignments continued to be handed down. Knowing that if we didn’t work hard we could lose the dream of [returning to] Japan, we continued to work with utmost effort.134
The officers’ negative reaction to the Democratic Movement was partly a result of their disgust at the activists’ attempts to govern the internees, coupled with resentment toward those abusing their newfound status. Ironically, the Democratic Movement had initially emerged as a reaction to officers’ abuse of power. At the other end of the ideological spectrum from Asahara w ere the Japanese who steadfastly resisted Soviet efforts to reeducate them. One such resister was Lieutenant Colonel Kusachi Teigo, former chief of the Operations Division (Sakusen Hanchō) in the Kwantung Army Staff. In that role, according to the military historian Edward Drea, he had wrongly predicted the timing of the Soviet attack on Manchukuo.135 Kusachi was interned in a camp near the remote settlement of Khurmuli, in the Khabarovsk Territory. Yoshida Kōhei, also interned at Khurmuli, described the Soviet successes in dividing the Japanese community in the camp: “Japanese w ere informing on fellow Japanese. Japanese were trying their fellow Japanese. T here was no distinction between an officer or a noncom[missioned officer]; in fact, superiors in the former Imperial Army were now the target of public attacks. The prevailing trend was that of subordinates overthrowing the superiors (gekokujō no fūchō).”136 Camp chiefs succeeded in breaking up not only the national community of the Japanese, but also hierarchies previously dominant in that community. As subordinates humiliated their erstwhile superiors with the encouragement of their captors, POWs such as Yoshida awakened to the painful loss of the social moorings that had kept their world in order. This was hardly surprising, since the trend of “subordinates overthrowing the superiors” was part of the ethos on which the Soviet Union was built. It was perpetuated in the lines of the communist “Internationale”: “The earth shall rise on new foundations / We have been naught we s hall be all.”137 T hose who had been naught
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and found the courage to stand up to their superiors had been given the backing of camp chiefs to be all within camp walls. Yet they did not all use that power well, as we have seen. Kusachi could not reconcile himself to this change in fortune. Gathering a group of like-minded officers, he resisted the “Soviets’ and the aktiv’s cold- blooded, sly, stonyhearted, traitorous actions against the Japanese . . . at every opportunity, organizing hunger strikes.” The members of his group were “repeatedly thrown into solitary confinement cells or transferred to special camps.”138 Yoshida, the author of these words, spent a total of seventy- five days in solitary confinement by his own admission. In his memoir, Yoshida created a heroic narrative of the Kusachi faction, of which he was a member, praising its efforts to beat the Soviets at their own game by “arming themselves for ideological argument and constantly engaging in political and ideological standoffs with the org [organizers] and the camp political division. Determined to face even death, branded ‘reactionaries’ in the camp, this was the Kusachi faction.”139 Soviet archives confirm that Kusachi’s determination to resist made him a nuisance for the camp chiefs: on 28 October 1947 the chief of the political department in the Khabarovsk Territory Naumov instructed deputy head of Camp No. 18 that “The appointment of Colonel Kusachi as the battalion commander was a mistake that needs to be corrected.”140 As a “reactionary element,” Kusachi had to be isolated, not promoted. Needless to say, the description of Kusachi by Yoshida, one of his followers, provided in the previous paragraph is hardly impartial. Shirai Hisaya, a journalist and historian of the internment, presented a different Kusachi, painting a portrait of a “military man devoid of worldly wisdom” and quoting Kusachi’s justification of the Kwantung Army’s abandoning Japanese settlers in front of the advancing Soviet troops as a m atter of “strategic necessity.”141 According to Shirai, Kusachi was also the man who actually wrote the secret offer of the Japanese soldiers as workers to the Soviets. In the camps, Kusachi was indeed intolerant of the activists. When Asahara ripped off Kusachi’s insignia, calling him and Sejima “the emperor’s slaves,” Kusachi reportedly faced Asahara down, telling him, “I can’t believe a Japanese man has fallen to such a dreadful low”—for which he was put in a solitary cell.142 Yet however brave Kusachi and his followers might have been in the camps, the activists had the time and resources, as well as the support of the Soviet political officers, to wear down their resilience using a variety of methods.
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In his recollection titled “Brainwashing Was Also Part of the Noruma,” Inomata Kunio remembered attending the reeducation program run by a regional political department. Inomata had started his camp life working in the infirmary, where he performed such grisly tasks as stacking the frozen bodies of his dead comrades after camp doctors had dissected them. His story took an unexpected turn when he was ordered to gather his belongings and travel to a political school in Vladivostok: “The Chief Political Department (GPU) ordered that I go to Vladivostok,” he wrote at the start of his recollection.143 While it was not impossible to be selected randomly to attend a political school, it seems that the author left a crucial link out of his story, one concerning his metamorphosis from an ordinary camp inmate to a member of a select group of individuals sent for several weeks to a school in a big city—where, exempted from the hard work of the camp, they studied the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and the advantages of the socialist system. Looking back at the schooling he underwent alongside tens of other activists from other camps, which included attending lectures and debate classes led by skilled Japanese instructors, Inomata depicted it as a farce. This stance is significant b ecause it is representative of many internees’ dismissive attitude toward the Soviet attempts to reeducate them. The classes w ere on a range of propaganda subjects, such as “A Short History of the Russian Communist Party,” “Questions of Leninism,” “Marx’s Das Kapital,” “American Imperialism,” and related topics. Inomata did not dwell extensively on the contents of the classes, writing: “When the classes started, both teachers and students w ere thinking only about making up the noruma [quota] hours, performing their parts in this play, contriving ways to pass time, such as asking the colonel in charge of political education or the org [party organizer] to explain this or that topic in minute detail. This was unexpectedly well received by the political officer, who would happily repeat “khorosho, khorosho” [well done, well done].”144 There are accounts that downplayed their authors’ participation in the Democratic Movement, behavior that could betray that they might have been—however fleetingly—taken with the ideology, way of life, or political system of the Soviet Union. These accounts point, among other things, to the pressure faced by the returnees from the communist superpower in postwar Japan. Yet the Soviet archives demonstrate that attitudes in Japa nese memoirs toward the propaganda program were not always unbiased,
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and that interest in alternative explanations of the new world order a fter the collapse of the Japanese Empire was noticeable among the Japanese internees. Many conscripts and NCOs w ere eager to learn about the socialist way of life. This eagerness was often the result not of Soviet coercion or incentives, or of the persuasive powers of political officers. Very often it had its roots in the internees’ disillusionment with the imperial project, injustices of the IJA military hierarchy, or attempts to hasten one’s repatriation by feigning allegiance. Inomata may have attended political school in the Soviet Union, but his memoir did not betray any fascination with the USSR. Still, his time at the propaganda school was much more pleasant than his experience at camp worksites. Inomata’s account contains many proofs of that. His life at the school included g oing fishing and cooking seafood on the shore before enjoying a meal with the officers; g oing to the theater with instructors to watch a Cossack dance performance while attracting curious glances from the Soviet audience; and spending spare time working on a stage play under the guidance of renowned Japanese artists, including Kuroyanagi Moritsuna, the famed violinist of the NHK and Tokyo symphony orchestras (whose daughter Kuroyanagi “Tetchan” Tetsuko became a famous actress in postwar Japan). Despite this intellectually and culturally invigorating experience, Inomata finished his account with an anticommunist statement: “The brainwashing education sought by the Soviet Union, when put side by side with the reality of internment, only strengthened my desire to go back to Japan, to become a messenger about the tragic deaths of my friends.”145 Does this turn Inomata, Ishiguro, Kitagata, and o thers into hypocrites who feigned a belief in the Soviet system to achieve early repatriation, influence over their compatriots in the camps, or other perks afforded to the activists? A closer look into the workings of Soviet society shows that the answer to this question is more complex than one might think. Stephen Kotkin argued: “It was not necessary to believe. It was necessary, however, to participate as if one believed—a stricture that appears to have been well understood, since what could be construed as direct, openly disloyal behavior became rare.”146 Despite the fiery rhetoric of the Democratic Movement, participation did not always equal belief, and t hose Japanese who realized this successfully used the movement to forward their own interests. A folder kept among the documents u nder the broad rubric of “repatriation” in the State Archive of the Russian Federation shows that there w ere
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Japanese internees who, unlike Inomata, did not really want to go back to Japan.147 The thick folder, compiled in July 1949, contains applications from over eighty internees for permission to stay in the USSR and become Soviet citizens. It is a collection of motley documents: t here are Japanese- language petitions (seigansho) in the neat handwriting of the applicants themselves, some of whom diligently added furigana glosses providing the readings of the Chinese characters for the benefit of their Soviet translators. Several of these are addressed to “The Great Father of the Nations of the World, His Excellency Generalissimo Stalin!” T here are “statements of reason” (riyū sho) for applying for Soviet citizenship, also handwritten, as well as typed Russian translations of these. While the Japanese requests contain formulaic expressions likely gleaned from the Nihon shimbun, many statements are remarkably candid, displaying not a mindless recital of propaganda slogans but genuine reasons b ehind the internees’ decisions. Usually t hese reasons involved a combination of personal circumstances that made repatriation no longer desirable (such as broken or nonexistent family ties) and a confession of a transformation in the USSR. Some of these petitions deserve quoting at length. An applicant named Kitamura wrote: I have no family, no f ather or m other. Remaining at home is my stepmother, with whom I shared three cheerless years of my life. She had a son, whom she loved dearly, but us she hated viciously and wished us all an early death. . . . At home [in Japan] I worked tirelessly and spared no effort, but saw no reward for my work except insults. Only in Soviet captivity, my assiduous work and studies have received the cheers and respect of the Rus sian p eople, who work honestly and selflessly for the good of the Soviet nation. For this reason, I, too, want to apply myself and my labor to the cause of building socialism along with the Soviet people, and I no longer want to return to “my” Japan.148
Another applicant shared his experiences of personal transformation through honest work, which had changed his outlook on life: I used to be a company clerk who had never done any manual labor before coming to the Soviet Union. However, in the three years of living and working in the USSR I learned the true value and happiness of sweating through hard work. For about a year I have been engaged in construction work in Khabarovsk. During this time, I found much joy in such work as plastering, laying bricks,
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and constructing pechka stoves. I had never experienced such happiness during my time as a provincial clerk. I found joy in three things: first, the everyday life of someone who makes things; second, the feeling of connection one’s life has with one’s work in a socialist country—a feeling you cannot possibly imagine in a capitalist society; and third, the significance this labor is assigned in a socialist society. My father has died and my sister has been married off, and my stepmother and stepbrother have inherited my parents’ house. So I can’t even say that I have a h ousehold in Japan. My life w ill be one of loneliness [if I return]. . . . I want to spend every day of my remaining life in the most meaningful way. I hope you w ill start the procedures of my settlement as soon as pos sible, having considered the above reasons. I cannot wait to become a Soviet citizen even a day e arlier, and to contribute with all my strength, and to learn the things I was never able to learn in Japan, and to become a citizen of the most progressive socialist country.149
Yet another internee’s reasons for remaining in the USSR had to do with the potential for happiness he observed among the Soviet people: “I wish to settle in the USSR because in my three years since entering the Soviet Union I have had the opportunity to witness and experience the true selves (hontō no sugata) of the Soviet working people . . . [and because] I think the USSR is the only country where I believe I can achieve utmost happiness.”150 Some applications of the Japanese were supported by documents furnished by camp chiefs, such as character references (kharakteristika). One such reference, written about a Japanese POW by the head of the Fifth Camp Unit of Camp No. 53, a Major Rovenskii, demonstrates the level of rapport that could be achieved between camp leaders and select internees: During his time in the camp unit from July 1948 to January 1949, the POW has worked as a quartermaster in the unit’s rationing serv ice. He has handled his duties well, his accounting and reporting are in good order, he is personally disciplined and attentive (ispolnitel’nyi) in his work. He has carried out the instructions of Soviet officers in an accurate and timely fashion. In his personal demeanor he has not raised any suspicions. He has expressed a wish to remain in the Soviet Union and become a Soviet citizen.151
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Rovenskii ended his reference with an all-important statement: “There are no objections from my side to permitting this POW to remain in the Soviet Union.”152 Unfortunately for those internees who wished to remain in the USSR, the Soviet leaders rejected most of these requests. A November 1949 letter from Nikolai Filatov, the acting commissioner for repatriation, to Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, noted that at the Transit Camp No. 380 at Nakhodka “130 Japanese POWs . . . have refused to return to Japan and requested permission to remain in the USSR and acquire Soviet citizenship.” Filatov reported having forwarded t hese requests to the MVD, which in turn had presented them to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Russia. There, “the issue did not meet with a positive resolution, hence all of these persons will be returned to Japan.”153 Despite reluctance to allow the Japanese to settle in the USSR, t here were cases in which men who had formed relationships with Soviet w omen w ere shown more leniency. A report sent to the Soviet leaders by Nikolai Dudorov, the interior minister, on 23 November 1956, t oward the end of the internment, mentioned “713 citizens of Japanese nationality, of whom 577 reside in Sakhalin Region and 103 in Krasnoyarsk Territory. The majority of these Japanese have settled down with families and h ouseholds, they work in various enterprises and collective farms. Of these, twenty people have expressed the wish to return to Japan as of 1 November 1956”—in other words, they had changed their mind about staying in the USSR.154 A Soviet archival document based on a Kyodo News Agency report cited Hasegawa Hideo, a returnee who remembered meeting around thirty of his compatriots in Krasnoyarsk “who had decided to stay in the USSR. The majority of them had married Soviet women.”155 Despite the conditions of captivity, h uman relations continued without regard for its limitations and divisions. It is thus hardly possible to explain the decisions of those who asked to remain in the USSR solely as a product of propaganda education. There is little reason to doubt the genuineness of the confessions about being impressed by the Soviet way of life and thinking that, combined with what internees saw as a lack of prospects in Japan, compelled them to seek to remain in the USSR. Denying that the Soviet experiment—with or without the theoretical underpinnings supplied by the political classes and the propaganda newspaper—held sufficient attraction to some of the Japanese would be inaccurate, as the above testimonies demonstrate.
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The episodes discussed above all point to diverse reactions to Soviet reeducation efforts. Nevertheless, however close or distant Japanese POWs’ contact was with the Democratic Movement, at the very least the latter provided them with a critical, alternative vision with which to view the Japa nese Empire and war. It awakened in some internees, even if only momentarily, a disapproving awareness of the emperor system and their past contributions to it. It honed the visions of those who found that they were critical of the American version of global order after they returned to US- occupied Japan. To a small minority of ardent Marxists, it gave more. Regardless, for almost everybody exposed to the full force of the Soviet reeducation program, the fascination with the USSR proved short-lived. Perhaps the aversion to all things Soviet that had been cultivated in these soldiers since their army days proved powerful once they returned to Japan. Perhaps more powerful was the repulsion felt as a result of the Soviets’ deceptive attempts to mislead and divide them. Of course, officers stood out in this regard, as we saw in the references to the anti-Soviet education that Itagaki and o thers had received. While some, like Itagaki initially, w ere surprised to be proved wrong by their life in the USSR, many still responded defiantly to Soviet treatment. Moreover, many returnees realized that they had been lied to by the Soviets when they set foot back in Japan. All the exaggerated and openly false reports about postwar Japan, such as the one about Japanese people selling their children to buy rice, caused irritation not only among the members of the Japanese public who read about them in regular newspaper reports about repatriates but also among the repatriates themselves, who felt that they had once again been deceived by the Soviets.
C H A P T E R SI X
IN THE COLD WAR CROSS FIRE RETURNEES AND THE SUPERPOWER CONFRONTATION
MVD materials show that the overwhelming majority of POWs behave loyally t oward the USSR. A significant number of them, especially graduates of antifascist schools and aktiv members, unmask anti-Soviet defamation, actively participate in democratic organizations, and join communist parties in their countries. For example, of the 2,000 Japanese repatriates arriving in Maizuru on 3 July 1949, 1,827 joined the Japanese Communist Party. —A Soviet pamphlet on the experience of political work among the POWs
On 18 July 1949, the US weekly magazine Life published a photo-essay titled “Japan’s ‘Red Army’ Gets Back Home.” The story featured nineteen photographs of Siberian returnees by the photographer Miki Jun. In the title image, two former internees were leaning on the railing of a repatriation ship, facing six laughing women in nurse uniforms. The nurses were all youthful, and some of them playfully clung to the railing as they turned their girlish smiles toward something or someone outside the frame. It was a snapshot of a quotidian moment, showing young people enjoying a lighthearted instant through an exchange of jokes or a mischievous act, the nature of which is unknown to us. Yet the caption u nder the image betrayed no lightheartedness, proclaiming, “Home for first time in years, two well- indoctrinated prisoners crack jokes with bloomered Japanese nurses who escorted them from Russia.”1 For a start, there was nothing in the photo graph that betrayed the former prisoners’ “well-indoctrinated” state. They were both wearing army caps, knee-high boots, and jackets that w ere slightly 205
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Figure 6.1. The cover image of a story about returnees from Siberia in Life magazine. Photo courtesy of Miki Ken’ichirō. LIFE logo, caption, and headline © 1949 The LIFE Picture Collection. All rights reserved. Licensed from The Picture Collection Inc. and published with permission of TI Gotham, Inc.
worn and bore no insignia. The men had their backs to the lens, revealing nothing but the sides of their young, smooth, and smiling faces. T hose familiar with Life might have drawn a parallel with Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous snapshot of a sailor kissing a young woman in New York City’s Times Square on V-J Day in 1945. The 1949 image also showed serv icemen celebrating their war’s end in a joyful moment shared with young women. If anything, their behavior was less naughty than that of the American sailor
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photographed in 1945, though Miki’s image also conveyed the joyous mischief of the young. The caption to Eisenstaedt’s image was somewhat risqué, mentioning the “uninhibited sailor plant[ing] his lips squarely” on the young woman’s.2 Yet the Japanese serv icemen w ere presented differently in the same magazine: even the comparable tone of the two captions could not mask that contrast. In reality, it was hardly the young men’s Japaneseness that was now a problem for the Life editors, almost four years a fter V-J Day. Rather, it was their being “well-indoctrinated” by the Soviet communists. Indoctrination made these men less trustworthy, less deserving of sympathy, and even less Japanese. It would define them from now on, sometimes overshadowing their ordinary qualities and their humanity. More than introducing the American reader to the contents of the image, the caption gave a taste of the ideological cross fire in which the Siberian internees soon found themselves. Ten of the images in the photo-essay presented episodes from the repatriation of one returnee, a man named Yamada Kunisuke. They showed happy scenes with friends and family members: tears of joy shed by Yamada’s mother and sister at the train station, relatives bringing sake and fish as homecoming gifts, the returnee’s speech of thanks to the neighbors “who watched after Kunisuke’s family during his years away,” and Yamada changing into a kimono from his uniform and discarding his heavy Siberian boots for sandals.3 Perhaps most remarkable was the last photograph, which showed Yamada being bathed by his mother, as he had probably been as a young boy: the naked man squatting in the yard of his parents’ h ouse as his mother poured steaming hot water into a large wooden vat. These snapshots showed the protagonist’s return to his roots as a Japanese man. Yet in the Cold War atmosphere, it seemed that even episodes of ordinariness had to be seasoned with political messages. Sandwiched between vignettes of Yamada’s reintroduction to home life, three images reminded the reader of his Siberian past and his relationship to Japan’s present and future. “Communist welcome sweeps Kunisuke into the street in the firm grip of a gang of young Japanese Reds,” read one caption, while the next photograph showed a “Great red rally” at the Kyoto Station plaza. In the “firm grip” of the communist youths, “Kunisuke signs obediently as Kyoto Reds shove membership form at him.” 4 The captions depicted the scenes at the station as a forceful imposition of communist membership on Yamada, but in all three photographs he looked content, even happy. However, the language of the inscriptions left no room for doubt: it was the “gangs” of “Reds” who
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forced the returnees into JCP membership. Typical of news stories of the time, the returnees w ere presented as passive recipients of Soviet propaganda, either as militant communists who had lost their reason or as gullible fools enchanted by the “red” ideology. “They Had Departed with Banzais, Returned to the ‘Internationale,’ ” proclaimed one headline, marking the contrast between the past and the new, alarming present.5 Yamada’s story was titled “Prisoner Who Learned His Marxist Catechism Starts Life Anew in Japan” and contained testimonies from Yamada about the camp propaganda program, recorded by the “TIME-LIFE correspondent” Frank Gibney.6 Four years later, Gibney published Five Gentlemen of Japan, a book in which he provided a more detailed portrait of the young man and traced the evolution of the camp Democratic Movement through Yamada’s experiences. Linking the ideological struggle in Yamada’s camp to global events, Gibney wrote, “The ‘reactionaries’ of Camp 115 found themselves kicked by the same rules and the same techniques that had beaten and would beat other helpless men in China, Bulgaria, or elsewhere in Siberia.”7 The prose of the main 1949 article in Life was as vivid as Miki’s photographs, though its sinister tone contrasted with the smiling f aces in the images: “Out of the darkness the ghost of an almost forgotten army has come back to haunt Japan. . . . [W]ell-fed, hard-jawed men who seemed to be as tough a bunch of fanatically indoctrinated Communists as Moscow ever sent out anywhere.”8 Despite its hackneyed expressions and alarmist tone, the photo-essay was hardly unusual among news stories about the people who crossed the Cold War divide in the late 1940s. It demonstrated the suspicion that greeted the Siberian internees who entered a much-changed Japan. Like the escapees from the “ ‘slave world’ of communism” analyzed by Susan Carruthers in Cold War Captives, these Japanese men w ere finally crossing into the “free world.”9 Unlike Carruthers’s escapees and defectors, however, the Japanese returnees in 1949 had been deprived by the cold winds of superpower relations of the sympathy they had received as captive “brethren” (dōhō) in the first years of their internment.10 It is doubtful that the young men in the photo-essay w ere aware of it, but that item was their initiation into the Cold War media and propaganda b attles—in which not only their behavior but their appearance and even their existence would come under intense scrutiny. This constant inspection and suspicion followed them for a brief period at the beginning of the 1950s, as the Cold War wreaked havoc in East Asia that culminated in the proxy war on the Korean peninsula. Having crossed the proverbial Bamboo Curtain longing for familiarity and peace,
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the returnees from Siberia who had long dreamed about repatriation were caught in the Cold War b attles. Their return to Japan was not an end to, but a mere transition to a new phase of, their participation in the superpowers’ struggle for influence in Japan and East Asia more generally. In this chapter I analyze the Siberian Internment as a Cold War encounter and the internees in various roles: hostages, witnesses, scarecrows, and warriors in the superpowers’ confrontation. Although they were portrayed by Life and other publications as hapless subjects of Soviet schemes, I view them as players on the international scene, participants, observers, and shapers of the momentous events of the Cold War period. The Japanese returnees from Siberia took up these roles in numerous episodes throughout the Cold War, and here I focus on four battlefields in which they played a part. First, I briefly enter the courtrooms of the Tokyo Trial. Brought into this tribunal were Siberian internees such as Sejima Ry ūzō, presented by the Soviet prosecution to help establish and consolidate the Soviet version of justice. Second, I analyze the international disputes and disagreements between US and Soviet representatives over the issue of releasing the internees, as well as the long crusade waged by various Japanese organizations, including the government, for hastening their repatriation. T hese debates were not confined to the realm of formal relations. Rather, they spilled into the pages of newspapers, radio waves, and Diet sessions, where the Japa nese and their allies tried to pressure the USSR. Third, I examine the transformations in the public image of the Soviet Union in Japan, the anti-Soviet propaganda that portrayed the USSR as a slavery kingdom, and responses from the Soviets and their sympathizers. These Cold War clashes soon developed into a political maelstrom in Japan. Into this storm came the POWs, who were now described not as brethren who deserved sympathy but as “red repatriates” (akai kikansha) and potential foot soldiers of the Communist Revolution who warranted wariness and suspicion.11 Fourth, I analyze these divisions in Japanese society through the so-called Tokuda Incident and the suicide of a former POW and interpreter, Kan Sueharu. All four battlefields mirrored the broader international contest between the superpowers and the developments on the international stage. Nevertheless, a study of the Siberian internees on these battlefields is illuminating in its own right. It helps us reanalyze the origins and legacies of the Cold War in East Asia; the making of the US-Japan Alliance; and the sketching of the contours of a new, postwar Japan. In all this, the internees played an active part as historical actors who, while caught up in the nets of the superpower struggle, spoke and acted as the situation required without losing sight of their agency,
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and whose experiences therefore are invaluable in understanding the making of postwar Japan.
THE TOKYO TRIAL
The IMTFE, or the Tokyo Trial, was a momentous occasion in post-W WII history, the culmination of the Allies’ efforts to serve justice to the Japanese Empire and usher in a new international legal and political order. Given the changing relationship between the United States and the USSR, however, the trial turned into a Cold War battlefield where conflicting versions of postwar justice clashed. In this respect the trial served as a dress rehearsal for the coming collisions at various international venues. Importantly for our story, the IMTFE became the first international stage on which Siberian internees w ere called to play a part. I analyze h ere an episode involving three high-ranking Japanese internees who acted as witnesses for the Soviet prosecution at the tribunal: Lieutenant General Kusaba Tatsumi, formerly commander of the Fourth Army and from December 1944 commander of continental railroads in Manchuria; Major General Matsumura Tomokatsu, former deputy chief of staff of the Kwantung Army; and Lieutenant Colonel Sejima Ry ūzō, formerly a strategist on the IJA general staff (encountered above). I analyze Sejima’s part in detail in this section. In his memoir published half a c entury a fter his 1946 trip to Tokyo from Khabarovsk, Sejima reminisced how in August of that year he and two other officers had been ordered to act as Soviet witnesses at the IMTFE.12 On the way to Japan, Sejima and his companions were put on a train to Vladivostok, from where they would board a plane to Tokyo. Yet they were stuck for a month in a Vladivostok hotel as the Soviets and the US Occupation administration sorted out the intricate permissions and checks for the Soviet staff members accompanying the witnesses to Tokyo. Sejima wrote that he and his companions could already feel the frigid winds of the coming superpower confrontation: “We w ere like frogs in a well that know nothing of the great sea, but even we could sense the mistrust between the Soviets and the Americans.”13 Frog in a well he may have been, having spent the preceding year in the isolation of a Soviet camp, but Sejima’s selection as a Tokyo Trial witness caused much controversy in postwar Japan and haunted him for decades. In Chapter 2 I mentioned the conspiracy theory alleging that Sejima had offered—w ith the approval of his superiors—the Japanese serv icemen as
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labor force to the Soviet Union. This accusation, coupled with what some Japanese saw as Sejima’s betrayal of his former superiors at the Tokyo Trial, led to his being portrayed throughout the Cold War as a Soviet agent who had been recruited during his Siberian internment.14 Following the collapse of the USSR, rumors about Sejima received a new lease on life. In a 1992 interview published in the monthly Literary Chronicles, the Soviet propaganda strategist Ivan Kovalenko corroborated the conjectures that had been brewing in Japan for decades and that authors such as Hosaka Masayasu had striven to confirm through research and interviews with Sejima.15 Hosaka, who has perhaps written more than any other Japanese author on Sejima, spent the two decades between 1987 and Sejima’s death in 2007 trying to understand Sejima.16 As the subtitle of another volume suggests, “What Kind of a Man Is Sejima Ry ūzō?” was a question on the minds of many p eople in postwar Japan.17 Most notable in Kovalenko’s interview was his testimony about the se lection of Soviet witnesses for the Tokyo Trial. Sejima had claimed in a 1975 interview with the Literary Chronicles, in a clear contradiction with his 1996 memoir, that he had been completely unaware of the reason for his trip to Tokyo: “Having landed at Haneda [airport], I saw the Stars and Stripes and realized we were u nder foreign occupation. From Haneda we were passed over to the Occupation Army, put in Jeeps and taken to Mitsubishi Naka-6 Building in Marunouchi. Only two or three days later did we learn we had been brought as witnesses to the Tokyo Trial.”18 In reality, Kovalenko revealed, the selection process had been extremely complex and careful. This is understandable: the Moscow leaders were aware of the grave risk should the Soviets’ gamble fail, so they must have selected only the most willing and trustworthy witnesses. Kovalenko’s testimony seemed to prove Hosaka’s conjecture in a 1987 article that Sejima and Matsumura must have talked freely with the Soviets and given away details of Japa nese strategy, for why e lse would they and Kusaba have been chosen out of tens of high-ranking officers?19 Perhaps a more important reason for the special care the Soviets took in selecting their witnesses and bringing them to Tokyo was that their case against Japan at the IMTFE was built on a weak foundation. It was difficult for a nation that had breached its neutrality pact with Japan in August 1945 to argue persuasively that Japan had had aggressive plans against it throughout WWII. Kirsten Sellars has written that “some of the Soviets’ problems w ere self-inflicted,” including their reluctance to provide witnesses for cross-examination, and that “the most incriminating material they had
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produced had been written by Russian intelligence officers.”20 While Soviet archival information explaining the selection of the witnesses has yet to be made public, a crumb of evidence was unearthed by Hosaka in the US National Archives (NARA). The document concerns Kusaba—who, despite all the care the Soviets took to guard him, was found dead on 20 September 1946, three days a fter his arrival in Tokyo, having taken the potassium cyanide that he had managed to carry on his person. For the motivation behind his suicide, it is worth quoting in full the damning words of IMTFE defense counsel Major Ben Bruce Blakeney, who claimed that Kusaba, “to oblige his captors, bestowed what was intended to be the kiss of death upon Generals MINAMI, DOHIHARA, ITAGAKI, TOJO, OSHIMA, ARAKI and UMEZU. KUSABA himself is author of the ultimate commentary upon his testimony: The affidavit written, signed and sealed, the witness brought to Tokyo to testify, he realized that he must face the inquisition of cross- examination, and he could not face it—he took cyanide.”21 The affidavit Kusaba had provided to the Soviets in March 1946, while he was still in the USSR, was presented to the tribunal by the member of the Soviet prosecuting team Solomon Rosenblit.22 However, the impossibility of questioning the witness meant that it was eventually stricken from the record in 1947, along with the testimony of other witnesses whom the Soviets could not produce for cross-examination. Hosaka claims that the Soviets must have presented Kusaba’s diary to the US side to certify his death, and it was the English translation of this diary that Hosaka found in the archives. In a 7 July 1946 entry, Kusaba wrote: “We had the evening meal all together with the investigator Colonel Kotovikov, deputy camp commandant and interpreter Tyrov, Ōtsu [Toshio, former governor of Karafuto Agency (Governing Office of Southern Sakhalin) and another potential witness], Matsumura [Tomokatsu], Sejima, and another officer. We discussed anew our appearance as witnesses at the International Military Tribunal.”23 Kusaba was not the only witness to expire before reaching the courtroom: Miyake Mitsuharu, the former Kwantung Army chief of staff, died a few days after providing an affidavit, and t here w ere other witnesses who died without being brought to court but whose written testimonies w ere used by the Soviets in building their case. Among these was Major General Akikusa Shun, described as “the most capable [general] in the Japanese Army for the training of personnel for plots, intelligence activities and their execution.”24 Akikusa, one of the founders of IJA’s Nakano School of military intelligence, died in 1949 in the tsarist-era prison of Vladimirskii Tsentral, a few months after the Tokyo Trial ended. The deaths of Kusaba and other
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witnesses, including the execution of some by the Soviet authorities, provided defense counsels with strong evidence to question the verity and value of affidavits provided by Soviet witnesses. Blakeney, who repeatedly proved to be a thorn in the side of the USSR at the trial, summarized these points well on 7 June 1947 in referring to the Soviets’ reluctance to agree to the “corporeal production for cross-examination” of witnesses whose affidavits they had presented to the tribunal. Indirectly, Blakeney’s criticism of the Soviets’ uncooperative attitude regarding the demands of the defense was also a veiled attack on the Siberian Internment of the Japanese witnesses, who were being kept in captivity for no obvious or justifiable reason: “Of the witnesses in question, 12 are former Japanese soldiers, 9 of them generals, who w ere taken prisoner of war by the Soviet forces in August 1945. For near on twenty-t wo months now they have remained, prisoners of war, in Siberia or European Russian [sic], though it is a m atter of common knowledge that millions of Japanese prisoners of war have been repatriated from more remote regions of the earth.”25 Alarmed by Kusaba’s suicide and in an apparent attempt to appease the remaining witnesses, the Soviets arranged meetings with their families. In his memoir, Sejima included the words of his wife, Kiyoko, who remembered: “the Soviet military officer told me in Japanese ‘Mrs. Sejima, your husband w ill soon return to Japan, so prepare the h ouse where you w ill live together.’ Having heard that, I thought ‘He w ill return in a year at most,’ and departed in high spirits.”26 We cannot know if this was deliberate misinformation intended to coax Sejima to cooperate and ensure that he performed the role assigned to him. For their court appearances, the Soviets even hired a tailor who made bespoke suits for Sejima and Matsumura.27 On 18 October 1946, Rosenblit presented Sejima’s affidavit to the tribunal. It can be summarized in three main points: • In 1941, as a newcomer to the Military Operations (First) Department of the Army’s general staff, Sejima had been entrusted with incinerating military plans for 1939, which he claimed he perused before committing them to fire. He found in them plans for operations against the USSR, and he presented some details (such as the names of Soviet places to be occupied in case of an invasion). • In 1942 Sejima was transferred to First Department’s Second Section (Dainika), which was responsible for military operation plans. There, he became familiar with plans for 1940–1941. He also recalled in some detail the new plan for operations against the USSR, which was a dopted
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in 1942 and stayed in force until the spring of 1944. Sejima also claimed that he “knew that a mobilization was underway in Japan in the summer of 1941 to reinforce the Kwantung Army.”28 This was around the time of the June 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union—when the USSR was at its most vulnerable, fearing an attack from the East. • Discussing operation plans vis-à-v is the USSR in detail, Sejima confirmed that they were all offensive in nature. However, Sejima’s affidavit contained an important disclaimer: “It had never been explained to me whether t here was to be a war against Russia or not. All I knew were the military m atters concerning operational plans. . . . I have no knowledge concerning political relations.”29 Following the presentation of his affidavit, Sejima was called to the witness stand, where he was cross-examined by defense counsels Kiyose Ichirō, Blakeney, and Lawrence J. McManus. Kiyose quizzed Sejima on his affidavit, specifically asking about Sejima’s claim to know nothing about a war against the USSR. Sejima refused to be drawn into interpreting the political implications of military plans. Blakeney took a different route, trying to es-
Figure 6.2. Sejima Ry ūzō at the Tokyo Trial, 18 October 1946. Kyodo News Agency.
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tablish whether the existence of plans such as those mentioned by Sejima necessarily implied readiness to start a war. McManus took yet another approach: he questioned the reliability of the USSR’s witnesses. He inquired about Sejima’s internment, asking whether he had been charged with any crimes in the USSR and the circumstances of his trip to Tokyo. Specifically, McManus wanted to know if Sejima had any knowledge of two Russian witnesses for the Soviet prosecution: Grigorii Semionov, the Cossack ataman, and Konstantin Rodzaevskii, the Harbin-based Russian fascist and leader of the Russian Fascist Union. Both men had been executed by the Soviets, giving McManus a rationale “to find out w hether or not the fact that t hese men who are not produced here and who have been executed might have had some bearing upon the testimony that this witness is offering right now.”30 The defense counsels’ probing questions did not manage to extract much new information from Sejima. The cross- examinations ended t here, and Sejima’s part in the Tokyo Trial was over. According to his memoir, the American representatives requested that Sejima and Matsumura be allowed to stay in Tokyo for further interrogations, but this request was refused by the Soviets. On 6 November 1946, the prosecution applied for permission for Matsumura and Sejima “to leave the jurisdiction of the Tribunal and return to Russia,” and this was promptly granted by the president of the Tokyo Trial, Justice William Webb.31 No reason was provided for their need to “return to Russia” in the document granting permission. Back in Siberia, in July 1949 Sejima was sentenced to twenty- five years in the camps u nder Article 58 of Rus sian Criminal Code—for “supporting international bourgeoisie” (Article 58 Paragraph 4) and “espionage” (Article 58 Paragraph 6)—t he charge reserved for many high-ranking Japanese kept in Soviet custody a fter everyone else was released.32 Whatever the reason b ehind his initial willingness to testify at the Tokyo Trial, in the courtroom Sejima took a middle course. On the one hand, by providing details of Japan’s offensive plans against the USSR that could not possibly be verified, he kept the promise he must have given to the Soviets. On the other hand, by focusing on military m atters in isolation from their political implications and emphasizing his ignorance of any Japanese intention to start a war with the USSR, Sejima managed to keep himself from being blamed for testimony against his former superiors and compatriots. In fact, the defense counsels—aware of the weaknesses in the Soviet case— unintentionally helped Sejima in the latter re spect by asking him
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leading questions and strengthening his point that the military plans he mentioned did not necessarily imply an imminent Japanese attack against the USSR. In a series of interviews Sejima gave years l ater, eventually published as a book, he emphasized the same point: “a strategic plan is not necessarily a plan of aggression.”33 Sejima’s subsequent fate, and the mysterious detachment he preserved after his return to Japan in 1956 and subsequent rise to prominence as one of the architects of Japan’s economic miracle, do not provide many clues about his time as a Siberian internee and Tokyo Trial witness. Nevertheless, in the broader history of the internment and the Cold War, the episode of his testimony demonstrates the high stakes at the Tokyo Trial, which was a venue of fierce postwar competition for legitimacy between the erstwhile allies. In the Tokyo courtroom, the victorious powers put behind them the bloody conflict that had held the world in its grip for six years and crossed swords in the new battle for supremacy in postwar East Asia. The legacies of the Tokyo Trial as one of the first acts of the new confrontation have been subject of much controversy over the past seven de cades, which is well summarized in the conclusion of Yuma Totani’s The Tokyo War Crimes Trial.34 However, the aspect of the international tribunal as a harbinger of Cold War disagreements has not been analyzed sufficiently by scholars. The ongoing debate about the value of the Tokyo judgment is reflective, once again, of the lack of consensus on the histories of the war, empire, and postwar settlement in Japan and East Asia in general. This is partly because the national history framework continues to dominate minds and agendas, with the “victor’s justice” view still popular in Japan—as seen in Japanese nationalists’ veneration of the dissenting Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal.35 Pal’s dissent was also popular among prominent conservative figures—Sejima, by his own admission, was one of the initiators of the plan to erect a monument to Pal in Kyoto.36 Yet, as pointed out by the Japa nese historian Higurashi Yoshinobu, the Tokyo Trial should be seen not just as an international legal event, but also as a venue where diplomacy took place. Higurashi’s call for a “cool-headed” (reisei) approach to the trial in Japan reveals the prevalence of emotions in any debate on the issue.37 However, as he rightly points out, for occupied Japan the trial was one of the first steps in the cooperative diplomacy with the United States, a sort of “national security policy that smoothed the transition to postwar politics and the cooperation with the United States.”38 For the United States, which sought to limit Soviet influence on the postwar settlement, the trial also rep-
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resented a preparation for its forthcoming entanglement with Japan that would flower into a security, political, and economic alliance. In anticipation of its policy goals vis-à-vis Japan, the United States granted blanket immunity to some potential defendants (the so-called scientists in Unit 731, involved in experiments on humans and development of bacteriological and chemical weapons) and ruled out any participation by Emperor Hirohito in the trial. For the Soviet Union, competing with the United States for influence over the East Asian and Pacific regions, the Japanese inclination toward the United States was just one reason for dissatisfaction with the trial verdict. In this competitive diplomacy, the Siberian internees acting as Soviet witnesses found themselves briefly in a no-man’s-land of international politics. They served the interests of the superpowers, who tried to use Japan and the Japanese to gain advantage over one another. The Soviets, in particular, turned to their Japanese charges as instruments in constructing their own version of postwar justice, once it became clear that the Allied justice— the verdict in the Tokyo Trial—would not grant Moscow all it desired. The 1949 Khabarovsk trial, in which the USSR adjudicated the crimes of twelve other high-ranking internees, and the Soviets’ unsuccessful proposal in 1950 to try the Japanese emperor were also part and parcel of the Soviet efforts to defy Allied justice and put forward its own. These tribunals thus became battlegrounds where the internees w ere drawn into the Cold War struggle. Nevertheless, the Tokyo Trial was only one stage on which the increasingly heated drama of disagreements between the United States and the USSR over Japan was played out. As Japan became locked more firmly in America’s embrace with each postwar month, more discord separated the two superpowers on issues relating to Japan’s immediate f uture. In the first postwar years few issues were as pressing and divisive—or seen as so obstructive to the postwar settlement—as the issue of repatriating the Japa nese from the USSR. This issue also became a major bone of contention between the Cold War rivals, and a stick with which to beat the USSR in the eyes of the Japanese and global public.
B ATTLES OVER REPATRIATION
The repatriation of more than 6.6 million Japanese soldiers and civilians from various ends of the defeated empire was a colossal undertaking that
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was beset with delays and difficulties. Returning the Japanese from Soviet- controlled territories proved particularly challenging. With some exceptions, the repatriation of Japanese from American-or British-controlled territories was delayed mostly for logistical reasons, or due to conflicts that continued or began anew following the end of WWII.39 The situation was different in Soviet-controlled territories, for the USSR was not interested in a speedy repatriation of the Japanese. The 23 August 1945 directive ordering the transportation of the Japanese to the camps did not specify the duration of their stay in the USSR. From its beginning, it was clear that the Siberian Internment was not intended as a short-term undertaking. The repatriation of these internees further widened the growing divisions between the USSR and other members of the Allied Council for Japan, particularly the United States, and turned into a Cold War battlefield in its own right. Following persistent American demands to return the Japanese from Soviet-controlled territories, on 19 December 1946 the “Agreement between the U.S.S.R. and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (Concerning Repatriation of Japanese Prisoners of War)” was signed. According to the deal, the USSR agreed to repatriate 50,000 Japanese every month. However, the existence of the agreement did not guarantee that repatriation from the USSR could be finished within a few months. First of all, the Soviets agreed to repatriation only during warm months, citing climatic conditions: Soviet ports froze during the winter, which made navigation difficult. Explaining the delays in their repatriation to the Japanese in their custody, Soviet officials shifted the blame to the GHQ, which allegedly had failed to provide repatriation ships. This was clear misinformation. According to a survey of Occupation policies, when it became clear that the Soviets w ere using every excuse to hold on to the Japanese, “the United States representative on the Allied Council for Japan, on 29 October 1947, offered enough shipping (including fuel) to increase the rate of repatriation immediately to 131,500 persons for the first designated month, and to 160,000 thereafter. No Soviet answer for this offer was received.” 40 Second, on the issue of repatriation, when there was a clash between the USSR’s international and domestic obligations, the latter always had the upper hand. The record of a meeting of officials from several Soviet agencies on 19 February 1947 by Lieutenant General Konstantin Golubev, the deputy commissioner for repatriation of the USSR Council of Ministers (Zamestitel’ upolnomochennogo SM SSSR po delam repatriatsii), provides an
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illustrative example. At the meeting Golubev, responsible for repatriating the agreed monthly number (50,000) of Japanese, spoke about the USSR’s capacity to exceed that figure and return 60,000 every month. His enthusiasm was soon curbed by the MVD representative, Colonel Denisov, who proclaimed that “it should be possible to repatriate 30,000 e very month in the next eight months—a total of 240,000,” provided that the Ministry of Railway Transport could supply fifteen railway echelons monthly. Undoubtedly, it was the MVD—the agency chiefly responsible for the internees’ life and death—t hat had the last word on the issue: the officials at the meeting agreed to Denisov’s 30,000 as the number the USSR could repatriate “without detriment to our national economy and railway transport.” However, the document in question has an addendum, entered in hand two days later, on 21 February. It reports a telephone conversation between Golubev and Sergei Kruglov, the interior minister, “who stated his objection to the 30,000 rate, which could not be sustained. Comrade Kruglov believes the rate of repatriating the Japanese in 1947 cannot exceed 20,000 persons monthly. Any increase in this number w ill damage the national economy dramatically.” 41 The return of Japanese each month thus continued at the pace set by the MVD u ntil 22 April 1950, when the Telegraph Agency of the USSR announced that “the Soviet authorities have completed the repatriation of remaining Japanese POWs . . . w ith the exception of persons under investigation in relation to war crimes.” 42 This announcement gave rise to waves of international criticism of the Soviet Union, especially in Japan. Emerging from the war as part of a victorious allied coalition and with a firm belief in the centrality of its contribution to defeating the evils of Nazism, fascism, and militarism, the Soviet Union did not take lightly any attempts to damage its hard-earned international prestige. In other words, while the rate of repatriation was dictated by concrete economic interests, the Soviet leaders were nevertheless eager to avoid the bad press it attracted due to its illegal detainment of foreign citizens. An important change in the Soviet approach to repatriation around 1947 reflects the influence of international public opinion on Soviet decisions. Interestingly, both the old and new approaches to repatriation had been governed by considerations of prestige. First, during 1946, the USSR had hastily repatriated the sickly and incapacitated POWs in the aftermath of the deadly winter of 1945–1946. This was for a pragmatic reason: the Soviet leaders preferred that t hese sickly Japanese not die in Soviet territory. Then, starting
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in 1947, as conditions in the camps slowly improved thanks to persistent attempts to control diseases and prevent mortality, repatriation authorities realized the damage that the sick returnees had inflicted on the nation’s image. This change in thinking was already evident in late 1946: an MVD order on repatriation in October dictated that “the sick and weakened [were] not to be among t hose repatriated in 1946.” 43 Instead, with mortality rates now under control, it made sense to send home the POWs who w ere the most productive workers, to create a favorable image of life in the USSR and to motivate other internees to work harder. In a draft of a memorandum to Iosif Stalin in November 1946, Interior Minister Kruglov suggested that “to stimulate high productivity of labor . . . it is appropriate to repatriate those POWs who have exceeded their quotas in the last 5–6 months,” and in a missive to Viacheslav Molotov in September 1946, Kruglov recommended “repatriating . . . 30,000–40,000 from Far Eastern regions,” since the POWs “demonstrate a low level of labor productivity in winter months, are prone to cold-related diseases and tuberculosis, and rarely work outside during high frost.” 44 Nevertheless, the basic premise of keeping internees for as long as possible remained intact, with minor tweaks that served to improve productivity at home and prestige abroad. Despite t hese efforts, the USSR’s international image was to suffer significantly u nder the incessant barrage of foreign criticism. Looking back, an October 1955 British report claimed that the issue had caused “deep bitterness in the countries most concerned and the resultant damage to the Soviet cause has been incalculable. That the Soviet authorities have been aware of this harm there can be little doubt.” 45 The report’s author justifiably wondered, “Why did the Soviet Union permit this ill-w ill against her [to a]rise in the first place?” but did not offer a definitive answer. In reality there w ere two major reasons for the Soviets’ reluctance to allow the Japa nese and other POWs to return home, despite the high diplomatic and economic cost of holding onto them. First, as I have argued above, the Siberian internees w ere a valuable workforce for the desperately understaffed Soviet economy in the initial postwar years. This dependence is evident in the prolonged confrontations between the office of the Commissioner for Repatriation on the one hand, and the state ministries and local authorities dependent on workforce to fulfill production quotas on the other hand. Disputes between these agencies were perhaps inevitable, given their conflicting interests: the former strove to fulfill the USSR’s repatriation obligations, while the latter worried about the precious workers they would lose as a result.
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An illustrative example of such an administrative standoff was that between the central authorities and Dmitrii Kriukov, the civilian administrator of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in the three years after the war. In his memoir, Kriukov did not single out the repatriation of over 350,000 Japa nese and more than 20,000 Koreans from Sakhalin for special treatment, or give away any details of his battles with Moscow.46 However, the Rus sian historian Iuliia Din has unearthed archival materials attesting to Kriukov’s vehement opposition to the repatriation of the Japanese and Koreans. Kriukov was an influential and energetic man with instructions from Stalin himself to Sovietize southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Din writes that Kriukov “succeeded in persuading the highest leadership that hasty repatriation of Japanese would inflict enormous damage to the task of fulfilling industrial and agricultural plans.” 47 As mentioned above, even the high office of the Commissioner for Repatriation was helpless when faced with the MVD’s mighty apparatus, which made the ultimate decisions about the fate of POW labor. A report by the Commissioner on 22 February 1947 stated that “the w hole Japanese labor contingent involved in the industry of Southern Sakhalin can be repatriated last,” showing that Kriukov’s demands were met with MVD’s support.48 In an economy starved of human resources, competition for POW labor was fierce, and once reconstruction efforts became dependent on this workforce, it proved onerous to wean ministries, industrial combines, construction projects, and other labor-intensive enterprises off this readily available and easily mobilized source of workers. The second, more important, reason had to do with the looming Cold War. However important their role as workers, the Japanese captives had a crucial utility that went beyond their labor. By keeping them for as long as possible, the Soviet leaders preserved a channel of influence, a metaphorical handle on US-occupied Japan. Stalin must have reasoned that holding onto the Japanese in his custody might give him unexpected rewards in the long run, as well as giving the USSR an advantage in the coming Cold War competition with the United States over East Asia. At the very least, these Japa nese could be used to the Soviets’ advantage once they returned to Japan. Jacques Rossi wrote in his Fragments of Lives, “There are only two reasons for winding up in the Gulag: Firstly, when t here is a suspicion of a suspicion; secondly, any other excuse.” 49 In the case of Uchimura Gōsuke, Rossi’s friend and cellmate, and the other ’56ers we analyzed in the Introduction, both reasons were valid. Many Japanese internees, like Asahara Seiki, ended up in Soviet prison camps a fter everyone e lse’s repatriation b ecause, first of all, t here was suspicion of a suspicion: the NKVD s topped the
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repatriation of anyone with any trace of doubt about their past. But t here was also an excuse. As explained by another cellmate of Rossi’s, a man named Boris Lago-Ozerov who had experience working for Soviet intelligence operations abroad, “the NKVD would keep p eople ‘on hand’ for years whom they might consider using one day to instigate some politically ‘relevant’ provocation. Indeed, thirteen years later I met Prince Konoe Fumitaka— son of the former Japanese Prime-Minister [Konoe Fumimaro]—at the end of the immense Gulag empire. A fter spending seven or eight years in a pre-trial prison, the (NKVD) political police had finally given up the idea of using him in some completely fabricated trial, and instead had sentenced him to twenty-five years of prison. Once imprisoned, more time could always be added on.”50 In other words, the Soviets kept the Japanese as a potentially useful asset, a trump card in the coming negotiations with their home country. Needless to say, the charges brought against the POWs conflicted with international law: none of the conventions on the treatment of POWs allowed the sentencing of these Japanese citizens for espionage, or anti-Soviet agitation, or supporting the international bourgeoisie—the charges most commonly made. The absurdity of sentencing them to long stints in prisons according to the domestic Russian criminal code for crimes committed outside the Soviet Union while serving their national interests as employees of foreign military or intelligence organs can be explained only (if at all) by the prospect of using the POWs in the future. The Japanese fell victim to the USSR’s own version of justice carried out in two types of trials of Japanese and other POWs: first, the public show trials like the Khabarovsk trial of 1949, that chiefly served a propaganda purpose; and second, the largely secret camp trials of Japanese military officers, former bureaucrats, or anyone else who came under suspicion and had to be kept in Soviet custody beyond the point when all the ordinary soldiers w ere to be returned.51 I call this point the Great Sorting of 1949, when the Soviet state, under constant pressure from the international community, decided to end the repatriation of the majority of remaining Japanese internees (keeping whom had become more difficult to justify), yet held onto a relatively small number of those who might become useful in the international political bargains of the Cold War. However, this sorting was influenced not only by foreign policy considerations, but also by the domestic political climate: it coincided with the second wave of political purges of 1947–1949, when many political prisoners who had initially been imprisoned a decade earlier were rearrested.52
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Once the Tokyo Trial had reached its verdict, which the USSR found largely unsatisfactory, the Soviet authorities embarked on a twofold strategy in relation to their Japanese captives.53 On the one hand, they decided to repatriate all Japanese without obvious political value, which—in Soviet eyes—would remove the pretext for foreign criticism on the international scene. It would also enable the USSR to proclaim its benevolence in releasing all internees except those u nder investigation for war crimes. On the other hand, the USSR would still preserve a core of important military, political, and intellectual figures. T hese were around 1,500 individuals that the MVD sifted out of the mass of Japanese in several attempts. These p eople w ere deemed either potentially too dangerous to return to an increasingly hostile Japan, where they could contribute to joint Japanese-American efforts to damage Soviet interests, or potentially useful for Soviet interests and should thus be kept beyond the reach of everybody e lse. The other Allies were aware of these considerations. In February 1951, at the height of the Korean War, a British report stated, “It is reasonable to assume that the Soviets are afraid that these former military leaders might form the nucleus of future Japanese military groups for operations against the USSR, and also would provide the Western Powers with a group of ‘USSR experts.’ ”54 Indignant at the Soviets’ blatant disregard of the Potsdam Declaration and other international agreements, and mindful that the protracted captivity of the Japanese benefited Soviet interests, the government and society of Japan engaged in a prolonged and persistent struggle to hasten the repatriation of Japanese POWs throughout the eleven winters of the internment, but especially in the period 1945–1950. The Japanese authorities and citizen groups followed two major avenues in attempting to force the early return of the Siberian internees: the first was the formal, diplomatic avenue, while the second was the more forceful and critical approach, using media and political channels to discredit the USSR internationally as a slavery kingdom. Both approaches aimed at putting pressure on Moscow to force it to hasten the repatriation of Japanese citizens, but the second avenue metamorphosed into an all-out media and public onslaught on the Soviet Union and the JCP, to which some of the returning Siberian internees lent a voice—as seen in the example of the Tokuda Incident, analyzed later. Unable to conduct its own foreign policy during the Occupation, the Japa nese government had to rely on the United States to fight its b attles in international forums.55 The diplomatic b attles between the Soviet and American representatives at these venues became the initial medium in which
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Japan’s position as a victim vis-à-vis the Soviet Union took shape. The USSR’s regular refusals to provide information on the captives’ numbers and well- being frustrated the Japanese, who tirelessly lobbied the GHQ, foreign governments, and international organizations to demand the Soviets’ cooperation and hasten the repatriation of their compatriots. The US Occupation administration heeded these calls, “put[ting] pressure on the Soviet Union to honor the Potsdam Declaration and return Japanese soldiers to their families.”56 Toward the end of the Occupation, the Japanese government started to show independent initiative on the global stage. For example, in May–June 1951 Yoshida Shigeru, Japan’s prime minister and foreign minister, lobbied the UN General Assembly for assistance in hastening the repatriation.57 Japanese representatives used the UN Ad Hoc Commission on Prisoners of War—established by a General Assembly resolution in December 1950 in response to a complaint filed by Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—which sought to settle “the question of the prisoners of war in a purely humanitarian spirit.” True, the commission proved largely ineffectual, and its members conceded that “all efforts to secure the co-operation of the Soviet Union Government had so far proved unavailing.”58 Nevertheless, for the Japanese it was an important platform for drawing attention to the problem of their unrepatriated compatriots. On 12 September 1952, the Japanese representative at the eighth meeting of the commission’s third session, “Mrs. Kondo,” reminded the commission “how important it was to the Japanese p eople that it should persevere in its task to the end. Although the expected results had not been achieved so quickly as could have been desired, the Commission represented the only gleam of hope for t hose unfortunate p eople who were still awaiting the re59 turn of their dear ones.” In 1953, when the commission’s future came under attack because, in the words of a British delegate to the United Nations, “the individual members of the Commission are fed up with a job which appears to offer no prospect of productive result,” 60 the Japanese government requested the United Kingdom’s help in ensuring “that this Commission w ill continue to exist and perform its functions u ntil the time when the repatriation of Japanese nationals has been finally settled.” 61 There was another reason why the Japanese public desired the hasty repatriation of their compatriots. Around the start of the Korean War, in June 1950, anticommunist sentiment in Japan reached an apogee as a result of domestic and international developments. During this time, calls to repatriate the Siberian internees—more than 300,000 w ere erroneously believed to remain in the USSR—acquired a conspiratorial dimension. Fol-
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lowing the outbreak of the Korean conflict, as the world appeared to be on the brink of the third world war, rumors spread in the media that the USSR and China were planning to invade the Japanese islands by using these internees, whom they were suspected of having thoroughly retrained for combat. Declassified CIA archival material alludes to media reports of Soviets using Japanese POWs on the front line in Korea. For example, a November 1950 report titled “Soviet Troops Include Japanese POWs” claimed, “Eight or nine Soviet divisions comprising about 150,000 men are now being transferred to Vladivostok for deployment along the Korean border. . . . [O]ne third of the above men are Japanese troops which surrendered to the Soviet forces in 1945.” 62 Outlandish though they might seem in hindsight, these rumors were taken up even by newspapers half the world away. Thus, on 2 March 1951, the London Daily Telegraph published an article from its Washington correspondent reporting the strong belief “that a Communist- indoctrinated Japanese corps is with the Russians on Sakhalin Island.” The article claimed that “infiltration and internal subversion” represented “the imminent danger for Japan.” 63 The infiltrators would be recruited from among the 300,000 Japanese allegedly unaccounted for since they had been taken to Siberia from Manchuria and other formerly Japan-controlled territories by the Soviets in 1945. T hese widespread fears w ere also mentioned in a British intelligence report, which claimed that “rumours persist in Japan that Japanese VIP’s have been converted to communism and w ill lead invasion forces into Japan to ‘stage a p eople’s revolution.’ ” 64 Rumors of a coming communist invasion by 300,000 unrepatriated Japa nese might have been deliberate disinformation aimed to discredit the USSR, but they certainly contributed to the growing anti-Soviet feeling in Japanese society. The whopping discrepancy in the numbers of “missing” people was a product of a miscalculation: when the Soviet Union presented the total number of Japanese POWs, it counted only those interned in “the USSR and Mongolian People’s Republic,” whereas the GHQ and Japanese government interpreted “Soviet- controlled territories” to also include northern Korea and Manchuria. According to Tomita Takeshi, the GHQ and the Japanese Foreign Ministry exploited this discrepancy in criticizing the USSR.65 The accuracy of such claims was questioned by the returnees themselves. For example, Kurihara Yasuyo, who was repatriated in 1947, wrote in his 1949 memoir: “According to newspaper reports, t here are over 400,000 of our compatriots still remaining in Soviet territory. In reality, there cannot be so many.” 66 Importantly, declassified information in American and British archives demonstrates that the officials of both nations did
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not seriously anticipate a Soviet attack on Japan, nor did they display any alarm about the 300,000 potential invaders. Thus a special estimate of the US CIA on the “Probability of a Communist Assault on Japan in 1951,” dated 17 August 1951, proclaimed, “There is no reliable evidence of a Soviet intent to undertake an early invasion of Japan.” 67 In the UK Foreign Office records, British diplomats dismissed the Daily Telegraph story as “rather far-fetched,” commenting that the newspaper “is notorious for its readiness to print any rumour that comes its way.” 68 Other British diplomats noted that while they were initially willing to believe the claim about the 300,000 Japanese missing in the USSR, they soon realized that the number did not bear scrutiny: “The total number of those ‘not repatriated’ is given as 340,585 by one method of computation and as 369,000 by another, but the most striking fact about these figures is that the Japanese Government, though maintaining that between 340,000 and 370,000 persons are ‘unaccounted for’ or ‘not repatriated’, suggests that, in fact, only about 80,000 of these are still alive. We must admit that we have tended in previous references to this question to assume that there were actually about 300,000 Japanese still alive and unrepatriated.” 69 While the Japanese government played a central role in diplomatic campaigns for the repatriation of Japanese internees, formal avenues were not a government monopoly. The British report mentioned in the previous paragraph also detailed persistent appeals from the National Council for Accelerating the Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Abroad (Zaigai Dōhō Hikiage Sokushin Zenkoku Kyōgikai) to the British Mission in Tokyo. The timing of these appeals was due more to the forthcoming signing of a peace treaty between Japan and the Allies than to the Korean War. Throughout the first half of 1951 the council lobbied the western Allies to include the issue of repatriation in the peace treaty that was being negotiated at the time. On 24 April, for example, the council sent to the UK Liaison Mission at the British Embassy in Tokyo a petition which they have addressed to the Japanese Prime Minister regarding the 300,000 Japanese prisoners of war still held in the Soviet Union and in Communist China. The petition points out that the United States draft peace treaty makes no reference to this problem and claims that, under Article 9 of the Potsdam Declaration, the powers concerned accepted responsibility for the return of all Japanese prisoners, not only those held by themselves. The petition goes on to say that . . . a clause should be inserted
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in the treaty in which the signatory powers bind themselves to continue to use their best efforts for the return of the prisoners still held by the Soviet Union and China.70
Petitions continued to be signed and sent to Allied representatives. On 23 July, three months after the report quoted above, the council organized a three-day meeting of the families of the unrepatriated and its representatives delivered another petition to the UK mission on the following day. Its deliberately dramatic message, in the British diplomats’ translation, was: “Our most beloved flesh and blood relatives w ere given the ‘sentence of death’ by the government of the U.S.S.R. previously and now they are forsaken by the United States, Britain and other countries. Lastly, they are about to get a ‘coup de grace’ from the hands of our brethren who w ill put their signatures to this Treaty.” 71 While terms employed by the Japanese government w ere less dramatic, the council’s activities w ere largely in concert with those of the Yoshida government, which was also pursuing this goal. Detailed British reports show that the Japanese government felt confident enough in the run-up to the signing of the San Francisco Treaty in September 1951 to insist on the inclusion of a clause on repatriation. Importantly, diplomatic reports demonstrate that not all trust had been lost among the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR—allies in WWII—even as late as mid-1951, when the Korean conflict remained unresolved. Documents dated April–May 1951, when the Japanese government and citizens’ groups intensified their lobbying efforts, reveal British skepticism about the inclusion of the reference to the Potsdam Declaration. One diplomat, Arthur F. Maddocks, wrote in regard to a dispatch from Tokyo that “an Article in the Treaty about the repatriation of POW would be a blatant piece of propaganda” but suggested that “if it is thought that this idea is worth pursuing, the first step would be to obtain the views of the U.S. Govt.” 72 This British hesitation betrayed concern not only about relations with the USSR, but also about the United Kingdom’s own obligations, as claimed by C. Peter Scott, a diplomat in the Foreign Office’s Japan and Pacific Department: “It would be an unenforceable provision as far as Russia was concerned, it would lay on the Allied Powers a binding obligation which many would probably refuse to contemplate, and would do Japan little good.” 73 With time, the propaganda value of such a provision—that is, its potential to hurt the USSR internationally—became more evident. Still, the
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United States and United Kingdom had to walk a thin line between, on the one hand, keeping the USSR cooperative in the coming peace treaty with Japan and, on the other hand, helping Yoshida domestically. This is seen in a candid remark by Charles Hepburn Johnston, the British diplomat who wrote the report titled “Japanese Peace Treaty”: “If this proposal [from P[rime] M[inister] Yoshida to the Americans to include a paragraph that would force the Soviets to carry out Article 9 of Potsdam] w ere simply a piece of coat-trailing at the Russians’ expense, we should naturally recommend its rejection. As, however, the object of it is to help Mr. Yoshida with public opinion in Japan, and give him something to point to by way of sugar on the pill, there seems to be much advantage in accepting it.” 74 The above assessment in August 1951 demonstrates a clear change in thinking among the western Allies in the three months leading up to the San Francisco conference on the peace treaty. While Washington and London were still wary of damaging relations with the Soviets over Japan, the tide was clearly turning. The United States and United Kingdom saw the utility of the repatriation issue in putting diplomatic pressure on the USSR, as is clear from the record of a consultation between the British representatives and William J. Sebald, Douglas MacArthur’s political adviser on the issue. Sebald opined that “the question, which has been simmering for a considerable time, has now ‘boiled over’ in practically every town and village in the country [Japan], where the local organizations for the return of unrepatriated nationals have banded into what now appears to be a nation wide movement. The major political parties, in order to save themselves from public criticism, have all taken up the question, and it was largely to protect itself that the Japanese government issued the ‘white paper.’ ” 75 It was a remarkable instance of civil society organizations taking the lead and forcing governments—both Japanese and foreign—to take action. Beatrice Trefalt has written about the extraordinary influence of the “national coordinating organization of the families of the missing”—the Association of the Families of the Missing (Rusu Kazoku Dantai Zenkoku Kyōgikai)—in lobbying to include a reference to the Potsdam Declaration in the San Francisco Treaty. In the eyes of the relatives of the internees in Siberia, “a peace was about to be concluded that would end the obligations of the Treaty’s signatories to each other in matters left over from the war; it would, in other words, supersede the terms of the Potsdam Declaration of 1945 and put an end to all mutual obligations contained therein.” 76 The lobbyists’ tenacious efforts, which were not limited to petitions but also in-
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cluded widely publicized hunger strikes, led to the inclusion of the reference they sought so persistently in the final text of the treaty, as clause b in Article 6: “The provisions of Article 9 of the Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945, dealing with the return of Japanese military forces to their homes, to the extent not already completed, w ill be carried out.” 77 The signing of the treaty in September 1951 did little to change the position of the Soviet Union, which maintained that it had already repatriated all Japanese except for those it called war criminals. Nevertheless, Japanese civil society and public diplomacy groups ranging in size and influence from prefectural associations to the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) continued to engage in public diplomacy with the Allies, including the Soviet Union, after the San Francisco conference. However, for over eighteen months after the signing of the treaty, which the USSR heavily criticized and refused to sign, Moscow’s stance did not change. What transformed the Soviet position in the end was the passing of the man who had initiated the captivity of the Japanese in the USSR: Stalin died on 5 March 1953. The period between the dictator’s demise and the end of 1956 saw serious transformations in how the USSR treated foreigners under its control. These changes were noticed even by American intelligence officials. For example, the Japa nese and Koreans coming back to Japan from southern Sakhalin reported: “The Soviets became very friendly t oward the Japanese after the death of Stalin. They stated that they favored friendship between Japan and the Soviet Union and felt that the U.S. Army should be ousted from Japan as soon as possible.” 78 Weeks a fter Stalin’s death, the chairman of the National Council for Accelerating the Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Abroad was emboldened enough to send a telegram to the Soviet premier, Georgii Malenkov, requesting him to facilitate the return of the Japanese from the USSR.79 In July Ō yama Ikuo, a Japanese socialist and Diet member who had been awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951, held a meeting with the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, who “suggested that the question of prisoners of war might be settled via Red Cross channels.”80 Accordingly, the JRCS— under the energetic leadership of its aristocratic chairman, Shimazu Tadatsugu—embarked on a charm offensive toward the Soviet Union that was in stark contrast with the usual attitude of Japanese government and civil society groups. In October 1953, a JRCS delegation visited the USSR to begin negotiations with their Soviet counterparts and members of the CPSU.81 In his December testimony to the Diet, Shimazu gave a favorable
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account of the visit, which had lasted for a full month and included four meetings between the two sides.82 These initial contacts gave way to a lively exchange of letters between the Red Cross societies of the two nations that continued until—and contributed to the start of—the talks to restore relations that began in London in June 1955. In the same month, two prominent Japanese academics visited the Soviet Union: Nanbara Shigeru, a professor at and former president of Tokyo University, and Mutō Masao, a professor at Tōhoku University. During their visit, the two academics w ere taken to Camp No. 48 in the Ivanovo Region, in European Russia, where they met with high-ranking Japanese officers—including Yamada Otozō, the former Kwantung Army commander, and thirty-five other POWs. On their return to Japan on 25 June 1955, Nanbara and Mutō brought back letters to the families of the interned.83 A British Foreign Office report titled “Japa nese War Prisoners in the USSR” from December 1955, when the Soviet- Japanese talks to restore relations w ere ongoing, claimed that “the unrepatriated Japanese [were] being used as pawns in Soviet attempts to achieve normal diplomatic relations between the two countries.”84 Nevertheless, informal contacts and diplomatic exchanges helped facilitate the brief rapprochement between the two nations that culminated in the signing of the 1956 Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration that restored diplomatic relations between the two countries. The last and thus perhaps most conclusive document containing the numbers of Japanese interned in the USSR was written on 18 October 1956, one day before the signing of the joint declaration. This was a note (spravka) sent by Semion Perevertkin, the first deputy of the Ministry of the Interior, to the supreme troika of Soviet leaders—Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the CPSU; Nikolai Bulganin, chairman of the Council of Ministers; and Anastas Mikoyan, Bulganin’s first deputy—that summarized the internment in three pages, dryly yet precisely. The document reveals an in teresting discrepancy. In Manchuria, it reports, the Soviet forces “took prisoner 639,776 serv icemen of the former Japanese Army, 609,448 Japa nese and 30,328 Koreans, Chinese, Mongols, etc.” But “in the summary report of the Soviet Information Bureau on 12 September 1945, the total number of POWs was publicly announced as 594,000.” The document adds in underlined text, clearly aimed to reassure the Soviet leadership, that the larger number—639,776—was never made public, nor was the number of those who died in captivity. Finally, it puts the number of Japanese still remaining in custody at 1,030—not too far from the final group of 1,025 in-
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ternees transferred to the Japanese deleg ation to return with the last repatriation ship on 23 December 1956. Besides these, the report notes that 713 Japanese civilians, 419 of whom w ere w omen, were living in the Soviet Union “without national passport[s] but with resident permits for persons without citizenship.” The majority of these Japanese, wrote Perevertkin, “refused to return to Japan since many of them have built families and livelihoods during their stay in the Soviet Union.”85
CRITICIZING THE SLAVERY KINGDOM
We have seen that diplomatic pressure alone was ineffective in resolving the repatriation issue: its impact on Soviet behavior proved negligible until after Stalin’s passing. Between 1948 and 1953, less diplomatic means had to be used to put pressure on the USSR. The allegation that the Soviet Union had failed to return over 300,000 Japanese was one example of a concerted public and media campaign aiming to exploit the USSR’s Achilles’ heel—its forced l abor system. As the tide of the Cold War turned, this campaign grew into a broader attack against the three-pronged enemy of a free Japan: the Soviet Union; the JCP; and its potential foot soldiers, the returnees from Siberia. Different from diplomatic campaigns to discredit the USSR internationally, the media attack in Japan aimed to destroy the credibility of the USSR and the broader communist front in the Japanese public sphere. Few accusations hurt the USSR more than the charge of maintaining a slavery kingdom, the Gulag, which became widespread in the West starting in 1947–1948, as Cold War tensions increased. Until then the Soviet Union had enjoyed relatively good press and benevolent attitudes in the capitalist world, especially during and immediately a fter WWII. While the USSR had many weaknesses that its rivals could exploit, the real chink in its propaganda armor was the contradiction that a nation professing to end “the exploitation of man by man” ran a forced labor economy in which millions of people who were slaves for all practical purposes toiled in inhumane conditions.86 While the USSR’s reliance on forced labor had hardly been a secret, it was the ubiquitous use of the word “slave” that so ruffled the feathers of Soviet state and propaganda officials in the postwar period. The word “slave” propagated an image not of a happy homeland of workers of the world, but of a place where people were trapped and exploited against their w ill. Examples proving this point w ere abundant. In her analysis of the
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reluctance of Soviet citizens and soldiers to be repatriated from Europe following the end of WWII, Susan Carruthers provided one such example: “For Moscow, the mass resistance of citizens to repatriation [to the USSR] after the war, coupled with the attempt of thousands more to flee west after 1945, constituted a stain that no amount of patriotic propaganda could bleach.”87 So were the attempts of foreign citizens to escape forced internment and labor exploitation, as well as the ceaseless attempts of their respective governments and compatriots to pressure the USSR to release them. Japanese media and citizens’ groups took aim at this contradiction at the heart of the Soviet system. Their efforts coincided with the growing awareness in the United States and other Western nations that the USSR’s slave- labor economy was a convenient target for propaganda. Cold War realities meant that the ugliest face of this contradiction—what we can call “slave narratives”—became one of the most preferred sticks with which to beat the USSR in the United States. While these narratives w ere subdued when relations between the two countries w ere close, they became prominent as the wartime alliance crumbled. Carruthers argued: “sustained criticism of Soviet ‘forced l abor’ became pronounced only when the g reat powers’ war time coalition splintered. Gulag consciousness in the West, in other words, was neither an outgrowth of détente nor a function of de-Stalinization but a correlate of cold war tension.”88 Moreover, this criticism was not exclusively government-led: members of civil society played an active part in it. In 1949, the AFL presented to the United Nations a copy of its book titled Slave L abor in Russia.89 The AFL was an influential organization that “played an outsized but underappreciated role in constructing the political culture and legal regime of postwar domestic [US] anticommunism and McCarthyism,” and its leaders “evangelized about the evils of communism, not only to u nion members, but also to Congress and the American public.”90 The 200-page Slave L abor in Russia contained chapters that compared f ree and slave labor, as well as a whole section containing thirteen “Affidavits by Former Inmates of Soviet Concentration Camps,” including a Zionist scholar, a Red Army officer, a peasant from Belorussia and a Polish invalid.91 By using the term “concentration camps,” the AFL put the Soviet labor camps in the same category as the Nazi camps, a comparison damaging to the USSR’s international image. Two years later, the AFL produced a map of the USSR titled “Gulag—Slavery, Inc.,” containing the locations of e very Gulag camp, with which the Missouri Congressman Orland Kay Armstrong confronted the Soviet deputy foreign minister and delegate to the San Fran-
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cisco Conference Andrei Gromyko.92 The word “slave” was also widely and deliberately used by US government officials: “By demonstrating that the phrase slave world wasn’t ‘mere abuse, but a precisely accurate term,’ U.S. officials aspired to demolish communism’s emancipatory pretensions, thereby shattering the appeal of Marxism-Leninism to oppressed p eoples 93 worldwide.” But it was more than the wish to discredit Moscow’s Marxist- Leninist appeal that underpinned American thinking. The Soviet Union’s very challenge to the United States was dictated by it being a “slave state,” as articulated by a draft Report to the President of May 1950: “The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles.”94 In Japan, where Article 3 of the 1945 GHQ Press Code prohibited any “false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers” in the early Occupation years, an increasing number of critical reports and news stories were published on national newspaper front pages a fter 1948.95 Moreover, the early Cold War period saw the emergence of openly anticommunist and anti-Soviet newspapers in Japan, which mirrored the increasingly dominant mood in society.96 Much like their Western counterparts, major Japanese newspapers regularly carried stories about the communist threat during this period, and returnees from Siberia were often implicitly linked with this threat. The topic of repatriation became central to the new thought war, with newspapers criticizing (1) the Soviet reluctance to cooperate throughout the internment but especially between 1945 and 1949; (2) the extreme conditions in which the Japanese compatriots (dōhō) w ere kept in the Soviet camps; and, more importantly, (3) Soviet efforts of communist indoctrination in the camps. While the first and second points—whose use played on the nationalist frenzy and compatriotic feelings of the Japanese public toward their interned fellow citizens—were popular between 1945 and 1949, the third point became the main focus of anti-Soviet propaganda message a fter 1949. As a popular medium of information, Japanese newspapers were not only pacesetters of public opinion but also its reflection. Their coverage reflected people’s anxieties about the future. Even amid “the exhaustion and despair” of the immediate postwar period, the Japanese public maintained high levels of participation and interest in societal affairs—which perhaps was natural, given the sweeping pace and scope of changes in Japan during the Occupation that influenced almost e very citizen’s life.97 In addition, this participation was a logical continuation of the unprecedented mass mobilization achieved by the Japanese state during the war. The Japanese public
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never shied away from taking an active part in producing and consuming propaganda during the war, and it would be wrong to assume that Japanese would neglect the new thought war of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The fact that the media industry in Japan had “survive[d] the war practically unscathed” meant that it soon resumed its central role in the postwar public sphere, a role indispensable in the psychological war (shinri sensō) waged by the Occupation authorities against communism in Japan.98 In this war, Siberian internees proved valuable subjects for propagandists on both sides of the Cold War divide: first for Soviet indoctrination chiefs, as discussed above, and later for US Occupation officials responsible for information policy. The stories of slave labor that the internees brought back to Japan—and the word “slave” (dorei) was prominent in their narratives— resonated with propaganda messages about the USSR as the slavery kingdom.99 The US authorities rated the Soviet indoctrination efforts highly, acknowledging that the Soviet propaganda program had managed to combine effective methods with the perfect conditions for turning the heads of Japanese POWs. The repatriates, according to the argument broadcast widely and regularly by the GHQ, had been kept in total isolation from the outside world while undergoing an indoctrination program with the two objectives of spreading misinformation about Japan and celebrating the virtues of the communist system. This experience, which not all Japanese had embraced in the Soviet camps, was nonetheless a substantial reason to suspect them of being communist converts. Japanese national newspapers often reported on the repatriation of Japa nese between 1945 and 1949 in the form of brief news stories about the arrivals of repatriation ships. The newspapers also discussed the uncertainty of the internees’ fate, their numbers, and the conditions they lived in during their imprisonment, as well as the struggle to hasten their return. However, such concerns were set aside and the tone of newspaper reports changed significantly following the watershed events of 1949. To trace how the changes in international relations in East Asia translated into the public sphere, let us analyze some pages of national newspapers, focusing on the Mainichi and Asahi in 1949–1950, for reports related to repatriation from the Soviet Union, as well as both news stories and editorials responding to important developments and Soviet proclamations and pieces demonizing the JCP. We will see that despite the returnees’ interventions into the public sphere when they presented their versions of the truth, their accounts w ere often altered to fit the desired message.
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One significant feature of reports about the Soviet indoctrination of Japa nese internees is the careful balance the newspapers had to maintain between, on the one hand, the task of alerting the populace to the potential danger of repatriates as communist converts and, on the other hand, the risk of inadvertently giving too much credit to the Soviets and their students. Unlike in secret reports, in their public pronouncements GHQ officials were dismissive of the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda, careful to point out that the Japanese former soldiers would soon return to their normal behavior as good citizens. The contrast between secret reports and public announcements was thus stark. The public had to be aware that the returnees might attempt to disrupt the peace and order in society, but it should not witness the authorities’ concerns about communist subversion. Japanese society had to be informed about the depravity and cruelty of the Soviets, who had abused and misled innocent Japanese citizens for several years, but the subtle message should be that Soviet efforts, however crafty, would never achieve success in the new peaceful and democratic Japan. This message would be enough to cause repulsion t oward the USSR without betraying any of the open appreciation or alarm that the US policy makers expressed in the secret reports quoted above. In all this, the returnees were often condescendingly depicted as subjects of Soviet machinations or as prodigal sons who should be carefully guided back into society. The USSR hardly occupied a permanent spot on the front pages of the Mainichi in 1949–1950, but the newspaper published frequent articles on recent, often provocative, declarations of Soviet representatives or commentary from US high-ranking officials and Western intellectuals on Soviet actions. Moreover, following the establishment of the PRC in October 1949, the USSR and communist China w ere increasingly referred to as one front, “the communist powers” (kyōsanshugi seiryoku). As the Sino-Soviet alliance became a reality in February 1950, the counterbalancing alliance between the United States and Japan was promoted as a necessity to preserve “peace and freedom” in East Asia.100 On the pages of the Mainichi and other national newspapers, the Soviet Union represented the most immediate threat to that peace and freedom, and reports of recent returnees from that nation provided ample proof of its brutality and backwardness. On 2 February 1950, for example, the Mainichi published a special feature article u nder the headline “Truth about the Siberian Internment: We Ate Even Snails and Frogs.” This may have been inspired by one repatriate’s report to an Occupation official at the port of Maizuru that “for fully
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three months we were given only potatoes, so we ate all the frogs, snails and slugs around the camp,” which was quoted in the GHQ’s special report subtitled “Life and Death in Soviet P.W. Camps.”101 These desperate attempts to find nutrition became deeply entrenched into the Japanese perceptions of Soviet camps, especially for national newspapers, even after the conditions in the camps had changed for the better. In fact, by the time of the Mainichi story, not only had the camp conditions improved, but most of the internees had already returned to Japan.102 Nevertheless, lack of food and other instances of Soviet backwardness and brutality continued to make headlines. The 7 February issue of the Mainichi covered a session of the House of Councillors’ Special Committee on the Repatriation of Japanese Citizens Remaining Overseas. This report, too, had a sensationalist title: “One Hundred Thousand Dead: The Siberian Tragedy— The Testimony of 103 Former Colonel Tanemura.” The report included the account of recent returnee Tanemura Suketaka (Sakō), a former IJA colonel and prominent strategist. As a military planner in the Imperial General Headquarters and the keeper of its secret journal, Tanemura had played a part in Japan’s strategy vis-à-vis the USSR in the last months of WWII. On 6 February 1950, Tanemura had answered the committee’s questions about his time in the USSR, the treatment of the internees and conditions in the camps, the Soviet reeducation and indoctrination program, and other issues. In response to a question about the discrepancy between the Soviet and Japa nese numbers for the internees remaining in the USSR, Tanemura said that of the 300,000 unrepatriated Japanese, “at least 100,000” must have died in the Soviet Union—the statement that supplied the Mainichi with its headline.104 A look at the transcript of the Diet session shows that Tanemura also acknowledged the need to make a distinction between t hose who had died not in the Soviet Union but in Manchuria, Korea, or other areas temporarily under Soviet control, and to not lump all the deaths together. Tanemura’s caveat was completely omitted from the newspaper article. Other witnesses talked about the latest economic revival in the USSR, claiming that the “Soviet Union is by no means a mystery country, and fundamental growth is occurring there.”105 This information was also omitted from the article. The headline chosen for the article, therefore, reflected more closely the anxiety of the times than the content of the witnesses’ accounts. The only witness to utter the word “tragedy” was Itagaki Tadashi, whom we encountered above. However, if one reads Itagaki’s full testimony, it is easy to see that he used the word not to mean “the Siberian tragedy,” as the Mainichi
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headline and lead suggested, but rather as a general criticism of war and militarism. Itagaki’s soul-searching statement deserves a full quote, with his two mentions of the word “tragedy” emphasized: It is true that many [Japanese] p eople are becoming victims (gisei) after entering the Soviet Union. Yet I see this as one of the tragedies caused by Japan’s defeat in the war. In essence, [these victims] are no different from the many promising young men of the tokkōtai [kamikaze units] who died embracing their [plane-]bombs (bakudan o daite). . . . To prevent such tragedies from repeating themselves . . . we should forgo the feelings we have had toward the Soviet Union for a long time, inculcated in me in the Japa nese Army Air Force Academy: hatred, viewing [the Soviets] as animals, as “the Red Country,” “the mysterious country.”106
Despite reporting on this session, the Mainichi article did not quote Itagaki’s words, as they ran completely counter to its claim that “the tragedies of internee lifestyle in Siberia came up in the testimonies of all witnesses.”107 In this example of selective reporting, some testimonies from the same Diet session made it into the headlines, while o thers w ere completely omitted. It is not difficult to guess that the latter came from people sympathetic to the USSR, as Itagaki was at the time. The Asahi commonly published several front-page articles on a related topic, and reports about repatriation w ere often accompanied by shorter pieces that expanded on the subject. The newspaper’s 28 June 1949 morning edition had a banner headline that read, “First Ship to Resume Repatriation Arrives from the Soviet Union: 2,000 Repatriates Reach Maizuru on Board Takasago-maru.”108 A smaller article on the same page took up the subject of ideological orientation of the returnees u nder the headline “Returnees Ignorant of the Truth: Share of Communists at Its Highest among Repatriates.” In the article, “a high-ranking GHQ official” claimed that the repatriates had been misled in the isolation of Soviet camps and would no doubt change their thinking as soon as they w ere reunited with their families.109 Another article on that page, written by an Associated Press (AP) correspondent who had witnessed the returnees’ disembarkation from the Takasago-maru, pointed to the contrast between this batch of repatriates and t hose who had returned in previous years: “The two thousand repatriates were dressed in durable clothes, and one could see they had been fed well. I also suspected they w ere well drilled along the communist lines. My suspicion was soon proved right: about half of those I approached
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readily admitted they w ere planning to join the Communist Party. . . . Some were genuinely surprised to find that Japan was not starving: the propaganda newspaper Nihon shimbun, published in Siberia, had reported there was no food in Japan and that p eople w ere selling their c hildren to buy provisions.”110 While the discussion of repatriates’ clothing and appearance was standard procedure, a practice inherited from e arlier years when the dominant topic of conversation was the returnees’ often emaciated condition, one can see that this discussion served another purpose. True, these reports still portrayed the returnees as part of the Japanese national body beyond any doubt: hence the ubiquitous messages of “Gokurōsamadeshita!” (“Thank you for enduring the hardships!”) in both the repatriation centers and on newspapers’ front pages. At the same time, in the media the returnees were reincarnated as the most direct, immediate, and tangible evidence of the Soviet Union. This explains the curiosity and zeal with which their clothes as well as thoughts were scrutinized by reporters eager to convey the feel of the Soviet Union that the repatriates brought back with them. In this way, newspapers located the repatriates in the gray zone between us and them, making it possible to move the returnees back and forth between the two groups depending on the emphasis of the report. The ambivalence with which the newspapers reported, on the one hand, the repatriates’ potential for subversion and, on the other hand, the suffering they had had to endure before they could walk on Japanese soil again points precisely to the existence of such a gray zone. Japanese-language newspapers hardly had a monopoly on anti-Soviet propaganda. The English- language daily Japan Times wondered on 29 March 1951 what the people of Hokkaido feared most as a threat to their postwar dream of “production, profits, prosperity.” “The answer is Russia,” the article’s author suggested, adding that “Hokkaidoans . . . have always hated the Russians, but now they are terrified of them.”111 Despite the abundance of such openly hostile news reports and opinion pieces, it would nevertheless be an exaggeration to portray the w hole of Japanese society as antagonistic to the USSR. The returnees clearly included Soviet sympathizers. The League for Supporting the Livelihoods of Returnees from the USSR (Sokidō), mentioned in Chapter 5, was one such group. In its 1949 booklet Appealing for the Truth, Sokidō decried the Japanese media’s attacks against the USSR:
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Unfortunately, the majority of these reports pander to the anxiety felt by families of internees and to the anti-Soviet feeling among our people. They especially select tragic events and publicize them in exaggerated fashion, stretching facts beyond the reality. Surely the writers of these articles must be feigning ignorance when they ask, Why did these tragedies occur? or, Who should take responsibility for them? If not, it is clear they are intentionally distorting the facts. Indeed, it would make perfect sense to use such a convenient topic to wring tears out of the Soviet-hating general public. Selling books [in this way], the publishers must be d oing well!112
In a general meeting on 28 October 1949, Sokidō members also criticized two recent films as denigrating the USSR and repatriates from that country. A Sokidō representative from Iwate Prefecture brought with him a “written protest against ‘DAMOI’ (Repatriation), a film produced by Shin Toho.” Kurihara, the chairman of the Sokidō Central Standing Committee, also criticized an earlier Shin Toho film On the Foreign Hills (mentioned in this book’s Introduction), sharing his conviction that Damoi would “bring disgrace upon repatriates and slander one of the Allied powers.”113 Neither was the Soviet government entirely silent in the face of international criticism. For example, a Moscow Radio broadcast in June 1951 took the United States to task for “inventing” the numbers of unrepatriated Japa nese, claiming: “Japanese prisoners of war held in Soviet territory were repatriated more than a year ago. The American Occupation authorities in Japan and the State Department should know that, yet they are slandering the Soviet Union. They have made up what they call a Japanese POW ‘yet to return’ list. Last August, Sebald told the same lie in the Allied Council for Japan, mentioning a figure of 370,000. Washington has now invented a new figure of 200,000.”114 The broadcast wondered, “Why are such tricks and fabrications necesary [sic] to the American imperialists? Their object is to defame the Soviet Union publicly and, at the same time, to prevent the Japanese people from knowing about t hose yet to return from the territory under American control.” As a tit-for-tat, it then asked: “What has happened to the 500,000 Japanese held in the South Pacific countries? They are being used as ‘bullets’ in the war against the people in South-Eastern Asia.”115 Such responses notwithstanding, the archives show that hostile propaganda campaigns gave the Soviet leaders pause and contributed to hastening the repatriation of the Japanese. From the early months of the internment,
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the TASS agency kept a tab on any Japanese pronouncements or petitions concerning the internment issue, furnishing regular reports on foreign media. For example, an April 1949 letter to Stalin from Andrei Vyshinskii, the foreign minister, stated: “In recent times the Americans and reactionary circles in Japan have unveiled campaigns for hastening the repatriation of Japanese POWs from the USSR.” Vyshinskii advised Stalin that 95,461 Japa nese remained in the USSR at the time and provided a detailed breakdown of the camps in which they were held. Finally, clearly to appease the campaigners, Vyshinskii recommended issuing “a statement that the repatriation of Japanese w ill be resumed with the start of springtime navigation, and that it w ill be completed in the course of 1949.”116 Only after Stalin’s death would the USSR’s stance on the issue of repatriation mellow, perhaps because the Soviets w ere “anxious to repair at least 117 some of the damage.” In the early 1950s, however, both superpowers accused each other of using Japanese captives to serve their own Cold War interests while the proxy war raged on the Korean peninsula. These international media b attles also cast a shadow on the clashes within Japan, where the JCP came under increasing pressure from the US Occupation administration, the Japanese government, and rival political groups.
THE COLD WAR DOMESTIC STORM
Gibney’s account of Yamada Kunisuke’s Maizuru landing was hardly unbiased, but it conveyed well the zeal with which the JCP welcomed repatriates from Siberia. Indeed, Japanese communists used each arrival from Nakhodka as a political occasion to initiate the returnees into the struggle at home. They staged noisy rallies and demonstrations at train stations, eager to display their strength both to the returning “comrades” and everyone else present. To t hose internees who were repatriated in the summer of 1949, they distributed a forty-page document titled “A Letter from the JCP: To the Returnees from the Soviet Union.” The pamphlet critically summarized the transformations in Japanese society since the war’s end, the progress of industrial reconstruction, and the state of democratization. It claimed that the policies of the ruling government had reduced the Japanese home islands to a “wretched state” and driven the Japanese working class “into the lowest depths (donzoko) of society.” This had impelled the toilers to engage in a “vehement struggle on which the fate of the Japanese people hinges,”
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an epochal showdown in which the repatriates were called to play a big part: “You have returned to a Japan caught in strife. You have had a brilliant experience of antifascist struggle and Democratic Movement, a personal experience of living in a socialist country.”118 Now put this precious experience to good use in Japan, seemed to be the JCP’s message to former captives, as conveyed by Tokuda Ky ūichi, the party’s general secretary, to some returnees visiting party headquarters: “Your fine spirits are proof that you have the confidence to realize in Japan the socialism you have studied so long over t here [in the USSR].”119 Indeed, the returnees presented the JCP with an opportunity to expand its ranks. Since emerging from imperial prisons onto Japan’s nascent postwar political scene, the party’s members had experienced a roller-coaster ride. In his classic study of Japanese communism, Robert Scalapino wrote of the JCP’s cautious approach toward the GHQ in the early Occupation years.120 Such caution was necessary, since the GHQ had not only liberated JCP leaders and given the party legal status, but it had also involved communists such as Tokuda in public committees and political initiatives. In the late 1940s, when the majority of Siberian internees returned to Japan, the party still enjoyed popularity as a result of the Japanese Marxists’ untarnished anti-imperial credentials and the party’s charm offensive as it sought to become a “lovable” political movement.121 This latter initiative helped the JCP achieve unprecedented success in the general election of January 1949, when it received over three million votes and increased its number of Diet seats from four to thirty-five. However, as Cold War circumstances took over Japanese society, what Sebastian Conrad called “the brief flirtation between Japanese Communists and American occupiers” did not last.122 The success of Occupation reforms dampened the JCP’s prospects, and the GHQ began to push the initially cooperative communists out of the pol itical limelight. Incorporating the “well-indoctrinated” Japanese returnees in the JCP was thus an obvious step for the party in its increasingly uncertain circumstances. The Maizuru pier, teeming with welcoming crowds, was a crucial political venue for groups vying for followers, the JCP among them. As the first waves of repatriation brought to Japan former captives yet unexposed to the full force of Soviet reeducation efforts, repatriations w ere seldom linked to the activities of Japan’s communists. However, in 1949 a sea change occurred in attitudes t oward the JCP. In this watershed year, domestic and international events plunged Japanese society into a series of crises. Internationally, a double
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blow was dealt to US influence in East Asia. First, the USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb in the Kazakh steppe in August, practically ending America’s short-lived monopoly on nuclear warfare. Then, on 1 October, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the PRC, following the communists’ victory in the Chinese Civil War. In addition, as noted above, the JCP had increased its presence in the Diet in the January general election, and “in this radically altered picture Japan’s importance in American strategic thinking skyrocketed almost overnight.”123 As if by coincidence, 1949 also became the year of “recalcitrant repatriates,” to borrow a description from a 1950 GHQ special report.124 The defiant returnees in question w ere some of the militant Democratic Movement gradu ates who provoked disturbances a fter their return to Japan. In a g reat irony of Japanese history, soldiers who a few years earlier were ready to sacrifice themselves for the emperor now landed at Maizuru with the b attle cries of “We are landing on enemy territory, the emperor’s islands!”125 Repatriates on thirty-three of the forty-four ships that arrived from Nakhodka in 1949 employed what GHQ officials called “nerve tactics,” refusing to fill in repatriation forms, loudly singing the communist “Internationale” and engaging in rowdy dances, staging sit-down protests on the ship decks, subjecting the ship crews to “people’s courts,” and fighting off their relatives’ desperate efforts to stop them from joining JCP demonstrations. Many of the “red repatriates” questioned at Maizuru by the US authorities as part of the Project Stitch and Project Wringer interrogation programs responded to the questions with silence or sometimes open hostility, curtly replying “I don’t remember.”126 One group staged a sit-in strike at the Repatriation Assistance Bureau (Hikiage Engochō) in Tokyo, and the members of another group missed their train north, choosing instead to march to the National Diet to present demands to Diet members. In what came to be known as the Kyoto Incident—one of many linking the repatriates and the JCP in the public’s mind—repatriates refused to board their trains at Kyoto Station until the release of two JCP members who had been arrested to prevent disturbances.127 In the words of an employee of a reception center quoted in the special report, “Indeed, the ‘cold war’ has come to Maizuru.”128 And from Maizuru, this militant behavior, as well as rumors about it, spread across the nation. While the JCP succeeded in using the reentry of Siberian internees in Japan to draw attention to itself, it hardly deserves credit for orchestrating what turned out to be perhaps the most confrontational summer of the
Figure 6.3. A “recalcitrant repatriate” being restrained by his f amily members in an attempt to prevent him from joining a communist rally. The Mainichi Newspapers.
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Occupation period in Japan. In fact, if 1949 was the year of “recalcitrant repatriates” for the GHQ, it proved to be a bad year for the JCP despite its success in the January general elections. The misbehavior of the “red repatriates” went a long way t oward further damaging the JCP’s image, which had suffered significantly in the previous year. But t here w ere complex domestic reasons that contributed to the JCP’s loss of credibility as a political force in Japan so soon a fter it had increased its representation in the Diet. A combination of the GHQ’s hardening stance toward the left and the gradual success of Occupation reforms that deprived JCP policies of attraction meant that the party was fast losing the allure it had earned among parts of the Japanese society. Around 1948–1949, the GHQ’s changing attitude toward labor unions galvanized the Japanese left and contributed to pushing the JCP toward more radical pronouncements. The Dodge Line (so named a fter its mastermind, the US banker Joseph M. Dodge) of sweeping fiscal reform initiated in 1949 forced Japanese employers to cut expenses and lay off thousands of workers. While not all labor unions in Occupation-era Japan were associated with the JCP, a large number of organizers were sympathetic to the idea of socialist revolution.129 The labor unions’ response to layoffs was to organize more strikes, and the spring and summer of 1949 saw industrial actions against such giants as Hitachi, Toshiba, and Suzuki.130 Amid t hese battles between employers and organized labor in the summer of 1949, the so-called three mysterious incidents related to the Japanese National Railways practically turned the Japanese communists into an enemy within. At least one of these incidents was inspired by worker layoffs. Happening in quick succession in July–August at the same time as the raucous crowds of indoctrinated returnees took Maizuru by storm, these incidents were widely associated with Japanese communists or their sympathizers. First, in the Shimoyama Incident in early July, Shimoyama Sadanori, the president of the Japanese National Railways, disappeared on his way to work, and his body was found on the tracks of the Jōban line the following day. The Mitaka and Matsukawa Incidents both involved derailments. In the first, a driverless train derailed at Mitaka Station in western Tokyo, killing six people. Ten members of the National Railway Workers’ Union (Kokutetsu Rōdō Kumiai) w ere charged, and one was sentenced to death (he would die in prison in 1967).131 In the Matsukawa Incident over a month later, three railway operators w ere killed when a train overturned in Matsukawa, a town in Fukushima Prefecture. Many of the twenty sus-
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pects w ere “active members of the radical National Railway Workers’ Union.”132 Since the JCP was considered “a hotbed of militant labor,” the incidents were deemed to have been acts of terrorism and sabotage, and the party was accused of organizing them.133 The suspects denied all accusations, and some family members of the Matsukawa Incident suspects even sent an open letter to Stalin and Mao (now held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation), asking them to “extend your mighty hand to ensure a world in which truth is protected and peace-loving humanity can be saved.”134 While the truth behind the three railway incidents is still shrouded in mystery, they convinced the Japanese public that anything could be expected from the JCP. Thomas French has traced the beginning of the JCP’s militancy to these incidents, which “heightened perceptions within GHQ and the Japanese government that the JCP posed a threat to Japan’s infrastructure” and led to the rearming of Japan when the National Police Reserve was founded.135 The disturbances caused by the “recalcitrant repatriates” w ere also ominous against the background of the so-called Red Purge that had been building up in Occupation-era Japan and was approaching a fever pitch by the summer of 1949. In the words of John Dower, it “involved close collaboration among occupation officials, conservative politicians, government bureaucrats, and corporate managers. A major objective was to break radical unions at the company and industry level.”136 Thousands of labor u nion activists and public employees were dismissed from their jobs in subsequent months. Between the summer of 1949 and early 1950, the purge was specifically directed against Marxists in Japan’s academic institutions, and it included sending Walter C. Eels, the GHQ’s higher education specialist, “to thirty national universities to call for the immediate dismissal of communist professors.”137 This nationwide campaign to expel leftists from public (and, starting in 1950, most private) jobs provided the JCP with a cause to raise the volume of its criticism of the Occupation, but ultimately its be havior damaged the party’s reputation, causing the JCP to be seen as a nest of troublemakers. The attacks also came from the party’s allies. In 1950 the JCP was severely criticized by the Cominform, the mouthpiece for Soviet international propaganda. The Cominform attacked the JCP’s struggles to reconcile the need to cooperate with the Occupation authorities with its raison d’être: communist revolution in Japan. As the eminent Japanese intellectual Maruyama Masao observed, “The most striking feature of the perennial
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disputes within the Japanese Communist Party a fter the Cominform criticism of 1950 is the disclosure that the Party itself, which pretends to have a complete understanding of the nature of the coming revolution, lacks a unified view on the subject.”138 Riven by factionalism and unable to unite with other left-leaning forces due to its own irreconcilably critical stance, the JCP’s position in 1949–1950 became increasingly belligerent. Its attempts to turn the repatriation of Siberian internees into occasions for po litical sparring make better sense when considered in this context. In short, the JCP’s attempts to galvanize support by exploiting the fresh injection of revolutionary spirit by the Siberian returnees ultimately backfired. The party’s excessive militancy likely damaged its image in Japanese public opinion. This was noticed by the Occupation authorities. The authors of a GHQ report titled “Japanese Prisoners of War” claimed: If the Soviets intended the raucous behavior of 1949 repatriates to serve as a fitting g rand finale to their four-year slave-labor plan, their end was accomplished. Had those in charge of repatriate tactics possessed sufficient foresight to gauge the deep imprint which such childish and unreasonable actions would leave in the minds and hearts of the Japa nese public, it is doubtful that such fanfare and spectacle would have been directed by the Soviets. The Japanese nation w ill not soon forget the circumstances that drove their own husbands, fathers and sons to a state of complete loss of individual human dignity and temporary emotional and mental instability.139
Gibney echoed this opinion, writing: “The rallies boomeranged. The ultimate damage which they did to Japanese Communism was directly proportional to their first g reat success. Years later, in harder times, or after long propaganda build-ups by the Communists—Russian and Japanese—they might have helped Sovietize Japan. In 1949 they alerted the Japanese to the danger of this possibility.”140 The danger of a communist takeover also spilled into allegations of direct support for the JCP from abroad. The JCP was alleged to have received funds and directives from the CPSU and the CCP, an allegation substantiated in some detail in declassified GHQ reports.141 News stories that portrayed links between communist parties as relations between the Japanese communists and their foreign masters often contained reactions or responses from Japanese authorities, which expressed concern and proposed concrete measures to prevent communist subversion. To cite one example, two days
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after reporting on the arrival of the Takasago-maru from Nakhodka, the 30 June 1949 edition of the Asahi printed a front-page report on the “Hirokawa Plan” to counter communist attempts “to stage a violent revolution (bōryoku kakumei) in Japan.”142 Hirokawa Kōzen, chief secretary of the Democratic Liberal Party (Minjitō, a forerunner of the modern Liberal Democratic Party), had come up with a three-stage plan that aimed to undermine and, where necessary, directly obstruct communist activities that went against Occupation policies. The Asahi report provided a brief summary of Hirokawa’s three points: 1. Through the Diet Investigative and Labor Committees, carry out an investigation of the activities of the JCP, which is behind various disruptive activities and strikes (sōgi kō i), starting with the railway workers’ strike. 2. Organize within the Democratic Liberal Party a committee on communism (taikyō iinkai) and ensure its involvement in investigations and policies related to the JCP. 3. In prefectures, cities, townships, and villages, set up emergency committees and urge them to counter communist-related policy. Using subparty organizations, establish anticommunist movements at every workplace and, by arousing enthusiasm in the masses, develop a nationwide anticommunist movement. Hirokawa was not the only politician speaking about the need to constrain communism. On 30 January 1950, during a session of the House of Councillors’ Budget Committee, several Diet members asked Attorney General Ueda Shunkichi about the connections between the JCP and the CCP. Ueda assured the deputies that Japanese agencies w ere scrutinizing the JCP’s finances to establish w hether it was receiving any funding from the CCP. Turning his attention to the notorious “violent revolution,” Ueda warned that “if the [threat of the revolution] materializes this w ill cause nothing but the complete destruction (kaimetsu) of the JCP.”143 Alleged influence from abroad—as well as the JCP’s newfound belligerence, not to mention the general turn in US policy against the Soviet Union—became cause for suspecting the Siberian internees as a fifth column in postwar Japan. How much of a real threat the returnees posed at the time is difficult to judge, but it was hardly substantial. Aleksei Kirichenko, a prominent Russian historian of the internment and a KGB colonel, wrote that starting in February 1948, the USSR’s foreign intelligence body, the
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so-called Information Committee, ordered the MVD to select potential intelligence recruits from among the foreign POWs, and 201 Japanese agents were eventually nominated by Major Yuri Rastvorov, who later defected to the United States in 1954 and recounted his work as a KGB officer in three articles in Life.144 Kirichenko, who passed away in 2019, suggested that he did not expect Russian archives containing evidence on the Soviet fifth column in Japan to be declassified any time soon.145 In his provocatively titled Thirty-Six Japanese Who Sold Their Motherland to the USSR, Hiyama Yoshiaki mentioned code names and real names of some Soviet agents allegedly recruited while they were interned in the USSR, and he claimed that Sejima’s uncooperative attitude was the reason why he was not repatriated earlier.146 Recent research has shown that the CPSU and Stalin personally had substantial influence on the Japanese communist leaders Hakamada Satomi, Tokuda Ky ū ichi, Nosaka Sanzō, and Nishizawa Ry ūji. David Wolff has written about “the hara-kiri resolution” forced on the JCP by Stalin in 1951. Their significant disagreements notwithstanding, both Hakamada and Tokuda had reservations with the way Stalin made them adopt the so-called Program of 1951, which called for revolution in Japan on the model of the Chinese revolution. The Japanese communists understood that this program was tantamount to political suicide, but none of them could muster enough courage to confront the leader of the world proletariat. Eventually they agreed to Stalin’s proposals and did as he said. Criticizing the infighting between Hakamada and the other three leaders, Stalin ordered unity within the JCP and even made Hakamada write a “self-critique.”147 Such was the awe inspired by Stalin in his Japanese comrades that Hakamada accepted this order without much protest, demonstrating that there was strong Soviet influence behind the scenes on the JCP’s sudden turn to militancy. The self-destructive “kamikaze policy” forced on the JCP by Stalin served Soviet and Chinese interests better than t hose of the Japanese communists, providing Moscow and Beijing with fuel for their fiery rhetoric against American imperialism in the wake of their 1950 friendship treaty. In addition to the detrimental pressure from the Soviet Union, the Japa nese communists came under relentless attacks from the Japanese government, the GHQ, and domestic political groups. T hese attacks culminated in the Tokuda yō sei mondai—which could be translated as the “incident concerning Tokuda’s demand” to the USSR, and which I call Tokuda Incident. This incident helped drive the JCP underground and further marginalize Japanese returnees from the USSR.
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THE TOKUDA INCIDENT
On 23 February 1950, in a session of the House of Councillors, the returnee Kubota Zenzō read out a petition. In Siberia, Kubota had been one of the leaders of the Rising Sun Brigade (see Chapter 5), which had vehemently opposed the activists of the Red Banner Brigade (Akahata Teidan). In his petition, Kubota alleged that Tokuda Ky ūichi, the JCP’s general secretary, had attempted to obstruct the repatriation of the Japanese from the Soviet Union. Tokuda, he claimed, had tried to influence the Soviet leaders, demanding that they send home only t hose Japanese who had become “true democrats, not the reactionary elements.”148 Ten days earlier, the Asahi had published Kubota’s appeal under a headline “Repatriate from the Soviet Union Kubota says: Investigate Tokuda!”149 It is not clear whether the ensuing Tokuda Incident would have gathered momentum had it not been discussed at an Allied venue days a fter Kubota’s Diet appeal. On 1 March 1950 at a meeting of the Allied Council for Japan, William Roy Hodgson, an Australian colonel representing the British Commonwealth, “urged General MacArthur to take ‘positive action’ on Japanese charges that war prisoners in the Soviet Union had been denied repatriation unless they agreed to join the communist party upon their return.” Hodgson, as we see, changed the nature of Tokuda’s alleged appeal that the reactionaries not be sent back (handō o kaesuna) to making it obligatory for returnees to join the JCP. In fact, Hodgson went even further and “criticized General MacArthur’s policy of maintaining that the Allied Council could only discuss the issue, and demanded that the Council order Japanese authorities to make a thorough investigation of the accusations, particularly to determine if charges of treason should be brought against Kiyuchi [sic] Tokuda. . . . William Sebald, United States representative on the Council, a fter an original statement that Colonel Hodgson’s proposal was ‘not appropriate,’ agreed to suggest that Japanese authorities launch a ‘positive’ inquiry. The Japanese government on the following day announced [the] initiation of an investigation.”150 As part of this investigation, on 16 March Tokuda was summoned to the House of Councillors’ Special Committee on the Issue of Japanese Nationals Overseas. He flatly denied the accusations and argued that there was no ground for his summons. He referred to a statement from the Soviet Union that had called the accusations “ridiculous nonsense” (bakabakashii tsukuribanashi) and reminded everyone that the nation issuing that “authoritative statement” was among the Allies jointly occupying Japan. The tone he
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used in his responses was one of righteous indignation, and he was asked to leave the hall several times as a result of some of his incendiary comments. He entered into altercations with some committee members, and their mutual insults stood in stark contrast to the ceremonial Japanese language of the usual Diet proceedings. Nevertheless, Tokuda insisted that he was eager to clear up any allegations of inappropriate or illegal behavior before the committee and even managed to use sarcastic humor in his responses, drawing laughter from those in attendance. However, a fter long disputes and deliberations in which style seemed to m atter more than substance, the committee failed to agree on anything except the decision to submit its stenographic record to the Allied Council for Japan.151 Yet Tokuda’s testimony—and especially his defiant refusal to admit any wrongdoing—provided the committee with a cue to take the investigation in another direction. Perhaps in trying to defend himself and demonstrate the absurdity of the committee’s actions, Tokuda mentioned “interpreter Kan” from a camp in Karaganda, Kazakhstan—a man whose name had also come up in Kubota’s petition. Kan had served as the interpreter of an exchange between the political officer of the camp, a man named Ermolaev, and the Japanese internees on 15 September 1949.152 Earlier that year, the TASS agency had announced Moscow’s decision to complete the repatriation of all remaining Japanese internees from the USSR by November 1949.153 At a camp meeting, several Karaganda internees had asked Ermolaev whether they should hope to go home that year. Ermolaev’s response was that the internees would be repatriated only “when they became true demo crats,” a condition that he claimed Tokuda had demanded in his letter to the Soviets.154 Faced by the Diet members, Tokuda clung to Kan’s name in the hope that the interpreter’s eyewitness account could help dispel any doubts. Tokuda’s line of argument involved questioning the validity of claims made by Kubota and his group: “These men [Kubota and o thers] do not speak Russian. The one who speaks Russian, the interpreter Mr. Kan, has provided evidence to the Asahi newspaper. If you think Asahi is printing lies, why d on’t you summon Kan and investigate it further?”155 According to the novelist Nakano Shigeharu, who was then a JCP member of the Diet and was present at the session, “Kan’s name was deliberately brandished by the testifiers [who remembered that he had translated Ermolaev’s answer]. They littered their testimonies with his name, using it as a hint.”156 In the session, Nakano mentioned Kan’s attempts to clarify the situation: e arlier Kan had sent statements to the Asahi and the JCP news-
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paper Akahata with his version of the events. He had also addressed a brief statement to the committee, which the chairman, Okamoto Yoshito, read aloud. In the statement, Kan emphasized that he did not know anything about Tokuda’s demand and that he had simply acted as an interpreter on that day. However, he wanted to clarify that the Akahata “article of 9 March has not accurately communicated my report. . . . For instance, I have never claimed that [Kubota’s testimony] was nothing but ‘poisonous rumor that completely defied reality.’ I have, therefore, sent letters of protest to both the Asahi and Akahata on the morning of 10 March. At this point I have no interest in any political position. Yet I am prepared to stand witness as long as it concerns only the facts at that place and time.”157 Perhaps moved by his readiness to put himself forward, or perhaps b ecause of the difficulty of extracting anything from Tokuda, an experienced politician, committee members agreed to summon Kan for a hearing. On 18 March, Kan attended the first of his two hearings. After he briefly introduced himself, one curious committee member after another quizzed him about that September 1949 day in the Karaganda camp. Answering their questions, Kan even recited from memory, in Russian, Ermolaev’s original answer and translated it for the benefit of the Japanese audience. The discussion then turned into a deep polemical debate about linguistic peculiarities, shades of meaning, and nuances of interpretation. Ermolaev had used the word nadeetsia (which can mean anything between “hopes” and “expects”) in relaying Tokuda’s message, and Kan used the Japanese verb “to expect” (kitai suru) when he translated it for the audience at the hearing. The interrogators wanted to know whether t here r eally was such a demand on the part of Tokuda. Kan answered that he did not know anything about the existence of a demand. “I was t here and then only in the capacity of an interpreter,” he answered. Committee members pressed Kan to express his “impression” of whether Ermolaev meant “demands” or “expects.” However, Kan did not budge from his use of the word “expects,” nor did he show any lack of confidence in the accuracy of his memory, which was continuously called into question.158 Kan’s interrogators kept bringing up evidence that would turn him, in their view, into a suspect in the public eye. Besides the linguistic acrobatics of Ermolaev’s speech (which prompted questions such as “Are you sure t here are no mistakes in your interpretation?”), they talked pointedly and repeatedly about Kan’s role as an activist in the Democratic Movement and his unconcealed opposition to the emperor system in Japan.159 They quoted
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other returnees’ testimonies, which went against Kan’s words (they asked Kan questions like “So-and-so said this about you, which contradicts your testimony. Whose version is true?”). Kan faced t hese statements calmly, never seeming to see the true motives behind the façade of words or showing curiosity about the rationale for t hese questions. He was open and patient, even when the same question was asked again and again and minuscule details of his testimony were scrutinized under the magnifying glass by one Diet member a fter another. Kan’s openness perhaps reflected an assurance of his own innocence, the sincerity of someone who was determined not to hide anything or dodge probing questions. During his second testimony, this time at the House of Representatives, on 5 April, Kan was asked directly by Kaji Ryōsaku, chief of the Lower House’s Investigative Committee, about the existence of the “Tokuda Demand.” Kan did not reject these claims out of hand. He said that t hese reports did not always reflect the reality, but he admitted that he would not go so far as to call them completely baseless. He showed that he was familiar with those who had reported Tokuda’s demand when he said, “among the returnees there were p eople with little sympathy t oward the Japanese Communist Party.”160 Diet members did not miss the opportunity of taking advantage of Kan’s frankness. During his second appearance, Kan faced not the grilling by inquisitive deputies that he had had to endure in the first hearing but deliberate attacks from several fronts.161 Reading the long transcript of the second hearing, in which the petty questioning and endless requests for clarification went on for hours, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the political drama. But one can only imagine the extent of the psychological pressure under which Kan found himself. The following day, on 6 April, Kan left a short note lamenting his “weakness to take on the evil and falsehood” of the world and, saddened by the label of “red” attached to him in the increasingly McCarthyist Japan, jumped under a Chūō line train near Kichijōji.162 He was thirty-t wo years old. Newspaper reports following his death reflected the anxieties evident in Japanese society. Those unfamiliar with what had gone on in the 5 April hearing must have found plausible the newspapers’ interpretation that depression and m ental fatigue had caused the suicide.163 Some of the journalistic reports questioned the role of the public hearing in bringing about Kan’s suicide, but in the eyes of the newspaper-reading general public, Kan acquired the aura of a strange, perhaps even mentally unstable, person.164 His death occupied the front pages of newspapers for several days and came
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up at later Diet hearings, after which it was forgotten. The renowned Japa nese intellectual Tsurumi Shunsuke paid tribute to Kan’s role as a philoso pher in his 1991 book on intellectual history by placing him on the same level as the American philosopher John Dewey.165 However, few people in Japan today have ever heard of Kan, despite his sacrifice’s being the biggest news for two weeks in the spring of 1950. Kan’s fate was important in the broader context of the Cold War international order as an unmistakable sign of Japan’s entanglement in the confrontation between the superpowers that would claim many more victims. His death could be seen as one of many politicized sacrifices made for the sake of restoring the social fabric of postwar Japan in opposition to the communist Soviet Union.166 This is clear in the attempts to judge him by assigning politically motivated roles to him, whereas in reality Kan did not consider himself a communist—only someone who had tried to do a good job as an interpreter. Some of his interrogators even interpreted Kan’s mental strain as arising not from the pressure under which he was put during his second Diet hearing, but from the insecurity of a Soviet agent who was afraid to be found out. In a session four days a fter Kan’s suicide, for example, Kimura Kōhei, a member of the House of Councillors’ committee, suggested that the committee launch a separate investigation into the issue and summon those who accused Kan of being a spy to testify in the Diet.167 Kan’s suicide is instrumental in conveying the pressure and fear p eople associated in any way with communism or the Soviet Union felt at the time. It also brought into the limelight the emergence of “the foundational narrative” of the postwar Japanese history of the war, especially those of its parts that allocated to the Soviet Union the role of a new as well as an old enemy.168 It helps us understand how the Siberian internees became hostages twice: once during their captivity in the Soviet l abor camps, and once after returning to their home country, which was increasingly entangled in the new Cold War international order. Kan’s story demonstrates that—first as vestiges of a dead empire, then as potential agents of upheaval after their return to US-occupied Japan, and later as hostages of confrontation between the new empires—the internees found themselves in a whirlwind of opinions, representations, and reflections about the e nemy and, as p eople who had witnessed the e nemy from within, occupied a position that was both privileged and marginalized within the postwar society. While Kan could be counted among the first victims of the Cold War in Japan, by taking his life he achieved more than simply putting his name onto
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the margins of postwar Japanese history. Kan’s suicide was a political act, an act of protest: by his act of defiance in the face of power, he shed light on the practices of sacrificing some lives to achieve certain political goals, cutting parts of history out of the picture, manipulating facts, distorting opinions, and dictating the collective memory. His was perhaps the most dramatic act of those committed by returnees who consciously played proactive roles in the political climate of the period. Some became active in the public sphere, sharing their stories and often tuning them to match the mood of the times. O thers, like Kan, refused to yield and w ere swept away. And still others, like Takasugi Ichirō, who was initially reluctant to write anything about his Siberian captivity but was moved by the news of Kan’s suicide, took up their pens b ecause they felt the urge to tell the truth as they saw it.169 Few were left untouched by the world-dividing whirlwind of the Cold War, which swept them into the domestic and international conflict in the same way that their lives had been crippled first by the war and then by postwar internment in the frigid Soviet wastelands. ■ ■ ■
We have seen through the lives and experiences of Sejima, Kan, and the thousands of “red repatriates” the various roles that Siberian internees played in Japan’s Cold War dramas. We have visited the courtrooms of the Tokyo Trial, where Sejima and his fellow officers stood witness. Their involvement in superpower disputes over justice and order was indicative of the utility they and hundreds of thousands of other Japanese men and women held for each Cold War camp in the clash of worldviews that was starting in the postwar world. In the b attles waged by Japanese organizations—including the Japanese government, family and citizens’ groups, and political bodies of various stripes—to hasten the repatriation of their compatriots from the Soviet Union, we could see how attitudes t oward the internees changed in response to the transformations in international affairs. While they were referred to sympathetically as “compatriots” (dōhō) and “one’s flesh and blood” (nikushin) in the initial years of the internment, the arrival of the troublesome converts of 1949 made the phrase “red repatriates” a more popular moniker for them. The alarm and suspicion that a few of the troublemakers inspired was extended to all returnees, becoming a tributary to the stream of growing anticommunist feelings in Japanese society. In the atmosphere of rising anti-Soviet fervor, rumors about the subversive potential of the re-
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turnees from Siberia readily multiplied. In contrast to the stigma of the “second-generation Manchurian Japanese,” who were born and bred abroad and hence did not belong in the postwar Japanese society, the returnees from Siberia w ere frowned upon for a different reason: they w ere potential transmitters of e nemy ideology.170 The fact that some of the returnees genuinely saw themselves as such—shouting “Long live Comrade Stalin!” when they arrived in Japan and considering it their duty to make Japan communist—demonstrates the diversity of the political scene in the late 1940s. The Japanese communists did not help themselves with their calls for a “violent revolution” at this time, abandoning their earlier attempts to attract new followers in the face of intense pressure, political purges, and conspiracy theories. These latter tensions culminated in the issue of Tokuda’s alleged demand to the Soviets to hold on longer to reactionaries. Societies in the throes of internal struggle or ideological fervor often have to pay a tragic price, and in this case Kan’s suicide was part of that price—although the true power of his decision to take his life was largely lost on many of his contemporaries. It was a harbinger of the struggles yet to come, b attles the Japanese would wage against their own government. Ultimately, the suspicion and rumors about the returnees from Siberia serving as soldiers of “violent revolution” proved to be unfounded. Perhaps the metaphor used by the Japanese writer Sawachi Hisae was suitable: she compared the “red repatriates” to the Japanese red-crowned cranes, noting that only the tops of their heads had actually turned red.171 Ishiguro Tatsunosuke—who also used a colorful metaphor of “donning a red mask,” and wrote about his training at Nakhodka before landing on “the emperor’s islands” as one of the “red repatriates” who swept the Maizuru pier in 1949—candidly admitted: “When I returned to the home islands, I ripped off the red mask outright. I realized that all the information about Japan drilled into me in Siberia was nothing more than demagoguery, a product of a Soviet scheme. I also learned that the Japanese communists w ere high- handedly sowing the seeds of discord in all directions, and I could no longer remain silent.”172 This view was echoed by the witness of many “recalcitrant repatriates,” Gibney, who used several other metaphors: “Only a hard core of the repatriates—less than 10%—remained Communists or strong Communist sympathizers. They w ere popularly called ‘tomatoes’ (‘red outside and in’). But the government officials assigned to deal with the repatriates found that
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the g reat majority of them were ‘radishes’ (‘red outside, but white inside’), whose Communist outer layer wore off through exposure to a freer society.”173 Whatever metaphor we resort to, the truth was that the Siberian internees had not all become “true democrats” ready to sacrifice the fragile peace of their nation for the utopian dream of turning Japan into a workers’ country. The fact that they still were seen as such reflects not so much their truly held beliefs as it does the atmosphere of the times and their utility in the construction of anti-Soviet narratives in Japan in the early part of the Cold War.
C H A P T E R SE V EN
WE CANNOT DIE AS SLAVES THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION AND COMPENSATION
We are [fighting] to reclaim our dignity as h uman beings. Only slaves are put to work without being paid. We cannot die as slaves. —Hiratsuka Mitsuo, a former internee and activist
For the Siberian internees, repatriation was the stuff of dreams. After years in Soviet camps and prisons, Uchimura Gōsuke imagined his repatriation as a scene from a beautiful dream: “The ship winds slowly among the green hilly islands. The New Year is near but the surface of the sea does not have the cold, clear skin that you see in northern waters. Rather, its color is a boisterous, deep Prussian blue. The greenery at the mouths of bays of little islands is partly submerged in the ocean w ater. . . . An airplane appears, its wings dancing when it overflies the ship, as if saying ‘Congratulations on your repatriation! We’ve been waiting! You’ve been through a lot! (Gokurōsandeshita!)’ ”1 Murai Misao’s arrival was close to what Uchimura imagined: “In the sunlight, the hills were all engulfed in greenery, and the sea glittered with various colors. It was like paradise to my eyes long used to seeing only bare hills.”2 Repatriation was not always as idyllic as imagined by Uchimura in his cold prison cell near Irkutsk or experienced by Murai, but when it finally happened, it was a merry occasion for most Japanese. Returnees wrote about the immense relief and happiness they felt when disembarking from repatriation ships at the port of Maizuru. They rejoiced amid the welcoming crowds of fellow Japanese and lost themselves in the embraces of f amily members and friends. Despite disturbances caused by the so-called red 257
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r epatriates who dominated newspapers’ front pages in the summer of 1949, it soon became evident that most returnees had no interest in joining any political struggle. Most Siberian captives soon returned to their hometowns and villages, hoping to rejoin local communities and resume the normality that had been put on pause by their Siberian bondage. Their reintegration into home society was to be facilitated by a number of state organs and civil society groups. In the late 1940s and early 1950s there was broad state support at all levels for the returnees from the Soviet Union, as is evident in the following excerpt from the Records of Repatriation Assistance (Hikiage engo no kiroku), published by the government’s Repatriation Assistance Bureau in 1950: Responsibilities related to repatriation are shared by almost all government agencies. . . . The Assistance Bureau oversees operations related to emergency assistance at ports of landing (or departure), quarantine inspections, demobilization, and partial assistance following permanent settlement in Japan. Repatriation ships are the responsibility of the Ministry of Transport. Statistics on Japanese civilians abroad fall u nder the control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Issues related to employment are in the sphere of activities of the Ministry of Labor, whereas direct livelihood support is the responsibility of citizens’ affairs departments (minseibu) in each prefecture and district, village and township, as well as social welfare sections thereof.3
Besides state organs, there were civil associations and former returnee groups that provided help to the newly repatriated and to families of those yet to return. Among such associations, the Records of Repatriation Assistance listed “the War Victims’ Relief Association (Sensai Engo Kai [later renamed Dōhō Engo Kai]), various w omen’s groups (fujin dantai), student unions involved in assistance activities throughout the repatriation process, and other bodies endeavoring to provide assistance and relief to compatriots repatriated from overseas.” 4 Writing about the early postwar years, the American political scientist F. W. Warner somewhat optimistically observed that the “organizations which [the repatriates] join a fter returning home indicate in some measure the degree of success of their rehabilitation and their attitudes towards conditions in Japan.”5 Considering the time of its publication—in 1949 during the summer of recalcitrant repatriates—this observation must contain some wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it reflects the optimistic spirit that had taken the place of defeat and despair in Japan in the early postwar period. Strong feelings of community and social trust
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meant that many Japanese returning from Siberia before 1949 found the help and encouragement necessary to restart their lives in postwar Japan. However, those who w ere swept along by the waves of red repatriates in that memorable summer of 1949 found it much harder to blend into the wary postwar society. As Lori Watt observed, “Some of the men who returned to Japan in 1948 w ere taken back to their old jobs, but those who returned in 1949 were refused.” Many skilled specialists struggled to find jobs when they r eturned from Siberia, and some were dismissed in the “Red Purge” and mass layoffs after initially finding employment. Even the u nions, the formidable challengers of the GHQ’s ruthless economic reforms, were “eager to distance themselves from the taint of communism and wary that Soviet detainees w ere willing to work for any wage, treated repatriates with similar disdain.” 6 This treatment was remembered by many returnees. Saitō Rokurō, an activist for returnee compensations, remembered how “bearing the mark of Siberian returnees, we had no other choice but to give up any hope of getting a respectable job.” 7 Kikuchi Toshio felt that “Japan’s welcome was extremely cold, because it was believed that ‘reds’ were returning home.” The frigid reception was evident from the moment of his arrival in Maizuru, where he was greeted “not by my family members, but by 400 policemen. I was filled with resentment; we were returning with an earnest desire to rebuild Japan, so what was this reception by police officers?”8 Katō Kintarō remembered how he “tried to get employment in a major electronics company using family connections.” When he asked a relative to put in a good word for him, the relative responded, “You must be joking! Do you realize where you’ve just returned from?!”9 Katō eventually managed to get by, trying his luck at several jobs before finally setting up his own business. The sociologist Oguma Eiji’s father, Kenji, was lucky to get a job at a well-digging company, where the company president’s son “was also a Siberian returnee [and] was sympathetic to his situation.”10 By the time the Japanese economy took off in the second half of the 1950s, many returnees had successfully reintegrated into society. Some, like Sejima Ry ūzō, even achieved outstanding success as business leaders. But the initial years of discrimination and hardship provided a taste of things to come. As the dust of the early Cold War upheavals finally settled and Japan entered a period of unprecedented growth, one issue remained unresolved for the former Siberian captives: state compensations. As returnees soon found out, however, successive postwar governments were extremely reluctant to provide them with any recompense. A combination of GHQ reforms
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and scant political w ill made demands for redress unlikely to succeed. First, in the early months of the Allied Occupation, the GHQ had suspended the military pension system. Even when it was restored after Japan regained its independence in 1952, not e very former serviceperson was entitled to a military pension (onkyū), let alone special compensation. T hose who did not meet the criteria for a military pension received no monetary help from the government. Thousands of former internees who had been drafted into the Kwantung Army thus missed out on pensions, sometimes only by few months. One example was Ōhira Hirayuki, whose serv ice of eleven years and ten months was two months short of the twelve-year minimum.11 Second, when the majority of returnees came back from Siberia during the first decade a fter WWII, the internment as a phenomenon was not incorporated as a special case into Japanese law. This meant that the returnees from the USSR had no special legal status or privileges prescribing special treatment for them. Legally they were no different from the more than six million Japanese repatriates from other outposts of the former empire. Finally, when diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Japan were restored in October 1956, the Joint Declaration they signed, while ending the internment, ultimately sealed the fate of compensation claims vis-à-v is the Soviet Union, depriving the Japanese former captives of the right to make claims on that nation.12 Similar to other Cold War bilateral treaties agreed between governments, the declaration ruled out any individual claims, closing the issue of internment compensation once and for all. Another example of such a treaty was the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and South Korea, which left unresolved the claims of thousands of Korean citizens—including forced laborers and victims of war time sexual slavery, the so-called comfort women—against the Japanese state. Like the comfort women and other WWII victims, the Japanese captives of the Soviets lost their right to demand compensation from the state that had victimized them, while their own government proved unwilling to meet their demands. As a result, returnees from Siberia were left in a political limbo. The Cold War settlement of the declaration, which also enabled Japan to rejoin the international community as a full-fledged member of the United Nations, left the Japanese former internees with no right to seek redress internationally. Even if they had had such a right, t here could have been no guarantees that the Soviets would have met their demands. The declaration was an example of what Lisa Yoneyama has called “previously concluded post-
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belligerency adjudications, war indemnities settlements, and various state- to-state normalizations [that] have rendered many instances of violence unredressable, or only incrementally redressed.”13 The 1956 international settlement created a domestic unsettlement, impelling former internees to turn their anger on Japanese governments. As seen in Hiratsuka Mitsuo’s words in the epigraph above, their grievance involved a desire not for monetary compensations, but for something more difficult to reclaim—their dignity as Japanese citizens whose sacrifices are recognized by the nation and society. As the former internees’ long postwar struggle for recognition and compensation demonstrates, the successive Japanese governments’ refusal to grant their wishes turned the internment into an unsettled legacy of WWII, similar to controversial history problems yet to be resolved between Japan and its neighbors and former victims. We could view the postwar struggle for compensations as an example of what Yoneyama called “transborder redress culture,” except that the internees’ demands could hardly cross borders since they were confined to national boundaries by the 1956 declaration.14 What made the Siberian Internment different was that in this case, it was Japanese citizens who were demanding compensation and recognition from the Japanese government. In addition to being victims of unredressed vio lence at the hands of a foreign nation, the Siberian internees were neglected for a long time by their own nation. The failure of their repeated claims for compensation reflected the goals and ideals of a postwar society geared toward economic growth and political alliance with the United States. The internees’ failures were among the “losses that have been left unaddressed by their victims’ peripheral status within the national community, previously marginalized by imperial policies, during the war, or in the process of decolonization.”15 There was a stark contrast between the well-organized and effective early postwar repatriation lobby and the largely ineffectual compensation lobby of later decades. We can perhaps explain this contrast by the fact that when it faced up to a foreign power, the repatriation lobby had the backing of the nation in the broad sense, including not only the government but also powerful and well- organized citizens’ groups such as the Association of the Families of the Missing and the National Council for Accelerating the Repatriation of Japa nese Nationals Abroad. In contrast to the broad support offered to them by the latter organizations during their Siberian captivity, in demanding compensation from the state the former internees w ere largely on their own.
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While some groups were affiliated with the ruling party, the most numerous and powerful group—the All-Japan Council for the Compensation of Internees (Zenkoku Yokury ūsha Hoshō Kyōgikai, or Zenyokukyō), led by Saitō Rokurō —was not aligned with the government, nor did it have effective means of putting pressure on the government except through petition drives. T hese drives were largely ignored, and Zenyokukyō’s legal challenges in courts also failed. Moreover, t here w ere divisions within the compensation movement that made the former internees’ task even more difficult. The history of postwar internee activism analyzed in this chapter can be divided into three phases: (1) the three decades between 1945 and 1974, during which the movement was in its dormant phase, with little organized campaigning for compensations except isolated actions by some groups; (2) the period between 1974 and 1995, the most active phase of the struggle, which focuses on the example of Zenyokukyō, the organization led by Saitō, and which largely lost its momentum following his death; and (3) the final phase, between 1995 and 2010, when only a change in government served to translate some of the sympathy for the internees into concrete policy. The next section covers the first phase, while the following section zooms in on the second phase in the struggle. The chapter concludes by briefly analyzing the third, post–Cold War phase of renewed interest in the internees’ plight that led to the emergence of what I call the politics of deference toward the now predominantly nonagenarian former internees, and that ushered in the closing act of their struggle for acceptance.
INTERNEE ACTIVISM IN THE EARLY POSTWAR PERIOD
The history of the internees’ struggles for compensation and recognition bears the marks of conflicting interests in the fragmented political and public space of postwar Japan. The issue of state compensations became a political battlefield shaped by the unwritten hierarchies of victimhood, political goals of ruling elites, and the arcane and impassive state bureaucracy. The typical attitude of successive postwar Japanese governments toward victim compensation was notoriously apathetic, if not altogether unsympathetic. It was also inconsistent. As Miki Ishikida noted, “The Japanese government has paid pensions and offered special assistance to Japanese military personnel, wounded soldiers, and their survivors, in addition to paying for medical care and offering allowances for atomic bomb victims. However, the
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nearly ten million air bomb victims did not receive any compensation at all. Furthermore, the government did not pay any compensation for people who had been detained in Siberia.”16 In his study of wounded and disabled veterans of the war, Lee Pennington referred to them as “casualties of history”; similarly, the Japanese returnees from the USSR also became victims of historic circumstances.17 Among the disadvantaged repatriates from overseas, they were further disadvantaged as red repatriates: we have seen how the taint of communism brought them under suspicion as agents of destabilization. In short, even among the neglected and marginalized groups in postwar Japan, the Siberian returnees occupied a low rung on the social ladder. For this reason, while they pursued the tangible goal of state compensations, their struggle has a broader and more symbolic significance. It reflects their refusal to accept the postwar relationship between the nation and those who had served it, and the peculiar interests and hierarchies that favored some victims over o thers. Taking advantage of the postwar democracy, the former internees tried to take the state and elites to task. And though their struggle was riven by divisions and ended in failure, it showed the determination of former captives to shape their fates as Japanese citizens. The history of returnee activism in the pursuit of compensations also reflects the development of citizenship activism in postwar Japan. Like many lobby groups or civic activists, such as the ones analyzed by Franziska Seraphim and Simon Avenell, the Siberian internees made use of the postwar democracy in negotiating the tortuous path toward recognition and reintegration.18 Their struggle took shape alongside the upheavals of the late 1940s, the protests of the 1950s, the violent resistance to the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (Nichibei Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku, abbreviated Anpo) of 1960, and postwar democracy’s other ordeals of fire. In this regard, the internees’ campaigns were important in the struggle for rights and redress waged by Japanese citizens. However, unlike redress campaigns better studied in Japanese and English, the internees’ struggle for compensations always had a marginalized quality. Nagasawa Toshio, a historian of that struggle, thus highlighted this unfavorable position: “The postwar system of compensations in Japan, while courteous to the military, was not so obliging to civilian victims of the war and bombing campaigns with the exception of atomic bomb victims. Even among serv icepeople, special cases such as Siberian internees—classified as ‘postwar prisoners of war’—could at best hope for a military pension.”19 In the rare cases when state power— personified in Japan by the overlapping combination of the cabinet and
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ruling party, the LDP—benevolently decided in favor of action to benefit the internees, it often took too long to carry it out. For example, in the early 1980s the government finally acceded to demands for a thorough investigation into the conditions of internment, which was deemed necessary to decide on the nature of compensations. The advocacy group proposing the investigation (the Aizawa faction of Zenyokukyō, discussed in detail in the next section) demanded that the government “begin the investigation swiftly, because the internees were aging”—showing that even associations allied with the Japanese state w ere aware of the sluggish pace of its clunky bureaucracy.20 Historians researching the Siberian internees’ compensation campaigns date their beginning to February 1974. This was when a dozen former internees from Saga Prefecture found out from an Asahi shimbun article that the Japanese government had paid a total of 4.8 billion yen (about 16 million US 1974 dollars) in “consolation payments” (mimaikin) to 2,185 Japanese ship crew members captured by the PRC in the East China Sea between 1950 and 1965.21 Concluding that they, too, had once been captured by a foreign power, these former internees founded the League for Obtaining Compensations and Consolation Payments for Wartime POWs (Senji Horyo Hoshōkin Isharyō Kakutoku Suishin Kyōgikai Dōmei). Their movement soon spread around the island of Kyushu and across the nation through the persistent efforts of their leader, Maeda Akihiro, efforts that included submitting petitions to the Diet. However, despite its early success—it had tens of thousands of members and chapters in prefectures across Japan— the league lacked clear and consistent “theoretical underpinnings” for its appeal.22 Yet to start the narrative in 1974 is to overlook the preceding thirty years of early internee activism. T hese decades w ere hardly eventful on the compensation front, but they are essential in making sense of the context of confrontation and collaboration between citizens’ groups on the one hand, and the Japanese government on the other hand. This context, and the broader Cold War setting that dictated Japanese state and social attitudes toward “unredressed” vestiges of war and empire, are crucial in understanding why the Japanese government was so reluctant to compensate its own citizens who had been imprisoned by a foreign power a fter the end of hostilities in WWII.23 The devastation caused by the world war meant that demilitarization became a central pillar of Allied Occupation reforms in Japan. The Allied
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Powers’ determination to prevent the revival of Japanese militarism did not end with punishing the militarist leaders who had led the nation down the path to war or purging from office thousands of employees who had been involved in the military. In its determination to eliminate all vestiges of militarist rule from every sphere of postwar society, the GHQ “ordered the abolition of preferential treatment for all former Japanese military personnel as part of the demilitarization effort from late 1945 to early 1946. On 24 November 1945, ‘SCAPIN 338: the Memorandum on Pensions and Benefits’ announced that all military pensions would be suspended.”24 As Pennington observed, the “SCAP did not seek to exclude disabled veterans, bereaved families, or destitute military repatriates from any new system of public assistance, but it stressed that these groups must not be granted special access or privileges.”25 The decision resulted from a desire to ensure civilian equality and eliminate military privilege. However, the policy had side effects, most conspicuously the proliferation of disabled and destitute former soldiers begging on the streets—a common sight in early postwar Japan. Deprived of a pension, many lost the means to support themselves and their families amid the economic chaos and high inflation rates. This situation remained unchanged until the end of the Allied Occupation in April 1952, and around that time a movement for reinstating military pensions started in Japan, in which disabled veterans played a central part. Fujiwara Tetsuya has analyzed the activism of the Japan Disabled Veterans Association (Nihon Shōi Gunjin Kai), which took advantage of the “increasingly favorable climate for veteran initiatives” immediately after the end of Occupation and “put pressure on the government to establish preferential provisions for disabled war veterans and their families.”26 In part as a result of the association’s lobbying, the Japanese government restored the military pensions on 1 August 1953. However, this restoration did not make all the Japanese soldiers who fought in WWII eligible for pensions. To qualify for pensions, one must have served a certain minimal period— twelve years for soldiers and NCOs, and thirteen years for naval warrant officers.27 This meant that only professional military personnel qualified for pensions, while the majority of wartime conscripts, including the Siberian internees, were disqualified from receiving them. T hose conscripts inhabited a gray area in postwar law that the government chose not to address fundamentally, given its reluctance to accept responsibility for providing compensation for the damages inflicted by a foreign power in the war. Instead, the government plugged the holes with so-called bonus or consolation
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payments and other allowances to some groups, never agreeing to all- encompassing compensations. Such special payments w ere provided to former Siberian internees—though they took a long time to come, not starting until after the establishment of the Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation (Heiwa Kinen Jigyō Tokubetsu Kikin, PFPC) in 1988. While veterans lobbied for pensions, compensation had hardly been a lobbying cause during the internment. As we have seen, the majority of advocacy groups during this time w ere concerned with hastening the repatriation process or providing support to the families of the unrepatriated. A long line of successive returnee associations served this purpose in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Three such groups deserve a closer analysis: the League for Hastening the Repatriation of Officers and Soldiers Abroad (Zaigai Shōhei Kikan Sokushin Dōmei); the League for Supporting the Livelihoods of Returnees from the USSR (Sokidō, later renamed Nichikidō); and the Association for Accelerating the Repatriation of Compatriots from the USSR (Zaiso Dōhō Kikan Sokushin Kai, later renamed Chōyokudō). The League for Hastening the Repatriation of Officers and Soldiers Abroad was founded by Ōki Eiichi, whose son was interned in the USSR, in the autumn of 1945, weeks a fter the war’s end. He “hoisted a banner and distributed leaflets outside Osaka’s Tsuruhashi Station. In December, major national newspapers started writing about his organization.”28 In July of the following year, the league organized its first general rally in Nara Park. Following this, Ōki organized nine more rallies, according to a January 1949 report from Yoshikawa Mitsusada, director of the Special Examining Bureau in the office of Japan’s Attorney General, for Lieutenant Colonel Jack P. Napier of the GHQ’s Government Section. “According to OKI, as many as approximately 20,000 people gathered together on one occasion. . . . Though we cannot ascertain what sort of m atters they discussed, yet it has been known that the prayers are said to have been offered (for their speedy repatriation),” Yoshikawa wrote. Like many organizations at the time, the league’s preferred modus operandi was using petitions. According to Yoshikawa, in March 1948, Ōki “submitted the petition sealed with blood for speedy repatriation to the Russian Embassy in the name of the League. But it is doubtful as to whether he actually did so or not.” The reason for this suspicion and the nature of the GHQ’s inquiry are not made clear in the document. However, in his conclusion, Yoshikawa offered the following evaluation of Ōki’s activities and character: “the organization itself seems to have a reputation [that is] none too savory (as t here is a rumour that Presi-
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dent Eiichi OKI is trying to take advantage of the families of those who have not yet [been] repatriated and the repatriates for a certain sort of purpose). In consequence, the real state of the organization is still under our investigation.”29 Ōki’s league was not the only group under investigation and surveillance by the Japanese authorities and the GHQ. A few months later Yoshikawa sent Napier a more detailed, ninety-six-page report on the League for Supporting the Livelihoods of Returnees from the USSR (Sokidō), a group we encountered in Chapters 5 and 6. Sokidō’s activities came closest to demanding monetary support for the returnees from the government. Indeed, Shirai Hisaya credited the organization with being the first to raise the issue of returnees’ welfare compensations in the postwar period.30 As its name suggests, this league aimed to assist former internees who had just returned to Japan. The league’s second general meeting on 28 October 1949 emphasized that “eighty p ercent . . . of repatriates are unemployed” and resolved that “every branch of the League is requested to join [an] unemployed workers union . . . or to organize such [a] union for itself to push an energetic campaign for the purpose of borrowing funds for living expenses, of enjoying the application of the Livelihood Protection Law or reasonable taxation and of aquiring [sic] relief goods.”31 It must be mentioned that Sokidō was founded by former activists of the Democratic Movement in the Soviet camps, and was described in a brief by Charles A. Willoughby, GHQ’s chief of intelligence, as “the most important medium through which the Japan Communist Party carries on its activities among the repatriate ele ment in Japan.”32 Tsumura Kenji, appointed its new chairman after the organization changed its name to the more inclusive Japanese Returnees’ League (Nihon Kikansha Dōmei, or Nichikidō) at the second general meeting, had been an activist in Transit Camp No. 380, at Nakhodka. Sokidō’s 1949 decision to broaden its base to include all repatriates, not just the ones from the USSR, must have been an attempt to avoid scrutiny amid alarm in Japanese society about the red repatriates. Regardless, in response to Willoughby’s brief, William J. Sebald of the GHQ Diplomatic Section advised that “serious consideration might well be given t owards directing the Japanese Government to dissolve” Nichikidō, which happened the following year.33 The third major alliance to be founded after Nichikidō’s dissolution in 1950 was the Association for Accelerating the Repatriation of Compatriots from the USSR. It was established in 1953 by Colonel Hasegawa Uichi, who
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had been interned in the Ivanovo camp alongside the Kwantung Army’s commander, Yamada Otozō, and other IJA officers. During the war, Hasegawa had served as head of the Kwantung Army Information Bureau (Kantōgun Jōhōbu). In the two years following his repatriation, he appeared several times in the Diet, providing testimony about those internees still in the USSR. A fter the last group of Japanese was repatriated in December 1956, Hasegawa’s organization was renamed the Long-Term Internees’ League (Chōki Yokury ūsha Dōmei, or Chōyokudō). It was a pioneering association whose activities, though eventually unsuccessful, laid the groundwork for future campaigns. Its lack of success was also an accurate barometer of Japanese governments’ early attitudes to compensation demands from pressure groups. Chōyokudō was the first group to seek compensation from the government that promoted its case in the Diet through petitions. Its members believed that their long stints in Soviet camps and prisons represented a sacrifice worthy of recognition and respect by the government and the broader Japanese society. They were the first to articulate the basis for any demands made to the Japanese state to honor “the grave sacrifices the internees had made in the name of the nation.”34 Through speeches in the Diet, petitions, and the pages of its newsletter, Chōyokudō consistently and candidly communicated the reasons for its demands, summarized by Nagasawa Toshio as follows: “(1) It is unfair that only one group bears the brunt of a disaster created by national emergency, (2) only we have shouldered the burden of Japan’s responsibility vis-à-v is the USSR, (3) our sacrifices were not the result of our own intentions, and (4) because of this, the profundity and length of our suffering should be acknowledged and equated to the sacrifices of the atomic bomb victims, e tc.”35 Chōyokudō used ideas of social justice to frame its argument, emphasizing the value of the Siberian internees’ sacrifice to the nation. In a 1966 petition submitted to the Diet, it claimed that because the internees had been captured while fulfilling their duty to the nation, their internment should be acknowledged as “public service” (kokka kōmu) and they should be considered to have been “government employees on duty.”36 Chōyokudō’s petitions, while forceful in language, w ere careful to emphasize the organization’s good intentions, and its members claimed that following repatriation they had waited patiently, without making any demands, for the government to take the initiative. But internees’ deaths from illnesses developed in captivity had been increasing lately, which had compelled them to start campaigning.37
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Chōyokudō’s appeals w ere greeted with some sympathy among the Japa nese political elites in the 1950s–1960s. This was partly b ecause its leaders who confidently advanced its demands had been senior officers and had commanded respect and authority during WWII. They also had connections among the ruling elite. According to Shirai, however, the sole reason why Chōyokudō managed to attract the attention of ruling party politicians and government bureaucrats was its “anti-Soviet and anticommunist position.” The fact that the politicians and bureaucrats were paying lip serv ice to Chōyokudō’s plight became evident: “even while they used Chōyokudō in constructing their anti-Soviet and anticommunist policies, the government and ruling party remained committed to their position of denying state compensation.”38 Moreover, while the Soviet captivity was fresh in the memory of Hasegawa and his fellow officers, almost a full decade had passed since the end of the war by that time, and the issue of compensation had become irrelevant for many deputies in the Diet and officials in the cabinet, not to mention the broader society. This brief summary of early activism suffices to convey the fast-changing and dynamic nature of the political environment in which internee interest groups operated, as well as the groups’ ephemeral character. Organizations appeared spontaneously and quickly disintegrated as soon as they had fulfilled their narrowly defined functions or when external circumstances made them obsolete. They often changed their names and objectives, creating a confusing mix of interests and demands. Moreover, even associations serving the interests of similar groups often had different philosophies, interests, and imagined enemies in political struggles. More often than not, these interests w ere far removed from the feelings of the general public beyond the narrow community that the interest groups served. This detachment was especially pronounced on the local level, as a result of the narrow aims the associations pursued. Examples of such aims could be staying in touch with fellow returnees a fter repatriation, organizing regular meetings and reunions, and only occasionally engaging in basic lobbying on the local level. Such activities rarely drew the attention of the national press. Contact among members of these small organizations was often maintained via crude newsletters, often prepared by hand and mailed to other members by enthusiastic leaders. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the first organizations appeared and the hardships endured in captivity were still fresh in the memory of the Japanese public, their rhetoric was often anti-Soviet and
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anticommunist, and the government showed some interest in their cause (as seen in the case of Chōyokudō). However, any support or sympathy from the nation’s political leaders turned out to be only empty promises of assistance with little political w ill behind them. Politicians borrowed the lobbying organizations’ terms in attacking domestic and international rivals, all the while remaining skeptical about the validity of the former internees’ claims and reluctant to provide any real support.39 And with their short existence on the political scene, few of the local associations developed any clout in broader political struggles, their missions and messages remaining close to the hearts of only their own members. At first glance, the government’s reluctance to grant any compensation to the Siberian returnees is hard to fathom: after all—along with the atomic bomb victims and other repatriates from overseas colonies—the returnees were living proof of Japan’s victimization at the hands of the e nemy. However, in contrast to the forceful position the government took on the issue of internees’ repatriation, the official stance on the issue of compensations and special payments for the victims of internment was conspicuous by its absence. When confronted directly by former internees or their allies in the Diet, government officials provided only evasive responses. The March 1980 reply by Shimizu Hiroshi, a government representative, to a question by a Diet member (Seno Eijirō of the Kōmeitō Party) about special payments to former internees was typical in this regard. Shimizu ambiguously called the compensations “an extremely difficult problem requiring careful measures”; few measures could be expected to follow from such a noncommittal response.40 As mentioned above, the 1956 Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration made it impossible for former internees to file a lawsuit against the USSR, and the Soviet-Japanese rapprochement was a product of a changing political landscape s haped by international and domestic rivalries—circumstances in which the Siberian internees had little say.41 As the Japanese historian Ishikawa Masumi observed, “The restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Soviet Union had been the earnest wish of Hatoyama Ichirō ever since he came to power” in December 1954.42 That restoration was in opposition to the “one-sided peace treaty” (katamen kō wa) signed at San Francisco by Hatoyama’s archrival, Yoshida Shigeru. Following the signing of this treaty, which did not include the Soviet Union, the latter repeatedly vetoed Japan’s applications for admission to the United Nations. As late as December 1955, even as Soviet-Japanese normalization talks con-
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tinued, the USSR vetoed another such application. This provoked a frustrated response from the US Department of State: “It is clear that the Soviet Union in vetoing Japan has sought only to preserve for itself a bargaining pawn.” 43 Another such bargaining pawn, as we have seen in Chapter 6, w ere the over 1,300 Japanese still in Soviet custody, who would be returned following the successful completion of bilateral negotiations and the signing of the Joint Declaration. Thus, restoring diplomatic relations was more than simply achieving something that Yoshida had failed to achieve: it also meant removing the last barriers to Japan’s membership in the United Nations. This required that the Japanese side sign away the internees’ right to make claims on the Soviet Union, at a time when some of these internees were still in Soviet hands. Article 6 of the declaration read, “The USSR and Japan agree to renounce all claims by either State, its institutions or citizens, against the other State, its institutions or citizens, which have arisen as a result of the war since 9 August 1945.” It was telling that preceding this were two articles that removed two significant obstacles unresolved by the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Article 4 said, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will support Japan’s application for membership in the United Nations.” And Article 5 said, “On the entry into force of this Joint Declaration, all Japanese citizens convicted in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics shall be released and repatriated to Japan.” 44 Ultimately, most associations such as Sokidō, Chōyokudō, and a string of lesser-known local organizations serving the interests of narrow groups were dissolved in the first three decades after WWII. In 1968, the Japanese Supreme Court issued a significant verdict on special payments, ruling that “there is no duty to provide state compensations to war victims.” 45 This definitive judgment took the wind out of the sails of groups advocating for state compensations. The only association founded in the first postwar de cade that persisted with its demands into the 1970s was Chōyokudō, but it too enjoyed little success and was dissolved in 1976. There was little hope that this government stance would change u ntil the mid-1970s, when the movement for compensations and recognition took off in earnest.
SAITŌ ROKUR Ō : THE SISYPHUS OF INTEREST GROUP POLITICS
The political activism of Saitō, a lobbyist for the returnees from Siberia, helps shed more light on the postwar lives and struggles of the returnees in
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Japan. It shows the Sisyphean nature of their strife against the ruling elites who were willing to listen to reports of returnees’ suffering when it served political goals but displayed little willingness to provide any real support when the returnees demanded it. Equally, Saitō’s activities reflect the fragmented nature of the movement for compensations, which made it more difficult to force concessions from people in positions of power. Most importantly, Saitō’s defiant and stubborn struggle is a major example of the internees’ concerted efforts to challenge the political arrangement in Japan as well as the position assigned to them in the hierarchy of war victims. In the uphill battle against the government for returnee compensations, few people were as persistent as Saitō. From the late 1970s (when he started his campaign of petitions and rallies) until his death in 1995, Saitō was the most prominent figure standing up for the returnees’ right to compensation for their postwar suffering. Despite divisions and political squabbles that marred the struggle, the All-Japan Council for the Compensation of Internees (Zenkoku Yokury ūsha Hoshō Kyōgikai, or Zenyokukyō), led by Saitō, managed to unite over 170,000 former internees into a nationwide movement. On the whole, this movement bore little fruit: nearly two de cades of activism were not enough to break through the walls of Japanese government bureaucracy when it came to compensations, although Saitō’s and other groups’ efforts ensured some payments and recognition. Saitō was born in 1923 in Tsuruoka, a city alongside the Sea of Japan coast in the northwestern prefecture of Yamagata. As his first name suggests (roku means “six” in Japanese), Saitō was the sixth son; there were twelve children in the family. Saitō was a promising student and wanted to continue his education, but the f amily was poor, and he had to give up his dream for lack of funds. Having finished six years of elementary school, at age fifteen he started working as a boiler-house assistant at a local factory. At age twenty, he crossed into Manchuria as a civilian (gunzoku) in the employ of the Eighth Aomori Division, stationed in the border region of Sunwu (in modern Heilongjiang Province of the PRC), working as a clerk. He was captured by the Soviets in August 1945 and transported via Manzhouli to a camp near the village of Nevel’skaia, sixty kilometers northeast of Taishet, in the Irkutsk Region—the area where Takasugi Ichirō, Satō Kashio, and thousands of other Japanese w ere interned. Saitō stayed in this area until the end of his internment, though he was moved between camp units. The Japanese in his camp w ere assigned to the construction of the BAM, and for the most part their work consisted of felling trees. The first work assignment they were given was to build housing for themselves—a common experience for
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thousands of those moved to Siberia by Stalin’s repressive apparatus in the preceding decades.46 Starting in the early months of his internment, Saitō showed an interest in the Democratic Movement, and in 1946 he became a leading member of the Nihon shimbun friends club (tomo no kai) in a camp unit in Parchum. There he was instrumental in breaking the resistance of several reactionary officers. However, as was common in the internment camps, Saitō’s role in popularizing the propaganda newspaper did not save him from the arbitrary violence of high-handed camp chiefs. For confronting the officer who ordered the Japanese to work on May Day, Saitō was tried repeatedly at so- called p eople’s courts, was given the most difficult work assignments, and had to endure other humiliating experiences u ntil his repatriation in the autumn of 1949. A fter returning to his hometown of Tsuruoka in October of that year and experiencing a period of unemployment, Saitō found work as a day laborer. While he worked as a laborer attached to the Public Works Section of the Tsuruoka municipal government, Saitō had his first brush with activism: he joined a u nion of day laborers and earned his peers’ re spect by taking part in several protest acts and hunger strikes. This recognition in the community and among his fellow workers was essential for Saitō’s election to the Tsuruoka City Council in 1951 as a Socialist Party candidate. In a city traditionally run by conservative interests and a council dominated by commissioners for public safety, inspection, and education policies, Saitō faced an uphill b attle in his struggle for workers’ rights and welfare. This struggle equipped him with the experience and determination to take on Japan’s welfare bureaucracy. He would put this knowledge and resolve to good use in the struggle for compensations. As mentioned above, Saitō was hardly a pioneer in the campaigns for compensation, the rudiments of which had taken shape in Sokidō’s efforts in 1948–1949 to protect the welfare of the recent returnees from the USSR. Following Sokidō’s feeble attempts to demand welfare support for the returnees, Chōyokudō’s unsuccessful petitions, and the 1968 Supreme Court verdict denying that the Japanese government had a duty to pay compensations, the struggle was in danger of fading into oblivion by the 1970s. It was jolted out of its slumber by the abovementioned Maeda, who turned compensation into a topic discussed nationwide but ultimately failed to translate the struggle into a well-organized movement. Several other repatriate activists picked up the baton from Maeda and expanded his struggle to the national level in July 1978 by founding the All-Japan Council for Demanding and Promoting Compensations for Forced Internees (Zenkoku
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Kyōsei Yokury ū Hoshō Yōky ū Suishin Kyōgikai, abbreviated Zenyokukyō). Ōtsuka Michio was elected its chairman, but the organization relied on the activism and leadership of several p eople, not least the heads of prefectural chapters.47 Although interested in returnee affairs ever since his repatriation, Saitō began his struggle in earnest in 1977, when he established the Yamagata Prefectural Branch of Zenyokukyō. At the time, he owned an automobile maintenance and repair company that he had founded in 1967 with his second son. The wave of internee activism sweeping the nation in the mid1970s ignited Saitō’s interest in organizing fellow repatriates in his home prefecture. Repatriated like thousands of o thers by the usual sea route across the Sea of Japan from Nakhodka to Maizuru, Saitō remembered how when the repatriates disembarked, employees of the Ministry of Health and Welfare had entered their names and addresses in written registers. He figured that this ready-made database would be handy in reaching out to the returnees. Through an acquaintance, Saitō learned that the register with the names of about ten thousand local returnees was gathering dust in a repository of the Yamagata Prefectural Office. Using the list to build the initial base membership for the local chapter, in September 1977 Saitō gathered the first meeting of the Yamagata Prefectural Branch in Tsuruoka, where he was elected its chairman. From that moment on, Saitō traveled the length and width of the prefecture, increasing the number of the organ ization’s members to seven thousand in six months.48 Far from being satisfied with simply representing the nationwide body in a sparsely populated area of northern Japan, at the Zenyokukyō meeting held in March 1978 in the Yamagata Prefectural Hall, Saitō outlined his vision of the movement, presenting the “three radical principles” of the organization: • Determination: History shows that the realization of compensation demands is not an easy task. It cannot be fulfilled without harmonious cooperation and tenacity of purpose. • Legal foundation: This problem cannot be resolved by signing petition after petition. We must determine clearly the international legal basis for our demands. • Organization: However rightful our claims, our demands w ill not be realized by relying on outside powers. It is absolutely imperative for us to achieve a 300,000-strong membership. For this purpose, we have to maintain a popular line not prejudiced t oward any single party.49
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Saitō’s zeal for and experience in organizing p eople, gained partly in the Democratic Movement in the Siberian camps and in industrial activism in his hometown, helped him expand the movement first into the neighboring prefectures of Akita and Aomori and later into Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima—at which point the organization encompassed almost all of northeastern Japan (Tōhoku). In addition to driving around Japan’s northeast, Saitō became a prolific writer, penning articles in the popular press about his struggle against the government, painting a pitiful picture of the returnees’ postwar lives.50 T hese w ere almost always tales of hardship and suffering that had not ended with repatriation, of camp ordeals whose effects followed former returnees long a fter their reintegration into postwar society. A thoughtful remark by Saitō’s second son, made during a March 1979 visit to the funeral of a former internee in a small town in Akita Prefecture, aptly summarized t hese tales: “Come to think of it: the returnees from Siberia are still living through hell!”51 What they had just witnessed was proof of that: Itō Sadao, a sixty-year-old former internee who had come back from Siberia suffering from severe frostbite had set fire to himself in his backyard, no longer able to endure the extreme pain caused by the frostbite’s aftereffects. In Itō’s hometown in the Japanese northwest, most people earned their living through manual labor at the time, working in farming, construction, and other professions that require physical health. Itō could not keep up with other workers, and the fact that he could not earn his fair share had become a source of humiliation for him throughout the postwar decades. He had regularly demanded compensation from the government to alleviate the costs of medical treatment and painkillers, but without success. He suffered severe pain e very day, and his wife had gotten used to him saying that he wanted to die. His suicide was thus more of a last resort to end his suffering than a political act, but it was a testament to the struggle of some returnees from Siberia in postwar Japan. Saitō’s years spent as a day laborer, city council member, and small entrepreneur had helped him realize that breaking through the formidable walls of the Japanese state’s bureaucracy required radical methods and resilience. His three principles—determination to cooperate, understanding of the law, and self-reliance—seemed to have found a sympathetic audience among the tens of thousands of returnees in northeastern Japan who had quietly observed the failed attempts of other organizations. Saitō’s efforts over the preceding months had lifted him to nationwide prominence by early 1979, when the northeastern branch of Zenyokukyō merged
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with the original movement that had begun in the southwestern island of Kyushu. Saitō’s relative obscurity until that point is clear in the surprise by which he took many p eople in the movement, including his would-be po litical rivals. This is how a volume on the Siberian Internment published by the PFPC, the most prominent rival organization to Saitō Zenyokukyō, described his emergence: “Although it is unknown when Rokuro Saito, who was not a member when the Central Conference was formed, first participated in the organization, he held a general conference at Mielparque [Hotel in] Tokyo on May 7, 1979. At this conference, he was elected director general, changed the name of the organization to the “All-Japan Council [for the] Compensation [of] Internees” and then directed the course of the organization at his discretion.”52 At the time of the May 1979 general conference, Saitō enjoyed wide support in the association. His insistence that Ueda Takao, who had served along with him as a deputy u nder Ōtsuka, the first chairman, now become his own deputy, was greeted with wide applause. But the roots of the future schism lay in the relationship between Saitō and Ueda. A few months a fter the general meeting that had filled everyone with optimism, the atmosphere within Zenyokukyō became divisive. Disagreements concerned the methods of struggle: the difficult choice between collaboration or confrontation with the government. Broadly speaking, the position Saitō presented to the Japa nese state consisted of demands to (1) pay the wages left unpaid by the USSR for the internees’ l abor in Siberia; (2) equate the Siberian Internment to military serv ice and pay military pensions to the internees, because the overall death rate in Siberia exceeded 10 percent; and (3) cooperate with the Soviet side in returning to Japan the remains of the deceased. But his general philosophy was one of expansion. As he stated in the March 1978 Yamagata conference, Saitō aimed to unite all former Siberian internees into a nationwide organization with more than 300,000 members to create a formidable lobbying front vis-à-vis the government. Ueda’s vision was more modest and pragmatic. He believed that “since the average age of the members now stands at sixty-three, it is unrealistic to expect the expansion of membership. [Therefore Zenyokukyō] should concentrate its efforts solely on the Liberal Democratic Party [LDP] and achieve the inclusion of compensations in the budget through persistent petitioning. The LDP is, after all, the ruling party and on the issue of budget has power and influence incomparable to that of the opposition.”53 In other words, while Saitō
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ambitiously insisted on expansion, Ueda and his faction suggested collaboration with power. Ueda’s faction broke away from the main organization and formed a new group in 1980. The new organization reversed to the old, longer name, confusingly also abbreviated as Zenyokukyō (Zenkoku Kyōsei Yokury ū Hoshō Yōky ū Suishin Kyōgikai, or All-Japan Council for Demanding and Promoting Compensations for Forced Internees), and it claimed to be the only heir to the united organization, dismissing Saitō completely. To strengthen the bond with the ruling party, the anti-Saitō faction elected the LDP politician and former internee Aizawa Hideyuki as its chairman. Aizawa was a conservative former bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry who would go on to serve as director of the Economic Planning Agency in the second Kaifu Toshiki cabinet in 1990–1991. From a breakaway faction, the new organ ization became a major rival of Saitō’s faction of the Zenyokukyō (or Saitō Zenyokukyō), and its connections with the ruling LDP lent it political legitimacy. It was the Aizawa faction of the Zenyokukyō (or Aizawa Zenyokukyō) that in 1988 achieved the establishment of the PFPC, set up to support research, erect memorials, and organize commemoration events. The PFPC operates a museum and library devoted solely to the history of the Siberian Internment—the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates (Heiwa Kinen Tenji Shiryōkan), on the thirty-third floor of the Sumitomo Building in Tokyo’s Shinjuku skyscraper district, a stone’s throw from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.54 The PFPC was also instrumental in the collection and compilation of the nineteen-volume Foundation for Peace (Heiwa no Ishizue) memoir collection cited extensively in this book. In short, with money from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the PFPC and its exhibition and resource center played a crucial role in popularizing the government’s version of internment history that emphasized victimhood and painful labor (rōku). Aizawa’s organization exists today, and he led it u ntil April 2019, when he passed away—t hree months short of his hundredth birthday. Its website claims that the organization has been the main group throughout the history of the movement for compensations.55 The political clout of its leader and the close connections it enjoyed with the ruling elites helped the Aizawa Zenyokukyō achieve tangible results. One such achievement was ensuring the payment of any monetary support to the internees in the twentieth c entury. With the establishment of the
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PFPC in 1988, the Japanese government and the LDP agreed to disburse over the following two years “reward payments” (irō kin) of 100,000 yen (about 800 US 1988 dollars) to each internee, along with a silver commemorative goblet and a letter from the prime minister.56 In addition to cleverly wording the payment as a “reward” and not “compensation,” the government and the LDP insisted following this decision that “all war compensations have been completed.” In the words of Shirai, “with that, the government decided that the problem of the internment was settled.” 57 This symbolic payment was made to all internees who applied for it. But the real sign of the Aizawa Zenyokukyō’s influence was that it was given exclusive access to a fund of a half-billion yen (about 4 million US 1989 dollars) allocated by the government for the PFPC, while the Saitō Zenyokukyō “was completely excluded.”58 In other words, “the method of respectfully involving the government” chosen by the Aizawa Zenyokukyō brought dividends in the long run, while the path of confrontation chosen by Saitō failed to force any concessions from the government.59 Moreover, using its clout, the Aizawa faction strove to discredit Saitō, accusing him of putting his interests before those of the movement. According to Shirai, who followed Saitō’s struggle from close quarters for several years, Saitō believed that “there w ill be nothing left for me if you take Siberia away.” 60 Unable to unite the movement in trying to persuade the government to meet internees’ demands through sheer numbers and persistent petitioning, Saitō and his followers decided to turn to the courts. Yet this path also proved to be tortuous. Unable to sue the Soviet government, the returnee groups decided to take their own government to court, armed with the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Under the convention, each POW’s home country was “responsible for settling with him any credit balance due to him from the Detaining Power on the termination of his captivity.” 61 In 1981, sixty-two former internees associated with the Saitō Zenyokukyō filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government, demanding individual compensations of 100,000 yen (800 US 1981 dollars) per month of internment—a total of over 264 million yen (2.1 million US dollars). The plaintiffs quoted several precedents from international law and specifically referred to Article 68 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which states: “Any claim by a prisoner of war for compensation in respect of personal effects, monies or valuables impounded by the Detaining Power u nder Article 18 and not forthcoming on his repatriation, or in respect of loss alleged to be due to the fault of the Detaining
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Power or any of its servants, shall likewise be referred to the Power on which he depends.” 62 The power they all depended was Japan. Following years of court b attles, in April 1989, the Tokyo District Court dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that b ecause the majority of the plaintiffs had been repatriated before the enactment of the 1949 Geneva Convention, it could not be applied to them.63 The plaintiffs appealed the decision. In 1993 the judges of the Appellate Court (the Tokyo High Court) conceded that “it is not hard to understand the feeling b ehind the demands for national compensation regarding various damages sustained as a result of being drafted against one’s own w ill into a war carried out by the nation.” 64 However, they denied that the 1949 stipulation that damages sustained by POWs become the responsibility of their home nation had been the custom in international law at the time many of the plaintiffs w ere repatriated from the USSR. This was the ultimate court defeat in Saitō’s lifetime. One area where Saitō’s efforts seemed not to be in vain was diplomacy. Angry at the courts’ refusal to acknowledge numerous precedents of nations’ compensating their own citizens imprisoned by other powers, the so-called system of compensating own POWs, Saitō continued to look for ways to change the verdict. He believed that the unfavorable court decisions were an act of discrimination against the former internees. One basis for the rejection of the plaintiffs’ claim was that they had failed to provide any proof of the “loss alleged to be due to the fault of the Detaining Power,” the Soviet Union. Saitō had paid multiple visits to the Soviet Union starting in 1980 and had established good relations with Soviet officials and scholars familiar with the issue. The court cases described above had lasted so long that they spanned a monumental era in global politics, when the nation that had interned Saitō and his fellow internees itself became history. Yet the final years of the USSR’s existence, marked by the bold reforms of President Mikhail Gorbachev, demonstrated some easing in the Soviets’ official attitude to the problem of the Siberian Internment. Even before the USSR’s collapse, Soviet politicians acknowledged the unresolved legacies of the internment in meetings with their Japanese counterparts. In January 1990, Boris Yeltsin, then a deputy in the USSR’s Supreme Soviet (the country’s parliament), appeared on the TBS telev ision channel during his visit to Japan and claimed that there were no obstacles to resolving the legacy of the internment.65 In April 1991 (as it turned out, during the last months of the USSR), Gorbachev paid an official visit to Japan. In June 1990, in preparation for Gorbachev’s historic visit, a Soviet cultural delegation had paid a visit to Tokyo, which
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Saitō used to build bridges and organize a Japanese-Soviet symposium. At the end of the event, Aleksei Kirichenko presented the Saitō Zenyokukyō with a list of 1,440 internees who had died in the USSR. During his 1991 visit to Japan, Gorbachev acknowledged the internment as a historical problem and presented the Japanese side with archival sources and more lists of deceased Japanese. Yeltsin continued this commitment to top-level dialogue when he became the president of post-Soviet Russia, and in October 1994 his government issued the former internees with work certificates necessary for them to claim compensation. In February 1993, Yeltsin also signed a decree to award Saitō the Russian Order of Friendship of the Nations “for his long-standing and fruitful activities toward developing friendship and mutual understanding between the peoples of Japan and Russia.” 66 Saitō’s activities w ere highly esteemed in Russia due to the realization that he was building a bridge with Russia single-handedly, almost entirely without
Figure 7.1. Saitō Rokurō shakes hands with Boris Yeltsin, October 1993. Saitō is wearing his Order of Friendship decoration, awarded by Yeltsin earlier that year. The Russian scholar of the internment Elena Katasonova is translating. Zenyokukyō.
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the sanction or support of the Japanese government. The Aizawa faction even turned this into a charge that Saitō was taking “many actions that ‘benefited the e nemy’ by trampling down on the face of our state, such as conducting ‘official negotiations’ on an individual basis.” 67 The use of rhetoric about “the enemy” when talking about the distant past is indicative of the nationalist fervor that the internment issue still inspires among some groups in Japan. At the time, however, Saitō felt that he had little choice. The history of his struggle contained ample evidence of the difficulty not only in winning any compensations from the Japanese government, but also in enlisting its help in dealing with foreign partners. The Japanese Foreign Ministry held fast to its commitment vis-à-vis the USSR signed in 1956, and its policy toward Moscow in the subsequent decades was dominated by the territorial dispute over the four southern Kuril Islands (known as the Northern Territories in Japan). Saitō’s success in reaching out to the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian ruling elites stood in stark contrast with his inability to gain influence among the Japanese ruling elites. Saitō’s public diplomacy is proof both of the marginalized status of the internment issue in postwar Japan and of the narrowness of the national container for the internment compensation issue. Though Japanese citizens, the former internees occupied a position similar to the many Asian victims of the war and empire— forced laborers, comfort w omen, and so on—who, also left out by the Cold War deals erected on the ruins of the Japanese imperial edifice, persistently demanded apologies and compensation from the Japanese state. The internees were acutely aware of this position. In 1999 Kambayashi Tomoya, Saitō’s successor as Zenyokukyō’s chairman, proposed sending “a joint appeal to the U.N. h uman rights panel so that the Japanese government would recognize the rights of former detainees” alongside South Korean and Dutch claimants of compensations from Japan.68 The unwillingness of the nation to satisfy the demands of its citizens was tantamount to an acknowledgment of the issue’s extranational nature. It revealed the great hulk of the imperial edifice u nder the cover of the postwar nation-state. Ironically, the nation proved reluctant to own up to the empire’s excesses that had resulted in the former internees’ captivity in the USSR—and their compensation claims. This reluctance was accepted squarely by Minister of Welfare Ide Shōichi, who objected to the phrase “government compensation” in the text of the Bill Regarding Relief for A-Bomb Victims: “If we use the phrase ‘government compensation,’ people w ill likely interpret it as referring to compensation based on the government’s responsibility for having started the war.” 69
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Saitō’s struggles are also illustrative of the pervasive divisions in Japa nese politics that make it difficult to achieve any consensus. In their struggle for compensations, returnee associations did not help their own cause. From their early years these groups were divided, and there was little cooperation and coordination among them. The struggle was not led by a united front of concerned returnees; rather, it was marred by incessant infighting and disagreements over fundamental questions of policy and methods. Even larger groups, such as the Saitō Zenyokukyō, that enjoyed genuine support across Japan, w ere torn by rivalry and petty disagreements that damaged their lobbying power. Saitō’s stubbornness also played a part in the eventual failure of the compensation struggle. Eventually, the only group that achieved any concessions from the ruling LDP—in the form of “reward payments”—was the organization that chose the path of cooperation instead of confrontation with the government. On the w hole, while other nationwide political groups started as popular movements during the postwar period, fighting political b attles with the conservative government and other groups, it is safe to say that returnees’ associations never succeeded in creating a truly nationwide political front, except for a brief period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when membership in Saitō’s organization exceeded 170,000 people. We have mentioned the internal divisions, but there was another, more important reason. Unlike political interest groups analyzed by Franziska Seraphim—the Japan War Bereaved Families Association and the Association of Shinto Shrines— Zenyokukyō did not attempt to play an active role in the “public culture of memory.” 70 Its main goal was to achieve compensations from the Japanese government for its citizens who had been victimized by a foreign power, to provide justice for and restore the dignity of the returnees “abandoned by their nation.” 71 ■ ■ ■
Saitō passed away in December 1995 at the age of seventy-t wo, six months after returning from a memorial serv ice in Russia. Following his passing, the activities of his Zenyokukyō underwent a brief period of chaos but were soon restored and continued u ntil 2011. Saitō’s immediate successor, Nasukawa Masashi, chose an entirely different course, even removing the word “compensations” from the organization’s title—perhaps a sign of his conviction that claims for redress had proved a hopeless cause. However, this created a backlash among Saitō loyalists in the movement, who forced
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asukawa out in June 1996 and elected Saitō’s deputy and the man b N ehind the 1981 lawsuit, Kambayashi Tomoya, as chairman. The organization then continued in its attempts to have the work certificates issued by Russia approved by the Japanese government and, following in Saitō’s footsteps, achieve resolution by enlisting Russian support. The most daring move in this direction was the proposal that Kambayashi made in the meeting of the Russian parliament to achieve the signing of a peace treaty through public diplomacy without waiting for the governments to resolve their differences. This was a remarkable, if unrealistic move, that demonstrated the internees’ determination to oppose and transcend the nation. On 13 March 1997, Japan’s Supreme Court rejected Zenyokukyō’s final appeal for compensations. In addition to the e arlier refusals to apply the 1949 Geneva Convention, the Supreme Court’s nine-page verdict classified the suffering of the Siberian internees “as a war damage similar to others” (sensō songai no hitotsu) and, alluding to the Japanese constitution, denied the plaintiffs’ right to demand compensations. The judges determined that, “while acknowledging the profound and severe damage suffered by the internees during their protracted internment and labor exploitation, t here is no other way but to state the impossibility of recognizing compensation for it based on the aforementioned clauses of the constitution.”72 Moreover, since Japan had ratified the 1949 Geneva Convention only in 1953, courts adjudicating the returnees’ lawsuits at various points had cited the impossibility of retroactive application of the convention.73 The courts’ decisions supported the political stance of the Japanese government, which considered the Siberian Internment illegal under international law and classified the internees as POWs u nder Japanese law.74 Consequently any compensation to former internees could be interpreted as backtracking on this principle in the eyes of the Japanese leaders and could create a precedent for other aggrieved groups to take action against the government. This verdict marked Zenyokukyō’s final and unquestionable defeat in the courts. The association’s members did not lose hope for a positive resolution despite several years of hiatus at the beginning of the new millennium. In 2003, the remnants of the Saitō Zenyokukyō and several other groups united under an umbrella organization called the Council on Passing Legislation on the Siberian Internment (Shiberia Rippō Suishin Kaigi). Led by Arimitsu Ken, an experienced campaigner for compensations in Japan and other Asian nations, the council aimed to resolve the compensation issue through a new channel of legislative process. The council worked closely with sympathetic
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members of the Diet and other politicians, while Arimitsu and senior Zenyokukyō members actively promoted their message through the media. The council also adopted a more decisive strategy of staging sit-down strikes of former internees. One such protest was held in front of the Diet building on 23 May 2003. This proved efficient, as the sight of “these old soldiers, with an average age of over eighty, sitting in protest shocked the national media, which actively took up the issue. Opposition parties also took note and started their own efforts.”75 The council also employed the strategy of promoting the cause among political figures. Thus Hiratsuka Mitsuo, the last chairman of Saitō Zenyokukyō, enlisted the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) member Nagatsuma Akira in the cause. With the initiative of political figures such as Nagatsuma, the DPJ introduced in 2004 the Draft Bill on Special Payments to Postwar Forced Laborers. That bill was defeated by the ruling coalition of the LDP and Kōmeitō in 2006, following eleven hours of debates in both chambers of the Diet.76 But the wheels of the parliamentary process had been set in motion, preparing the ground for the f uture. When in August 2009 the DPJ won the national elections and ascended to power, this groundwork proved useful. A combination of behind-t he- scenes negotiations with the LDP and Kōmeitō deputies and the DPJ’s newly acquired political clout meant that the law could now become reality. On 16 June 2010, the postwar saga of internees versus the government reached a conclusion. On this day, the Diet’s House of Representatives adopted the Postwar Forced Internees Special Law, which promised “consolation payments” (isharyō) in acknowledgment of the “hardships endured by the postwar internees during the forced internment in extremely cold areas, in poor conditions, for long periods of time.” 77 The Japanese government had never compensated the internees especially for their captivity and exploitation in the USSR (although it had provided special payments). This had led Hiratsuka Mitsuo, a former internee and Zenyokukyō chairman, to exclaim (as quoted in the epigraph): “We are [fighting] to reclaim our dignity as human beings. Only slaves are put to work without being paid. We cannot die as slaves.” 78 In a congratulatory statement issued the day the law was passed in the House of Representatives, Hiratsuka wrote, “after sixty- five years of despair, disappointment, and ill w ill . . . the nation has finally shown consideration to the former POWs.” 79 Hiratsuka admitted that the payments, in the range of 250,000–1,500,000 yen (roughly 2,500–15,000 US 2010 dollars) and paid from a special state-sponsored fund, w ere insuf-
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ficient. However, “the problem is not the amount of money. [What is impor tant is that] this law was made at all possible by the reconsideration of long postwar years during which we, the victims, had been given the cold shoulder.”80 The internees felt that some of their dignity as human beings had been salvaged through this acknowledgment. True, the government had found a way to compensate the now elderly internees without changing its decades-long stance—seen in its insistence on the law’s and the payments’ “special” nature. However incomplete, this was still a victory for the former internees. Fifty-four years following the end of the internment, and fifteen years a fter Saitō’s death, the Siberian internees had achieved some historical closure. The Special Law was a long-awaited achievement for the internees and their families, yet if it represented a closure of any kind, it was a truncated, conditional one, meted out in terms favorable to the government. It was a product of the politics of deference that seemed to the decimated ranks of the aging returnees to be a half gesture at best, a measure of national condescension. The surest sign of this was that only Japanese citizens received any payment: non-Japanese Siberian Internees—Koreans, Chinese, and others—were excluded. Thus, the Japanese state once again applied the postwar, national judgment on the prewar, imperial phenomenon that had resulted in the detainment of former subjects (Japanese and o thers) by the Soviet Union. By excluding non-Japanese imperial subjects, Japan once again demonstrated that concessions on historical issues would continue to be dressed in national terms.
EPILOGUE BREAKING BOUNDARIES
very year on 23 August one can hear “On the Foreign Hills”—the unofE ficial anthem of the Siberian Internment—at Tokyo’s Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, outside the moat of the Imperial Palace. The date is Siberia Day, the anniversary of Iosif Stalin’s 1945 decision to transport Japanese prisoners to Soviet forced labor camps. At the 2013 ceremony, “On the Foreign Hills,” sung seven decades ago by Japanese internees in the distant expanses of Siberia, sounded again in Furukawa Seiichi’s rich baritone at the place that holds the remains of some of the former captives. Surviving former internees, their numbers dwindling with each passing year, had gathered at the national memorial to commemorate t hose who never returned. They took to the stage to pay their respects and share their memories and grief with the audience of f amily members and friends, government bureaucrats and party politicians, and media representatives and members of advocacy groups. Murayama Tsuneo opened what proved to be his last address with a lament about his dead comrades: “They sang ‘Do not fall u ntil we 1 step on the fatherland’s soil,’ but never came back!” He had spent de cades meticulously gathering the names of the dead and had published a list of 46,300 casualties, before passing away himself in 2014. Inokuma Tokurō spoke of the inner struggle between the difficulty of testifying about the internment and the obligation to do so: “I did not want to speak; I did not want to remember. But I must pass on the story of my dead war comrades.”2 The solemn voices of the survivors mourn the cruelty of the internment, but the 23 August event is more than a memorial service. High-ranking bu286
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reaucrats; politicians from the right, left, and center; and other public figures of e very stripe unite on this day to give elegies for the Japanese victims of the internment. A divisive topic for decades, the internment now brings together political groups and individuals who otherwise agree on very little. Members of the LDP and JCP deliver similar-sounding speeches, while veterans of internee campaigns against the government join government bureaucrats in paying respects to the victims of Soviet cruelty and Japanese indifference. The annual show of compassion for the Siberian internees may reflect widely held attitudes about the internment. However, as I have argued in this book, this symbolic nationwide consensus on the cruelty of the internment and the collective act of mourning its victims has its roots first of all in the deep-seated tradition of canonizing national victimhood. In this tradition, the tales of deprivation in Siberia are valuable because they accentuate Japanese collective suffering.
SHADOWS OF THE INTERNMENT IN CONT EMPORARY JAPAN ESE SOCIETY
The postwar history of the Siberian returnees told in this book shows that they were left to themselves after playing a brief part in enriching the rec ords of war-related suffering and the anti-Soviet narratives of the early Cold War. In this sense it could be said that they w ere “abandoned by history,” to borrow Timothy Snyder’s phrase.3 The question that tortured them in captivity—why did we end up in Siberia?—haunted them for decades a fter their release. The internees answered it in their own ways, but the responses inevitably led to Japan’s humiliating defeat in WWII. Japan had lost the war, and “the winner takes it all” (kateba kangun, makereba zokugun) was the typical, if somewhat cynical, explanation that some former captives offered themselves, their c hildren, and the larger Japanese society. This was their way of explaining the humiliation of defeat and internment. Along with the hope of returning alive from the camps, they had hoped to find answers once they were back in Japan. However, a fter repatriation no one offered them an explanation of their Siberian ordeal beyond the familiar tropes about the treacherous Soviets. After the scramble to help the repatriates get settled in the early postwar years, there was rarely a comforting arm around the shoulder for the returnees. Their requests and later demands for compensation for the exploitation and suffering they had endured at the hands of
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the Soviets were met with noncommittal pronouncements of bureaucrats and cold verdicts of judges. Many returnees went on to enjoy successful postwar careers, but some struggled to find jobs and support their families— especially in the late 1940s, when unemployment was rampant and being a repatriate from the communist USSR was not an experience many employers found desirable. Japan’s embrace of its revenant sons was cold, as was seen also in their compatriots’ commiseration that was tainted by mild suspicion. These social and government attitudes continued almost until the Cold War’s end, when the need to constantly denigrate the USSR disappeared with the superpower itself. Interest in the internment peaked in the 1990s thanks to a combination of factors: the former internees’ increasingly advanced ages, the post– Cold War optimism and friendly relations with Russia, and the injection of new knowledge about the internment following the partial opening of Soviet-era archives. In accordance with the vogue of denouncing the excesses of both the brutal Soviet regime and the deadly superpower confrontation, the Siberian Internment acquired new utility for historians as a vestige of WWII and the Cold War. This interpretation about the internment being a legacy of the cruel past was echoed even by the heir of the nation that had consigned the Japanese (along with millions of other foreign POWs and Soviet citizens) to captivity and forced labor: the new Russia, which was e ager to establish friendly relations with Japan. True, even with the Russian acceptance of Stalin’s guilt, t hese changes did not mean that the phenomenon of the Siberian Internment was acknowledged as anything more than an isolated episode in Japanese national history. The internment became a domestic issue in 1956, when it was formally ended by the Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration, and the USSR’s collapse and subsequent intergovernmental exchanges failed to highlight its transnational nature. The attitude of successive Japanese governments that continued to deny compensations to the aging former internees demonstrated this clearly. As is evident from Hiratsuka Mitsuo’s statement following the passing of the Postwar Forced Internees Special Law in 2010 (see Chapter 7), the Cold War continues to haunt the history of the internment.4 In other words, the internment’s swan song has not yet been sung, despite the Japa nese governments’ apparent desire to put the issue to bed. When the last Japanese survivor of Stalin’s camps passes away, the internment w ill finally and completely recede into history. But it has long been placed on a pedestal of national sacrifice that is no longer dependent on the living or dying
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of its direct witnesses. Their history and experiences have been molded into the story of the nation’s remaking in the postwar period, and their voices have been lost in the cacophony of postwar tales of war and sacrifice. In short, the attitude of the ruling elite in Japan t oward Stalin’s captives has changed from a politics of indifference during the Cold War to what I call a politics of deference. The word “deference” can mean showing respect to someone because of their age. The respect shown to the former internees in the past three decades has been due chiefly to their advanced age. The Siberian internees have been portrayed as victims, but in ways dif ferent from other, more traditional sufferers in the pantheon of the Japa nese national victimhood. In his seminal study of postwar Japanese views on WWII, historian Yoshida Yutaka unearthed a hierarchy in the “people’s narratives of the war” (kokumin no senki): thus officers’ tales w ere privileged over t hose told by ordinary soldiers, and pilots’ experiences were more popular than those of infantry soldiers.5 As Franziska Seraphim and Lee Pennington have pointed out, and as I have reasserted in this study, the victim narratives in postwar Japan were dominated by the stories of civilian suffering.6 The innocence of civilians—women, c hildren, and the elderly— became a central pillar in the history of the violent collapse of Manchukuo and the broader Japanese Empire. The “moral authority of innocence,” to borrow Sabine Fr ühstück’s apt phrase, made undeniable the gravity and centrality of civilian stories of the imperial collapse.7 But as we have seen, there was a more fundamental motivation for emphasizing the innocence of the Japanese in the hands of the Soviets: in the WWII entanglement between Japan and the Soviet Union, the former was the innocent party that had never invaded the USSR. In contrast to innocent civilians who suffered from Soviet violence, the Japanese soldiers taken prisoner in Manchukuo’s ruins could hardly claim innocence, despite the illegality of their transportation and internment by the Soviets. Any such claims rang hollow b ecause, in the eyes of the Japanese nation, t hese soldiers had failed to do their duty—to protect civilians—and had endured the shame of falling alive into enemy hands. If there is any truth in the theory about the soldiers being offered to the Soviets as reparation, then it means that even in defeat, these soldiers w ere expected to continue to serve the nation and atone for its failures. Moreover, some of them had abandoned their allegiance to Japan by embracing the communist ideology of their captors in the camps, as well as by delivering a “slap in the face” of their compatriots welcoming them back at Maizuru by inciting violent upheavals and making unrealistic demands.8
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In contrast to the situation of the “hero-v ictims” of postwar Japan, there was l ittle that was heroic in the victimhood of the Siberian internees.9 The latter’s victimhood was tragic, inconvenient, and pitiful—adjectives reflecting the evolution of attitudes of Japanese domestic society and leaders toward the plight of the internees. During the internment, their forced migration and exploitation by a foreign power was portrayed as something undeniably tragic and unjust. Their entry into the Japan of the early Cold War and their demands for compensations and recognition meant that the former internees were seen as challengers to peace and order in the new Japan. Only a fter the Cold War and with the triumph of the prosperous if stagnant post–economic bubble Japan, the aging former internees were finally deemed worthy of deference. Even then, it was deference built mostly on pity for the old men whose persistence did not befit their advanced age. This politics of deference toward the Siberian internees has become the standard approach of the ruling elites to the issue of the internment, epitomized most clearly by the pronouncements at the 23 August memorial serv ice. But this deference is pervasive throughout modern Japanese society, symptomatic of attempts to constantly reassert the foundations of postwar Japan by honoring the sacrifices of the victims who died for it. With the passing of decades, melancholia slowly took the place of the internees’ once bitter memories. Victim narratives supplied the public with a default position on the internment, a stance beyond argument or reproach. The internment became another reservoir of national melancholia. Japan’s rapid postwar development and prosperity pushed the miseries of life in the Siberian camps further back in memory, even in the minds of the survivors. In some of their recollections, the memoirists’ tone changed from bitterness about the past to acceptance of it. Surprisingly, many memoirs and public accounts of the internment by the now elderly returnees often contained, besides the standard accounts of victimhood of their dead comrades, nostalgic recollections of the Soviet Union, its p eople, nature, and the peculiarities of its society and culture. Conversely, for a few of the young Japa nese who had grown up in the prosperity of the postwar period, the internment was attractive because the tales of hunger, cold, and hard physical labor possessed an exotic aura. The fact that Japan had traveled a long way since its defeat, devastation, and humiliation in war and captivity was the lesson younger generations could derive from the history of the internment. Many returnees and their editors, perhaps pandering to these interests, em-
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phasized those aspects of the internment in the testimonies that would seem most surreal to a young Japanese reader. In an attempt to popularize the internment’s history among younger generations, in 2012 the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates (Heiwa Kinen Tenji Shiryōkan) published a manga titled A Letter from Siberia (Shiberia kara no tegami), in which two high school students learn about the horrors of the internment with the help of their teacher, whose father had been interned in Siberia.10 In addition, Ozawa Yuki, the child of a former internee and the author of manga for girls (shōjo manga), published a manga about the Siberian ordeal of her father, Ozawa Masakazu, titled The Hand of Ice (Koori no te).11 Ozawa depicted the hardships of the internment by tracing the camp experiences of her endearing character. Having documented her f ather’s war and internment from the day he was drafted to the time of his repatriation, Ozawa ended her book with a resounding statement: “Undoubtedly, my father survived that time and that place. The memory of it is to this day etched deep in his heart.”12 Ozawa’s manga was one example of attempts by children of the returnees to make sense of the experiences of their parents and to perpetuate their suffering. Another such example is a recent family memoir by the sociologist Oguma Eiji, whose father, Kenji, was interned in Siberia and was active in postwar compensation lawsuits. First serialized in 2014 in the popular intellectual magazine Sekai, Oguma’s The Man Who Came Back Alive (Ikite kaette kita otoko, published in an English translation as Return from Siberia) is a peculiar work by one of Japan’s most prolific intellectuals.13 More than a memoir based on the author’s conversations with his f ather, the book also presents a detailed history of the internees’ experiences in the camps and their struggles a fter repatriation from the uniquely composite perspective of a scholar and a son. Oguma reaffirms his own agency as a witness to his father’s past and his duty in documenting that past: “Eventually, and inevitably, my father w ill die. However, by listening carefully to the experiences of others and giving them meaning, we can ensure that they continue to live a fter they are gone. This is something any of us alive t oday can do— something, in fact, that only we can do.”14 While for the most of his account Oguma does not try to draw lessons from his father’s experiences, sticking to an empirically sound and dynamic narrative, in his afterword he asks: “Is the trajectory of my father’s life typical of the Japanese of his era? . . . [I]t is a difficult [question] to answer.” He concedes that his father’s “experience of Siberian Internment is certainly unusual,” although he also
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considers the common ground the internees shared with the Korean former IJA soldiers and other victims of Japan’s imperial project.15 While Ozawa and Oguma cherished the opportunity to document their respective f athers’ ordeals, few children of former internees have used their parents’ experiences to address complex issues of guilt and responsibility. A candid memoir by Asaka Yū ho, the daughter of a former internee, shows how the baggage of the past found its way into the lives of the internees’ children.16 Asaka was born with paralyzed legs. Unable to walk, her life oscillated between the poles of her father’s character: on one pole was the kind and generous father who never shied away from showing his love for her. On the other pole was the angry tyrant who violently beat his son, Yūho’s elder b rother. Extremely disturbed by this dissonance, Yū ho gathered enough courage to confront her father, determined to find out what was eating him. She asked if he remembered his feelings when she was born a cripple. Her father’s response was tantalizingly honest: he had thought her paralyzed legs w ere “heavenly retribution” (tenbatsu) for the atrocities he had committed in Manchuria. His Siberian Internment, too, was punishment for his sins against the Chinese.17 Yūho was profoundly shocked by this revelation. For many years afterward, she was torn between the image of the loving father she would have had, had there been no war and internment, and the traumatized soldier who had returned home from the war and subjected his children to domestic violence. Asaka’s experience was unique in that she bore perpetrator guilt in her own body and name (Yū ho literally means “walk joyfully”), as a constant reminder instilled in her by her father’s past. Her memoir conveys the emotional cost of facing the incon venient truths about the war, both for individuals and the greater society. This trauma is in contrast with the convenience offered by embracing the victimhood narratives.18
INTERNMENT MEMORY IN THE SERV ICE OF THE NATION
The internment and its legacies have been passed on to subsequent generations who have used it to question or reaffirm the foundations of postwar national identity. The writings and pronouncements of the survivors have formed a formidable canon of memory. But the internment’s transnational nature also meant that its impact went beyond national borders in the post– Cold War world, influencing Japan’s international relations. As has been
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the case with other collective traumatic events, the memory of the internment has been recruited to serve national interests and perpetuate national myths. Similar to other cross-border encounters, the internment has also served as a mirror, reflected in which w ere the views of Japan from the outside. The Japanese people perceived these reflections in varying ways. Surprisingly or not, some of these perceptions served to feed ideas of Japanese exceptionalism, reminiscent of the theories of Nihonjinron (literally, “theories of the Japanese”), ideas that emphasized Japanese homogeneity and uniqueness and that self-gratifyingly celebrated the superiority of the Japa nese, their culture, and their way of doing things.19 A typical example of such perceptions is connected to the Alisher Navoiy Academic and Ballet Theater (Navoiy Theater) in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. The theater’s building was completed in 1947 using Japanese POW l abor. Following the USSR’s collapse, many former internees traveled to what had become independent Uzbekistan to pray at the graves of their fallen friends and bring back legends about the part the Japanese played in the construction of the building. One such legend perpetuated the Navoiy Theater in Japa nese society as owing its beauty and permanence to Japanese POWs: In April 1966, when most of Tashkent was wiped out in a devastating earthquake, the theater building was left intact. The Japanese internees who had worked on its construction remarked with satisfaction that, following the earthquake, “the Uzbeks w ere impressed by the quality of the work done by the Japanese, and are as a result sympathetic t oward Japan. They think of the Japanese as hardworking and honest.”20 A collection of memoirs published by the Japan-Uzbekistan Association lyrically referred to the theater in its subtitle as “The Japanese Legend Born on the Silk Road.”21 The Navoiy Theater legend has also become a diplomatic tool, consonant with Japan’s so-called Silk Road diplomacy vis-à-vis Central Asian countries, and it has been romanticized by internees and their lobby groups as a beautiful monument to Japanese craftsmanship and diligence.22 More importantly, the legend in which the Japanese internees are skilled craftspeople, not crude laborers, has provided an alternative narrative to the memoirs of humiliation and suffering in Siberia. In this legend, the people of Tashkent treat both the internees at the time and their memory many decades later with respect, unlike in many other camps that w ere cold, both literally and metaphorically. This legend was reaffirmed on 25 October 2015 during then Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s official visit to Uzbekistan, when he participated
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in the reopening ceremony of the Navoiy Theater, attended a memorial concert there, and “viewed a plaque stating that Japanese citizens were involved in constructing the theatre.”23 More recent have been the “silent prayers” offered by the former Prime Minister Abe at the memorial in Artyom, the site of a coal mining camp (Camp No. 12) north of Vladivostok, which honors the 7,400 Japanese who found eternal rest in the Maritime Province.24 Abe paid his respects at the memorial during his annual visits to the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. While attending the Fifth Eastern Economic Forum in September 2019, Abe visited the memorial for the fourth time, turning the visits into something of a ritual. No overt attempts w ere made by the Japa nese delegation to use the past in the service of the present. The prime minister’s press office even chose not to emphasize his silent prayer, reporting simply that Abe had paid “a visit to the memorial monument for Japanese nationals who died during detainment.”25 Ironically, for two days before honoring the souls of the Japanese who had died rebuilding the economy of the Russian Far East, Abe had discussed with his Russian counterparts the role Japanese companies could play in developing the resource-rich region economically. The talks centered on an investment decision to import liquid natural gas to Japan and the opening of regular flights between Tokyo and Vladivostok by two Japanese airlines. As seen in these examples, governments might try to appropriate the past for economic benefit, as a poignant volume by Yukiko Koga demonstrates.26 Yet the hope that the internment can find relevance as a transnational occurrence rests in the social, academic, and cultural exchanges related to the internment between Russia and Japan, and not simply in intergovernmental negotiations. As has been the case throughout the postwar period, especially during the campaign for compensations, the internees have taken the lead in these exchanges. Lobby groups, theater troupes, academic and research institutions, bereaved family associations, nongovernmental organizations, and other actors have been at the forefront of attempts to perpetuate the memory of the internment. The 1990s saw the first waves of former internees paying pilgrimage visits to the places where they had once been captives. Starting in 1992, groups of former internees and volunteers traveled to the former Soviet Union to collect the remains of those who had lost their lives in Siberia, to be reinterred in Japan. In collaboration with Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, in the decade between 2009 and 2019 t hese volunteers helped unearth and return to Japan the remains of
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1,771 internees.27 For example, as of 2014, Endō Shōji, a nonagenarian former internee, had traveled to Russia every year since 1992 on missions to return the remains of his comrades-in-arms to Japan and inter in the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery.28 And Tanaka Takeshi, who was interned in Khabarovsk for two years, decided to return to the city in 1995 following the death of his wife. 29 He lived t here u ntil his passing in 2020, teaching Japanese songs to local children and calling for a peace treaty between Japan and Russia. Along with honoring their war comrades, these former internees have been eager to achieve reconciliation and, many de cades after the end of the internment, some sort of closure.
BREAKING BOUNDA RIES
The making of a new Japan from the ruins of the failed empire was a tumultuous and complex undertaking. It was driven by belief in a world freed of war and by hopes for a better future expressed most poignantly in the plea “No more Hiroshimas” from the atomic bomb survivors.30 Ironically, emerging from the rubble created by the mushroom clouds, Japan had to negotiate the realities of a nuclear-powered superpower confrontation threatening to inflict a thousand Hiroshimas on the world. Equally, the path to building a new nation was beset by persistent vestiges of the expansionist empire and the destructive war it had unleashed on Asia. While the empire was hastily removed from the pages of Japanese history, its legacies did not evanesce as quickly. Moreover, excising the empire from public consciousness was hardly the best way to mourn its aborted promise and cure the wounds its violent exit had inflicted on the Japanese national body. Badly buried parts of the past continued to resurface in the postwar period like restless spirits, tormenting those who had survived the war and their children and grandchildren—the “generations that did not know the war” (sensō o shiranai sedai).31 Postwar Japan’s transition from empire to nation-state was also propelled by the ideals of freedom and democracy instilled by the United States, its old enemy and new, powerful ally. Japan’s newfound role as an American ally and bulwark against communism meant that it constructed its policy with an eye on its chief foreign partner: “Having liberated much of Asia and the Pacific Islands from Japanese imperial violence, the United States simultaneously forged anticommunist networks linking the military-security-academic
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f ree market client states, especially in North and Southeast Asia.”32 Much of Japan’s history in the postwar decades has been characterized by attempts to reconcile the requirements of this alliance with the sensibilities of the domestic society. These clashes between domestic issues and foreign obligations— the latter augmented in recent years by what the recent Abe administration saw as Japan’s responsibility to play a larger role in world politics—have often dominated the consciousness of the country’s citizens who are mindful of the heft of Japan’s historical baggage. The new Japan born from the empire’s defeat was first and foremost a product of the new world order and the international system of the Cold War. It follows from this that understanding Japan’s recent past and pre sent requires facing the uneasy legacies of empire and war. This book has dealt with one such legacy. The experiences I have analyzed show that d oing justice to the internees’ sacrifices and reclaiming their humanity would require moving beyond the by now ossified mind-set of martyrdom. This can be done only by broadening the scope of internment research, reflecting the diversity of camp experiences and representations, and addressing Japan’s controversial quest for empire. In my opinion, t hese tasks are attainable only by lifting the two major smoke screens, national and ideological, that have clouded not only academic histories of Cold War East Asia but also popular views of the period. Ultimately, as reflected in Satō Kashio’s poem etched on a memorial at the summit of Mount Takao (see Chapter 1), over the past decades the internees have sought the truth about their captivity in the hope that it would bring closure. But is perfect and complete closure ever possible? Snyder has argued that “closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song.”33 While closure might be what the survivors seek, I hold that it is not what research into the Siberian Internment needs. What is required is the opposite. The internment requires openings: of archives in Moscow and elsewhere that have been secret for too long, as well as of the hearts and minds of both the survivors and t hose who speak on their behalf—academics, lobbyists, and politicians. Most importantly, it requires opening the imaginary borders that separate national histories from one another. This book has attempted to open the frontiers of community and nation and transport the history of the internment to broader, extranational sites of post-W WII mass migrations, POW camps, and the Cold War. The internment, in my view, has served far too long as a unifying narrative for only
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the core group of p eople who experienced it directly. Its restrictively national rendering—the attempts to explain it in exclusive and narrow terms— might have served national history well. Certainly during the Cold War, its history had to abide by what Lisa Yoneyama called “territorially bound nationalist historical sensibilities, which were at the same time regimented by the U.S.-or Soviet-led East and West blocs.”34 But these restraints have also led to distorted images of the past, images that have made it all too easy to divert the gaze from the suffering of Japan’s Chinese, Korean, and other Asian and non-Asian victims. It has contributed, albeit indirectly, to the perpetuation of a victimhood mind-set and the history wars that continue to divide East Asia decades a fter the end of WWII. As we have seen, when the individual internee was pitted against the nation, it was always the nation and its interests that came first. In the same way that the internees had been captives of Soviet national interests, their tales have been arrested within the boundaries of national histories. By juxtaposing the melodramatic literature of hardship authored by the exploited Japanese internees and the businesslike deliberations of their Soviet exploiters, I have demonstrated that the sentimental baggage of solely Japanese suffering is better left b ehind. The sentimentality of the victimhood narratives has been one of two major smoke screens that have blurred the role of the Siberian Internment as a mirror of Japan’s postwar make over. Historians—whether Japanese or not—w ill do more justice to the Siberian internees by viewing them as participants in the global processes into which Japan had plunged headfirst in search of empire and domination. Unlawful and unjust as it was, their Siberian captivity was part of the worldwide storm that was WWII and the postwar race for supremacy. This tempest of global proportions led to the uprooting of whole populations, the redrawing of maps and boundaries, and the redistribution of land and resources. Perhaps as importantly, it reshaped the thinking of millions about themselves and their national communities. The shift in frameworks should not be seen as diminishing the gravity of suffering, humiliation, and marginalization of those who experienced the internment and their f amily members. On the contrary, exposing the processes by which the Siberian internees w ere enlisted into the Japanese national memory of victimhood gives them greater credit as subjects of history—the subjectivity they fought so hard to reclaim in their own country during the postwar period. It establishes the returnees from Siberia as active agents of history, not passive victims unable to speak for themselves.
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The other smoke screen has been ideology. Despite the extraordinary circumstances in which the Japanese captives found themselves, some of them had the courage and open minds to appreciate the unique opportunity for representatives of two opposing ideological camps to meet and coexist, albeit in the capacities of captor and captive. Despite the attempts of the Soviet government, the US Occupation administration, and Japanese politicians to divide the internees’ world into two ideological camps, some of them managed to break through the veil of ideology, see through the arbitrary Iron and Bamboo Curtains, and establish the humanity of the Soviet people. Works such as Takasugi Ichirō’s In the Shadow of the Northern Lights have demonstrated that it was possible, even in the most demanding circumstances, to discover the humanity of the other.35 It is because of the ideological warfare of the Cold War that voices such as Takasugi’s were lost in the chorus of self-righteousness on both sides of the ideological divide. But there is hope that new generations of historians can set aside ideology, victimhood, and other smoke screens and offer new histories, explanations, and interpretations of the past.
NOTES A C K N O W LE D G M E N T S INDEX
NOTES
All Japanese titles were published in Tokyo unless noted otherw ise. INTRODUCTION
1. Uchimura Gōsuke, Iki isogu: Sutārin goku no nihonjin, rev.ed. (Chūkō bunko, 1985), 8. 2. “Obituary: Gosuke Uchimura,” Japan Times, 31 January 2009, https://w ww .japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/01/31/national/obituary-gosuke-uchimura/# .WyFeuVPt4ck. 3. Soviet archival information puts the number of Kwantung Army soldiers in northeastern China at the time of the Soviet offensive at 1,178,000, although only 712,966 took part in b attles against the Red Army. See K. E. Cherevko and A. A. Kirichenko, Sovetsko-iaponskaia voina (9 avgusta–2 sentiabria 1945 g.). Rassekrechennye arkhivy (Moscow: Bimpa, 2006), 263. Mayumi Itoh puts the number of Japanese civilians in Manchukuo at 1,550,000 (Japa nese Orphans in Manchuria: Forgotten Victims of World War II [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010], xi). Accordingly, the number of all Japanese citizens in Manchukuo in August 1945 was over 2.7 million, although the exact number is difficult to establish. 4. David Glantz wrote about “brave, self-sacrificing samurai who, though poorly employed, inflicted 32,000 casualties on the Red Army and won its grudging respect” (The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945: “August Storm” [London: Frank Cass, 2003], xix). Viktor Karpov also documented the stubborn resistance of some Japanese units (Plenniki Stalina: Sibirskoie inter nirovanie iaponskoi armii, 1945–1956 gg. [Kiev: (V. Karpov), 1997]). Still, there was little that the Kwantung Army command could be proud of, as seen in the Soviets’ resounding victory. 301
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5. Soviet archival information shows that the fighting between the Soviets and Japanese in southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands continued until early September, even a fter Japan’s signing of the surrender document on 2 September. See Cherevko and Kirichenko, Sovetsko-iaponskaia voina, 236–286. 6. “Postanovlenie GKO o priiome, razmeshchenii i trudovom ispol’zovanii voennoplennykh iaponskoi armii,” 23 August 1945,–Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (hereafterTsAMO RF), fond (f.) 66, opis’ (op.) 178499, delo (d.) 1, listy (l.) 593–598, quoted in V. A. Zolotarev, ed., Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia, vol. 18 (7–2): Sovetsko-iaponskaia voina 1945 goda: Istoriia voenno-politicheskogo protivoborstva dvukh derzhav v 30–40-e gody. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Terra, 2000), 175. 7. “Direktiva Narkomata Oborony . . . ,” TsAMO RF, f. 66, op. 178499, d. 3, ll. 220–221, in Russkii Arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia, vol. 18 (7–2), 174–175. Few documents on the Manchurian offensive shed any light on the decision to intern the Japanese. Frantic reports exchanged by Soviet ministries in fulfillment of Stalin’s decree reflect the unpreparedness on the ground. Some of these reports have been compiled in a recent comprehensive document collection: V. A. Gavrilov and E. L. Katasonova, eds., Iaponskie voennoplennye v SSSR, 1945–1956: Dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2013), hereafter Iaponskie voennoplennye. 8. Postanovlenie GKO-9940ss ot 30 avgusta 1945 g., “O sozdanii komissii po vyvozu trofeinogo oborudovaniia iz Man’chzhurii,” Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (RGASPI), f. 644, op. 1, edinitsa khraneniia (ed. khr.) 459. See also Cherevko and Kirichenko, Sovetsko-iaponskaia voina, 286. 9. Numbers for Japanese internees are notoriously unreliable, with Soviet documents often contradicting one another. The correct total is between 574,000 and 640,000, while t here were around 60,000 verified and recorded deaths. In the 1990s the government of Boris Yeltsin submitted lists of names to its Japanese counterpart that put the dead at around 38,000. Murayama Tsuneo, a former internee, spent years composing lists of casualties; his total was 46,300 (Shiberia ni yukishi 46,300 mei o kizamu: Soren yokuryū shibō sha meibo o tsukuru [Nanatsumori shokan, 2009]). 10. The Japanese historian Abe Gunji has analyzed the temperatures in Siberia and found that in Chita, for example, temperatures fell to 40–42 below 0˚C in December 1945 (Shiberia kyō sei yokuryū no jittai: Nisso ryōkoku shiryō kara no kenshō [Sairy ūsha, 2005], 122). See also I. M. Volkov, Sovetskaia derevnia v pervye poslevoennye gody, 1946–1950 (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 206. 11. Iitsuka Toshio, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia kyō sei yokuryū sha ga kataritsugu rōku (yokuryū hen), ed. Heiwa kinen jigyō tokubetsu kikin (Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation) (Heiwa kinen jigyō tokubetsu kikin, 1991–2012) [hereafter Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia]), 9:291.
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12. “Agreement between the U.S.S.R. and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (Concerning the Repatriation of Japanese Prisoners of War),” 19 December 1946, Department of State Bulletin 23, no. 574 (3 July 1950): 431–433. 13. Matsumoto Shun’ichi, Mosukuwa ni kakeru niji: Nisso kokkō kaifuku hiroku (Asahi shimbunsha, 1966), 32. 14. “Iz spravki Dal’nevostochnogo otdela MID SSSR . . . ,” 16 September 1955, Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (AVP RF), f. 0146, op. 56, papka (p.) 344, d. 3, l. 113–116, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 678–679. 15. “Spravka-doklad Ministru vnutrennikh del . . . ,” Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), f. 1p, op. 32a, d. 1, ll. 1–25, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 486–497. 16. Uchimura, Iki isogu, 110. 17. From 23 August 1945 to 26 December 1956. 18. Kobayashi Akina, Shiberia yokuryū: Beiso kankei no nakade no henyō (Iwanami shoten, 2018), 92. 19. Molotov’s name is rendered “Morotofu” in Japanese. See ibid., 93; Tada Shigeharu, Uchinaru shiberia yokuryū: Ishihara Yoshirō, Kano Buichi, Kan Sueharu no sengoshi (Shakaishisōsha, 1994), 87. 20. Quoted in Kagawa Shōichi, “Asahara to iu soren no inu,” in Nihon shimbun: Nihonjin horyoni taisuru soren no seisaku, ed. Imadate Tetsuo (Kagamiura shobō, 1957), 223. 21. “Yomiuri sunpyō” column, Yomiuri shimbun, 20 August 1956. 22. Shirai Hisaya, Kenshō shiberia yokuryū (Heibonsha, 2010), 125. Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (RSFSR) was a catchall instrument for Stalinist repressions: the Soviet dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, among others, were convicted u nder this article. 23. “Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR 1926 goda. Stat’ia 58,” online at http://school .r usarchives.r u/prava-cheloveka/ugolovnyi-kodeks-rsfsr-1926-statya- 58.html. 24. The two terms are widely used in Solzhenitsyn’s seminal Arkhipelag GULAG (Gulag archipelago) (Moscow: Azbuka-Attikus, 2017). 25. Iu. I. Din, “Problema repatriatsii koreitsev Iuzhnogo Sakhalina v 1945–1950 gg.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 8 (2013):72. 26. Government of the Republic of Korea, Shiberia ni yokuryū sareta chō senjin horyo no mondai ni kansuru shinsō chō sa: Chūgoku tōhokubu ni kyō sei dō in sareta chō senjin o chū shin ni, trans. Kitahara Michiko (Seoul: Taeil Hangjaenggi Kangje Tongwŏn P’ihae Chosa mit Kugoe Kangje Tongwŏn Hŭ isaengja t ŭng Chiwŏn Wiwŏnhoe [Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea], 2013), 7. 27. Hayashi Teru, Shiberia, Vol. 1: Hakubo no oka (Osaka: Shimpu shobō, 2010– 2012), Chapter 6, “Unmei de kin ken o tachi hōten no gakai o miru,” 143–167. 28. Of the 155 women Japanese internees in Siberia, the majority were nurses taken prisoner along with former Kwantung Army soldiers. On 12 August 2014
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the Nihon hōsō kyōkai (NHK), Japan’s public broadcaster, aired a special documentary titled “The Women’s Siberian Internment” (Onnatachi no shiberia yokuryū), with the testimonies of surviving female returnees. 29. Takasugi Ichirō, Kyokkō no kageni: Shiberia furyoki, 12th ed. (Iwanami bunko, 2011); Kurumizawa Kōshi, Kuropan furyoki, 6th ed. (Bungei shunjū, 1990). 30. Ishihara Yoshirō’s and Kazuki Yasuo’s lives are analyzed in Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 31. “Nodo jiman arubamu kara (sengo 50 nen, dai 4 bu),” Asahi shimbun, 12 January 1995. 32. Stuart Galbraith IV, The Toho Studios Story: A History and Complete Filmography (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 71. 33. Shiki Theater Company Website, https://w ww.shiki.jp/applause/ikoku/. 34. “Ano koro nagareta uta,” Asahi shimbun, 3 August 2005. 35. On 17 August 2014, the NHK aired a special documentary about Yoshida Tadashi: “Itsu demo yume o: sakkyokuka Yoshida Tadashi no ‘sensō,’ ” NHK, accessed 6 April 2021, https://w ww6.nhk.or.jp/special/detail/index.html?a id =20140817. 36. Barshay, The Gods Left First; Yoshikuni Igarashi, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 37. Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 38. Takasugi, Kyokkō no kageni, 359. 39. Ian Nish, “Regaining Confidence—Japan a fter the Loss of Empire,” Journal of Contemporary History 15, no. 1 (January 1980): 194. 40. Documents on the GUPVI have been compiled in Maksim Zagorul’ko, ed., Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1939–1956: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Logos, 2000 [hereafter Voennoplennye v SSSR]). For more recent scholarship, see L. I. Borodkin, S. A. Krasil’nikov, and O. V. Khlevnyuk, eds., Istoriia stalinizma: Prinuditel’nyi trud v SSSR. Ekonomika, politika, pamiat’ (Moscow: Rosspen, 2013). 41. See, for example, Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron, Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet–East European Borderlands, 1945–50 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 42. On the race war, see John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 43. “Pis’mo ministra vnutrennikh del rukovodstvu strany . . . ,” 14 January 1947, GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 168, l. 76–80, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 358, 359. These opinions were presented in the interior minister’s report to the highest leadership of the USSR and should therefore be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, Japanese surprise at the lack of racial discrimination in the USSR was common.
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44. “Dokladnaia zapiska S.N. Kruglova chlenam pravitel’stva SSSR ob itogakh raboty MVD s voennoplennymi i internirovannymi,” 24 May 1950, GARF f. 9401, op. 2, d. 269, l. 309–319, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, Doc. No. 9.1, 920. 45. “Dokladnaia zapiska S.N. Kruglova,” in Voennoplennye v SSSR, Doc. No. 9.1, 918. 46. GHQ, Far East Command, Military Intelligence Section, General Staff, “Special Report: Japanese Prisoners of War, Life and Death in Soviet, P.W. Camps,” National Diet Library Website: http://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid /3540818, accessed 7 April 2021. 47. See the exchange between the two leaders in “Draft Message from Joseph Stalin to Harry S. Truman,” 17 August 1945, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 372, l. 111, trans. Sergey Radchenko, Wilson Center, http://digitalarchive.w ilsoncenter.org/document /122330; and “Translation of Message from Harry S. Truman to Joseph Stalin,” 18 August 1945, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 372, l. 112–113, trans. Sergey Radchenko, Wilson Center, http://digitalarchive.w ilsoncenter.org/document/122333. 48. Kathleen E. Smith, Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 6. 49. Uchimura, Iki isogu, 93. 50. Takasugi, Kyokkō no kageni, 351. 1. BEYOND THE NATION
Epigraph: Hashimoto Takuzō and Kimura Takao, Byakuya ni inoru: Soren chiku yokuryū hōkoku (Chūōsha, 1948), 5. 1. Satō Kashio, interview by author, Mount Takao, Tokyo, 1 March 2017. 2. Israel Emiot, The Birobidzhan Affair: A Yiddish Writer in Siberia (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 60. 3. Marina Stulova, “BAM Urbanizes Life in the Taiga,” Soviet Life 11 (350), (November 1985): 24. 4. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, Volume VII, The Far East, China, eds. Ralph R. Goodwin, Herbert A. Fine, Velma H. Cassidy, and Francis C. Prescott (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1969), Document 390, 530–531. Also available online: https://history.state.gov /historicaldocuments/frus1945v07/d390, accessed 15 May 2021. 5. “Draft Message from Joseph Stalin to Harry S. Truman,” 17 August 1945, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 372, l. 111, trans. Sergey Radchenko, Wilson Center, http://digitalarchive .w ilsoncenter.org/document/122330. 6. “Translation of Message from Harry S. Truman to Joseph Stalin,” 18 August 1945, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, RGASPI f. 558,
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op. 11, d. 372, l. 112–113, trans. Sergey Radchenko, Wilson Center, http:// digitalarchive.w ilsoncenter.org/document/122333. 7. “Potsdam Declaration: Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender, Issued, at Potsdam, July 26, 1945,” National Diet Library, https://w ww.ndl.go .jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html. 8. See, for example, Natalia Surzhikova, “Ekonomika sovetskogo plena: Administrirovanie, proizvodstvo, potreblenie,” in Istoriia stalinizma: Prinuditel’nyi trud v SSSR. Ekonomika, politika, pamiat’, ed. L. I. Borodkin, S. A. Krasil’nikov, and O. V. Khlevniuk (Moscow: Rosspen, 2013), 78–87. 9. The first quote about “telling it as it was” is from Ishiguro Tatsunosuke, Sanga ariki (Bunka kensetsusha, 1949), 3; the second quote about “recording facts as facts” is from Horyo taikenki kankō iinkai, “Kankō no shushi to uttae,” Horyo taikenki, ed. Takahashi Daizō (Soren ni okeru nihonjin horyo no seikatsu taiken o kiroku suru kai, 1984–1998), Vol. 1, “Rekishi, sōshū hen,” i (hereafter Horyo taikenki followed by volume number and page). 10. Gerald Figal, “How to Jibunshi: Making and Marketing Self-Histories of Shōwa among the Masses in Postwar Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (1996): 916. I am grateful to Aaron William Moore for this reference. 11. Takasugi Ichirō, Kyokkō no kageni: Shiberia furyoki, 12th ed. (Iwanami shoten, 2011), 226–227. 12. Figal, “How to Jibunshi,” 904. 13. Aaron William Moore, “The Problem of Changing Language Communities: Veterans and Memory Writing in China, Taiwan, and Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 408 and 409. 14. Christopher L. Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3. 15. James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 3. 16. Akiko Takenaka, “Aestheticizing Sacrifice: Media, Education, and Ritual during the Asia-Pacific War,” in New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics, ed. Minh Nguyen (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 179–191; Laura Hein and Akiko Takenaka, “Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States since 1995,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 1 (February 2007): 61–94; Philip Seaton, “War, Popular Culture, and Contents Tourism in East Asia,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 12, no. 1 (2019): 1–7. 17. Lee Pennington, Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 13. 18. Wakatsuki Yasuo, Shiberia horyo shū yō jo: Soren to nihonjin (Saimaru shuppankai, 1979), 1:1. 19. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
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20. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 5. 21. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 135. 22. Kobayashi Akina, Shiberia yokuryū: Beiso kankei no nakade no henyō (Iwanami shoten, 2018), 135–138. 23. Masuda Hajimu, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 2. 24. Hill, National History and the World of Nations, 3. 25. Moore, “The Problem of Changing Language Communities,” 400. 26. Tomita Takeshi, Shiberia yokuryū shatachi no sengo: Reisenka no yoron to undō, 1945–56 (Jinbun shoin, 2013); Kobayashi, Shiberia yokuryū; Abe Gunji, Shiberia kyō sei yokuryū no jittai: Nisso ryōkoku shiryō kara no kenshō (Sairy ūsha, 2005); Nagase Ryōji, Shiberia yokuryū: Nihonjin wa donna me ni attanoka (Shinchōsha, 2015); Shirai Hisaya, Kenshō shiberia yokuryū (Heibonsha, 2010). 27. Sebastian Conrad, The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in an American C entury, trans. Alan Nothnagle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 15 and 28. 28. See, for example, Abe, Shiberia kyō sei yokuryū no jittai; Nagase, Shiberia yokuryū. 29. Wakatsuki, Shiberia horyo shū yō jo. 30. Ibid., 459. 31. Ibid. 32. Abe, Shiberia kyō sei yokuryū no jittai; Tomita, Shiberia yokuryū shatachi no sengo. 33. Abe, Shiberia kyō sei yokuryū no jittai, 3. 34. Nagase, Shiberia yokuryū, 26. 35. Ibid., 435. 36. Tomita, Shiberia yokury ūshatachi no sengo, 2. 37. Kobayashi, Shiberia yokuryū. 38. Ibid., 30. 39. Among others, see Viktor Karpov, Plenniki Stalina: Sibirskoie internirovanie iaponskoi armii, 1945–1956 gg. (Kiev: [V. Karpov], 1997); Elena L. Katasonova, Iaponskie voennoplennye v SSSR: Bol’shaia igra velikikh derzhav (Moscow: Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2003) and Poslednie plenniki vtoroi mirovoi voiny: Maloizvestnye stranitsy rossiisko- iaponskikh otnoshenii (Moscow: Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2005); S. I. Kuznetsov, Iapontsy v sibirskom plenu, 1945–1956 gg. (Irkutsk, Russia: Izdatel’stvo zhurnala “Sibir,’ ” 1997); S. V. Karasev, “Iaponskie voennoplennye na territorii chitinskoi oblasti,” Kandidat nauk dissertation, Irkutsk State University, 2002; O. D. Bazarov, “Iaponskie voennoplennye
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v Buryatii, 1945–1948 gg,” Kandidat nauk dissertation, Irkutsk State University, 1997. 40. Borodkin, Krasil’nikov, and Khlevniuk, eds., Istoriia stalinizma. 41. Katasonova, Iaponskie voennoplennye v SSSR. 42. William F. Nimmo, Behind a Curtain of Silence: Japanese in Soviet Custody, 1945–1956 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). 43. Watt, When Empire Comes Home; Igarashi, Homecomings. 44. He also authored a memoir of his Siberian experience. See Uno Sōsuke, Damoi tōkyō (Kokusho kankōkai, 1989). 45. Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 42. 46. Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5. 47. Sebastian Conrad, “Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945–2001,” Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 87. 48. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 277–301. 49. Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 12. 2. EMBODIMENTS OF EMPIRE
Epigraph: Itō Masao, Mahoruka: Shiberia yokuryū ki (Bungeisha, 2002), 89. 1. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2010). 2. A Marxist critique of Japan’s role in WWII published in 1955 sparked a public debate that may compare in importance with the Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Dispute”) in West Germany. See Tōyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi, and Fujiwara Akira, Shō washi, new ed. (Iwanami shoten, 1959). 3. The question of whether the Japanese captives in Siberia w ere POWs or civilian internees has caused much debate. Hardly any consensus on the matter seems to be forthcoming. The picture is complicated by the fact that the former Japanese soldiers were transported to the USSR a fter the Kwantung Army surrendered to the Soviets but before Japan officially signed the instrument of surrender on 2 September 1945. Many internees referred to themselves as POWs in their recollections, and in the political campaigns for compensation from the Japanese government, it was in the internees’ interest to be known as POWs. The Russian historian Aleksei Kirichenko has suggested that only a conference of international lawyers from Russia and Japan could settle this question (“Voennoplennye ili internirovannye? Istoriia voprosa,” accessed 8 April 2021, http://ru-jp.org/intern.htm).
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4. Itō, Mahoruka, 87. 5. Sadako N. Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931–1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), chapter 8. 6. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Kimera: Manshū koku no shō zō (Chūkō shinsho, 1993). 7. S. C. M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 223. 8. Deokhyo Choi, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Writing the ‘Empire’ Back into the History of Postwar Japan,” International Journal of Korean History 22, no. 1 (February 2017): 1–10. 9. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Eri Hotta, Pan- Asianism and Japan’s War, 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 10. Young, Japan’s Total Empire. 11. For a recent history of the Chinese Civil War, see Diana Lary, China’s Civil War: A Social History, 1945–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For an analysis of legacies of the Japanese and Soviet occupation of Manchuria, see, for example, Koji Hirata, “From the Ashes of Empire: The Reconstruction of Manchukuo’s Enterprises and the Making of China’s Northeastern Industrial Base, 1948–1952,” in Overcoming Empire in Post- Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding, ed. Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 147–162. 12. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). 13. Henry Frei, “Japan and Australia in Karl Haushofer’s Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean,” Journal of International Studies (Institute of International Relations, Sophia University, Tokyo), no. 22 (January 1989): 77–104. 14. Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War, 107–139. 15. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, especially 307–398. 16. For imperial propaganda about Manchuria, see Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006); Annika A. Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013). 17. Mantetsu Eiga Seisakujo, Rakudo shin manshū (Kamutekku, 2005), DVD. 18. For definitions of “Manchurian bandits,” see Mariko Tamanoi, Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 66. 19. Okabe Makio, “Shiryō ga kataru: Manshūkoku tōchi no jitsujō,” Sekai, no. 6 (1998): 154–193. 20. Quoted in Shiraishi Megumi, “Chūgoku zanryū koji” kikokusha no jinken yōgo: Kokka to iu shū dan to kojin no jinken (Akashi shoten, 2008), 48. 21. Sarah Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 4 and 60.
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22. See, for example, Chūgoku Kikansha Renrakukai, Watakushitachi wa chugoku de nani o shita ka: Moto nihonjin senpan no kiroku (San-ichi shobō, 1987); Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 23. Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 94. 24. Owada Mitsu, Manshū shiberia 2,000 nichi: Ahiberia yokuryū ki (Shinjinbutsu ōraisha, 1985), 10–11. 25. Ishiguro, Sanga ariki, 32–33. 26. Asahara Seiki, “Dema, chūshō ni kōshite,” Chūō kōron 71, no. 11 (October 1956): 163. 27. Shirai Hisaya, foreword to Hiraide Setsuo, Shiberia ni uzumeta karute (Bungeisha, 2000), 5 (emphasis added). 28. Kushner, The Thought War, 51. See also Young, Japan’s Total Empire; Tamanoi, Memory Maps; Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War; Culver, Glorify the Empire. 29. For a recent history of constructing the Manchurian colony, see Bill Sewell, Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905–1945 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019). 30. Maki Sakie, “Pioneering That Led to Tragedy,” in Women against War, ed. Women’s Division of Sōka Gakkai (Kodansha International, 1986), 31. 31. Narita Ry ū ichi, “ ‘Hikiage’ to ‘yokury ū,’ ” in Ajia taiheiyō sensō, Vol. 4: Teikoku no sensō taiken, ed. Kurasawa Aiko, Sugihara Tōru, Narita Ry ū ichi, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Yui Daizaburō and Yoshida Yutaka (Iwanami Shoten, 2006), 182. 32. Ibid. 33. Itagaki Tadashi, “Watashi wa shiberia ni umarekawatta,” Shinsō shō setsu, no. 18 (April 1950): 24. 34. Itō, Mahoruka, 57. 35. Ibid. 36. For an example of the shattering of the allegiance of one subject (Watanabe Kiyoshi) to the emperor following the end of the war, see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 339–345. 37. Itō, Mahoruka, 56–57. 38. Furumi Tadayuki, “Manshū teikoku no saigo o mite,” in “Bungei shunjū” ni miru shō washi, ed. Handō Kazutoshi (Bunshun Bunko, 1995), 2:140. 39. Itō Mahoruka, 87. 40. Ibid., 88. 41. Quoted in ibid., 87–88. 42. Itagaki, “Watashi wa shiberia ni umarekawatta,” 26 (emphasis added).
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43. Ōtsuka Takeshi, Kikuchi Toshio, and Katō Kintarō, “Shiberia yokury ūsha zadankai: Onshū no arara ni musubareta kizuna,” Bungei shunjū, no. 9 (2014): 329–330. 44. Fujiwara Tei, Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru (Kaiseisha, 2015). 45. Sejima Ry ūzō, Ikusanga: Sejima Ryū zō kaisōroku, 12th ed. (Sankei shimbun shuppan, 2009), 276. 46. Furumi Tadayuki, “Manshū teikoku no saigo o mite,” 143. According to his son, Ken’ichi, as a Manchukuo official Furumi always felt sorry for the Japa nese residents in Manchuria who suffered in the Soviet invasion. A fter his repatriation from the PRC, Furumi helped build a park commemorating the Japanese pioneers in Manchuria and Mongolia in Sakuragaoka, Tama City, Tokyo. Furumi Ken’ichi, interview by author, Tokyo, 29 October 2014. 47. Miyawaki Junko, Sekaishi no naka no manshū teikoku (PHP Shinsho, 2006). 48. Kametani Yūjirō, “Hōten asahiku asahigaichiku no haisen zengo,” in Manshū sayonara, ed. Editorial Committee for Repatriation Memoirs (Kokusho Kankōkai, 1981), 609. 49. Tamanoi, Memory Maps, 12. 50. For Hirota’s overtures, see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 51. Sejima, Ikusanga, 277, 279. 52. Hata Ikuhiko, Nihonjin horyo: Hakusonkō kara shiberia yokuryū made (Chūkō bunko, 2014), 2:176. 53. K. E. Cherevko and A. A. Kirichenko, Sovetsko-iaponskaia voina (9 avgusta–2 sentiabria 1945 g.). Rassekrechennye arkhivy (Moscow: Bimpa, 2006). 54. Sejima, Ikusanga, 277. 55. Ōki Tatsuji, Ikite kaetta dame na heitai: Hito chū nen hojū hei no shō shū kara shiberia hikiage made (Roppo shuppan, 1977), 88. 56. Issa Pliev, Konets Kvantunskoi armii: Zapiski konno-m ekhanizirovannoi gruppoi sovetsko-m ongol’skikh voisk, 2nd ed. (Ordzhonikidze, USSR: Ir, 1969), 87. 57. Edward J. Drea, “Missing Intentions: Japanese Intelligence and Soviet Invasion of Manchuria, 1945,” Military Affairs 48, no. 2 (April 1984): 69. 58. Sejima, Ikusanga, 281. 59. Kubota Tomi, “Haisen tōji no manshū no omoide,” in Manmō kaitaku no shuki: Nagano ken no kiroku, ed. Nozoe Kenji (Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1979), 390. 60. Kanzaki Tatsuo, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” Saiki shidan, no. 181 (June 1999): 24. Online at http://bud.beppu-u.ac.jp/modules/xoonips/detail .php?id=ss18106. 61. Quoted in Narita Ry ū ichi, “Sensō keiken” no sengoshi: Katarareta taiken / shōgen / kioku (Iwanami shoten, 2010), 88.
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62. Furumi Tadayuki, “Manshū teikoku no saigo o mite,” 142. 63. Furumi Ken’ichi, interview by author. 64. Handō Kazutoshi, “Shuki kenshō intāby ū: Shiberia yokury ū no ‘mitsuyaku’ setsu o tadasu,” Bungei shunjū, no. 9 (1990): 109. 65. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 242. 66. Sejima, Ikusanga, 281. 67. For a memoir by Aleksandr Zhelvakov, the Soviet officer who on 20 August 1945 convoyed Manchukuo’s former emperor, Pu Yi, to Chita, a town in southern Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, for trial, see Ia dralsia s samuraiami, ed. Aleksandr I. Koshelev (Moscow: Eksmo, 2005), 334–338. 68. Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy. 69. Koshelev, Ia dralsia s samuraiami. 70. For the concept of “hereditary enemies,” see Michael E. Nolan, Inverted Mirror: Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany 1898–1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). 71. Paul E. Dunscomb, Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918–1922 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). 72. See the soldiers’ recollections in Ia dralsia s samuraiami. 73. There are a number of works that investigate the hundreds of thousands of cases of rape of German, Romanian, Hungarian, and other women by members of the Soviet Red Army in the first half of 1945. See, for example, Atina Grossman, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German W omen by Occupation Soldiers,” October 72 (Spring 1995): 42–63. 74. Aleksandr Vasilevskii, Delo vsei zhizni, vols. 1 and 2 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989). 75. Iosif Stalin, “Obrashchenie tov. I.V. Stalina k narodu 2 sentiabria 1945 goda,” Pravda, 3 September 1945. 76. Steven M. Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 77. Vladimir Maiakovskii, known as the poet of the revolution and famous for propagating Bolshevik policies through his pithy verses, acknowledged the role of the Russo-Japanese War in ending tsarist Russia in his long eulogy, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: “Tall tales about the tsar’s royal mercy end / with Mukden’s bloodbath and Tsushima’s debacle” (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A Poem [Moscow: Raduga 1984], 63). It was thus ironic that Stalin invoked the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War—the defeat that had eventually helped the Bolsheviks’ ascend to power in Russia—in his victory speech. 78. “Fight the samurai” was a common phrase used in Soviet press and memoirs. For example, the title of a memoir collection cited h ere is directly translated as “I have fought the samurai.” Koshelev, Ia dralsia s samuraiami; at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin promised President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the Soviet Union would join the war in the Far East a fter Nazi Germany’s capitulation. See Hasegawa,
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Racing the Enemy; S.M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010). 79. Koshelev, Ia dralsia s samuraiami. For self-congratulatory prose, see, for example, Vasilevskii, Delo vsei zhizni. 80. See Oleg Smirnov’s recollection in Ia dralsia s samuraiami, 332. 81. Sawachi Hisae and Sataka Makoto, “Sedai o koete kataritsugitai sensō bungaku,” Sekai, no. 6 (2007): 207. 82. Furumi Tadayuki, “Manshū teikoku no saigo o mite,” 144. 83. Tamanoi, Memory Maps, 72. 84. Chiharu Kōno, “Five Victims,” in Women against War, 26–31. The other accounts in this collection, which focuses primarily on the suffering of women and c hildren in Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and other former Japanese territories in the wake of Japan’s defeat, contain many examples of victimization at the hands of Soviet soldiers. 85. Anonymous, “Peace after Wandering,” in Women against War, 64. 86. Handō, “Shuki kenshō intāby ū,” 104–117. 87. Grossman, “A Question of Silence,” 60. 88. Ibid., 62. 89. Women’s Division of Sōka Gakkai, Women against the War. 90. Yukiko Koga, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption a fter Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 87. 91. Lee Pennington, Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 197. 92. Sejima, Ikusanga, 289. 93. Vasilevskii, Delo vsei zhizni, 2:268. 94. Handō, “Shuki kenshō intāby ū,” 113–114. Ironically, Konoe’s son, Fumitaka, ended up in a Soviet camp, where he died in ambiguous circumstances in 1956—shortly before the last internees were repatriated. 95. Sejima, Ikusanga, 292–296; Handō, “Shuki kenshō intāby ū.” 96. See Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 1; Dower, Embracing Defeat; Philip A. Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories: The “Memory Rifts” in Historical Consciousness of World War II (London: Routledge, 2007). 97. Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 5. 98. Tamanoi, Memory Maps. 99. Besides nationwide organizations of repatriates from China, such as the Association of Returnees from China (Chūgoku Kikansha Renrakukai, there are numerous smaller groups connected to the memory and legacy of Manchukuo. To give a few examples, they include the Changchun Association of Japan (Nippon Chōshun kai), Manchurian Electrical Association (Manshū Dengyōkai), and informal research and study groups (kenkyū kai) such as the Manchurian Memory Workshop (Manshū no Kioku Kenky ūkai).
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100. Katakura Tadashi and Furumi Tadayuki, Zasetsu shita risōkoku: Manshū koku kō bō no shinsō (Gendai bukku sha, 1967), 9. 101. Furumi Tadayuki, Wasureenu manshū koku (Keizai ōraisha, 1978). 102. Furumi Tadayuki, “Manshū teikoku no saigo o mite.” 103. See, for example, Okita Kazuo, Akashia no natsukashii dairen (Bungeisha, 2003); Hamano Kenzaburō, Aa Manshū (Akimoto shobō, 1971). 104. Furumi Tadayuki and Jono Hiroshi, Gokuchū no ningengaku (Chichi shuppansha, 2004). 3. BEDBUG COUNTRY CHRONICLES
Epigraph: Takasugi Ichirō, Kyokkō no kageni: Shiberia furyoki, 12th ed. (Iwanami shoten, 2011), 147. 1. Takahashi Daizō, “ ‘Kaisetsu’: Hangun / minshuka undō no keika,” in Horyo taikenki, ed. Takahashi Daizō (Soren ni okeru nihonjin horyo no seikatsu taiken o kiroku suru kai, 1984–1998), 8:3. 2. Futaba Kaname, Shiberia horyo no shuki (Daigensha, 1947); Hashimoto Takuzō and Kimura Takao, Byakuya ni inoru: Soren chiku yokuryū hōkoku (Chūōsha, 1948). 3. On the role of material prosperity in the forgetting of the war, see, for example, Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), “Introduction”; Sebastian Conrad, “The Dialectics of Remembrance: Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 1 (2014): 4–33. 4. For example, Furumi Tadayuki, Wasureenu manshū koku (Keizai ōraisha, 1978). 5. Narita Ry ū ichi, “Sensō keiken” no sengoshi: Katarareta taiken / shōgen / kioku (Iwanami shoten, 2010). 6. Takahashi Daizō, ed., Horyo taikenki; Heiwa kinen jigyō tokubetsu kikin, Heiwa no ishizue: shiberia kyō sei yokuryū sha ga kataritsugu rōku, 19 volumes (Heiwa kinen jigyō tokubetsu kikin, 1991–2012). 7. For a comparative study of how the communist powers, even when they w ere closely allied, demonstrated fundamentally different attitudes t oward the Japanese in their custody, see Amy King and Sherzod Muminov, “ ‘Japan Still Has Cadres Remaining’: Soviet and Chinese Policies t oward the Japanese Trapped in the USSR and the PRC after World War II, 1945–1963,” Journal of Cold War Studies, forthcoming. 8. There are few examples of returnees who managed to bring back from Siberia records of any kind. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko has written about Nakamura Shigeru, who transported his notes and poems home by wrapping them around his body (Shiberia no sei to shi: Rekishi no naka no yokuryū sha [Iwanami Shoten, 1993], 7–35), and Andrew E. Barshay has written about Niki
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Yoshio, who managed to smuggle his log out of Siberia (The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945– 1956 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013], 40–41). 9. Philip A. Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories: The “Memory Rifts” in Historical Consciousness of World War II (London: Routledge, 2007), 34. 10. Kondō Takeo, Shiberia yokuryū ki (Hakuōsha, 1974), 2. 11. Itō Masao, Mahoruka: Shiberia yokuryū ki (Bungeisha, 2002), 263. 12. Kenneth S. Bordens and Irwin A. Horow itz, Social Psychology, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 279. 13. “Field Serv ice Code,” trans. Tokyo Gazette (Tokyo Gazette Publishing House, 1941), 13. https://nla.gov.au /nla.obj-372598481/v iew. 14. Lee Pennington, Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 168. 15. Owada Mitsu, Manshū shiberia 2,000 nichi: Ahiberia yokuryū ki (Shinjinbutsu ōraisha, 1985), 64. 16. Quoted in “Pis’mo ministra vnutrennikh del SSSR . . . ,” Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 9401, op. 2, d. 135, l. 241, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 70–71. 17. Ōki Tatsuji, Ikite kaetta dame na heitai: Hito chū nen hojū hei no shō shū kara shiberia hikiage made (Roppo shuppan, 1977), 86. 18. Ibid., 83–84. 19. Adelbert Holl, After Stalingrad: Seven Years as a Soviet Prisoner of War, trans. Tony Le Tissier (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2016), 76. 20. Kondō, Shiberia yokuryū ki, 16–19. 21. Furumi Tadayuki, “Manshū teikoku no saigo o mite,” in “Bungei shunjū” ni miru shō washi, ed. Handō Kazutoshi (Bunshun Bunko, 1995), 2:144. 22. Ibid., 2:143–144. 23. Iaponskie voennoplennye, 12 (emphasis added). 24. Uchimura Gōsuke, Iki isogu: Sutārin goku no nihonjin, rev. ed. (Chūkō bunko, 1985), 25. 25. Futaba, Shiberia horyo no shuki, 23–24. 26. Postanovlenie GKO-9940ss ot 30 avgusta 1945 g., “O sozdanii komissii po vyvozu trofeinogo oborudovaniia iz Man’chzhurii,” RGASPI, f. 644, op. 1, edinitsa khraneniia (ed. khr.) 459. 27. Dismantling and appropriating industrial equipment and resources was a common Soviet practice in territories occupied by the Red Army. There was little remorse on the Soviet side, as this appropriation was seen as a form of reparations necessary in rebuilding the Soviet industry and economy a fter wartime destruction. Of the Soviet actions in occupied Germany, Filip Slaveski, for example, has written about “fever-pitched dismantling activity” (The Soviet Occupation of Germany: Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945–1947 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 135). 28. Holl, After Stalingrad, 83.
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29. Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-L ease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 30. Ōki, Ikite kaetta dame na heitai, 88. 31. Satō Kashio, interview by author, Mount Takao, Tokyo, 1 March 2017. 32. Hikiage Taikenshū Henshū Iinkai, ed., Ikite sokoku e, vol. 3: Shiberia no akumu (Kokushokankōkai, 1981). 33. Iitsuka Toshio, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 9: 290. 34. Niibori Jūzō, “Ikinokotta heitai,” in Horyo taikenki, 2:163–166. 35. Quoted in Yokoyama Shūdō, preface to Yoshida Kōhei, Shiberia horyo no shisō sen: Nihonjin sokoku no higeki (Roshia to no y ūkō shinzen o susumeru kai, 2008), 4. 36. Takura Hachirō, Chita: Ahiberia yokuryū 640 nichi (Teishin kōronsha, 1949), 3–4. 37. Ibid., 4. 38. “Rasporiazhenie Ministra vnutrennikh del SSSR ministram vnutrennikh del respublik . . . , ” GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 205, t. 1, ch. 2, l. 67, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 431. 39. Shimada Shirō, “Soren yokury ūki 1,” in Horyo taikenki 3:86. 40. Kurihara Yasuyo, Shiberia horyo monogatari (Gyōmeisha, 1949), 17. 41. Ameno Tadashi, “Ikoku no oka o koete,” in Horyo taikenki, 4:331. 42. Tsuchibashi Haruyoshi, “Dōbutsu atsukai no ichinen y ūyo,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia 1:16. 43. Inomata Kunio, “Sennō kyōiku mo noruma,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:24. 44. Seno Osamu, Shiberia yokuryū ki (Nagoya: Kōy ūsha, 1947), 120. 45. Hashimoto and Kimura, Byakuya ni inoru, 70. 46. Abe Yutaka and Shimura Toshio, dirs., Watashi wa shiberia no horyo datta (Tōhō, 1952). 47. Nakaya Masataka, “Rāda nite,” in Horyo taikenki, 3:95. 48. Iitsuka, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” 292–293. 49. Katō Ky ūzō, Watashi no shiberia taiken kara—Das Leben ist gut (Seki zaidan, 2015), 29. 50. Iitsuka, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” 294. 51. Ibid., 295. 52. Takura, Chita, 6. 53. Oguma Eiji, Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925– 2015, trans. David Noble (International House of Japan, 2018), 95. 54. Kitagawa Nagayoshi, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia 3:334. 55. Komatsuzaki Risaku, “Kōshurei kara tashikento e,” in Ikite sokoku e, vol. 4: Bōkyō no sakebi, ed. Hikiage Taikenshū Henshū Iinkai (Kokushokankōkai, 1981), 531–532.
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56. Takahashi Takao, “Bafun ga jagaimo ni mieta,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:279–281. 57. Murata Jinsaku, “Bafun no naka no mugi,” in Shiberia yokuryū taikenki: Watashitachi ni totte shū sen wa nakatta, ed. Shiberia Yokury ū no Taiken o Kataritsugō Kai (Kobe: Kobe shimbun shuppan sentā, 1981), 144. 58. Sekine Tadayoshi, interview by author, Tokyo, 18 December 2018. 59. Tsuchibashi, “Dōbutsu atsukai,” 17. 60. Uchimura, Iki isogu, 33. 61. Ibid., 32–33. 62. Ibid., 34. 63. Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (London: Routledge, 2002), 159. 64. Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation, ed., The Japanese Internees and Forced Labor in the USSR after the Second World War (Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation, 2008), 679. 65. One of the grandiose projects of the Stalinist era, the BAM—hailed by the Soviet propaganda machine as a feat of the Komsomol and pioneers transported from western regions of the USSR—was completed with the help of the Japanese internees. See, for example, S. V. Kalugina, “Faktory ideologicheskoi ‘obrabotki’ iaponskikh voennoplennykh i internirovannykh v period stroitel’stva BAMa 1945–1956 gg,” Vestnik Tikhookeanskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 13, no. 2 (2009), 177–182. 66. Takahashi Yoshirō, “Shiberia yokury ū to waga jinsei,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 5:173–174. 67. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 202. 68. Aikawa Haruki, “Sobieto hy ūmanizumu o miru,” Chōryū 5, no. 2 (1950): 36. 69. Nakaya, “Rāda nite,” in Horyo taikenki 3:97–98. 70. Soren Kikansha Seikatsu Yōgo Dōmei (hereafter Sokidō), Shinjitsu o uttaeru (Hachigatsu shobō, 1949), 17. 71. Minamiguchi Saichi, “Ikijigoku shiberia yokury ū,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:109. 72. Nasu Tadao, “Ōshū roshia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:172. 73. Aaron William Moore, “The Problem of Changing Language Communities: Veterans and Memory Writing in China, Taiwan, and Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 399–429. 74. Iitsuka, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” 294. 75. Sawatari Hideo, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 6:320. 76. Yamada Ichirō, “Kyosei sareta uma no yōni,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:34. 77. Ibid., 1:33–34.
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Notes to Pages 101–104
78. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1. 79. Quoted in Takasugi, Kyokkō no kageni, 186. 80. Besides the documents I cite in Chapter 4, I base my conclusion on the contents of two major collections of documents on POWs in the USSR: Voennoplennye v SSSR, chapters 3 and 4, and Iaponskie voennoplennye, part 1, chapters 1 and 2. 81. Saitō Akira, “Kami no nai shiberia yokury ū no kunan,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 5:399. 82. N. A. Frolov, “Voennaia meditsina v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 gg. (Tretii period). Soobschenie 3,” Voennaia meditsina, no. 3 (2008): 119– 123. In the USSR, women took the place of men in many other professions, including physically demanding industrial jobs. A delegation of foreign businessmen in 1952 was surprised to find Soviet w omen shoveling snow, loading railway cars, and performing other tasks usually associated with men. British delegates were especially curious about the high proportion of women among doctors. See Liubov’ Lazareva and Andrei Sorokin, “Poslevoennye sanktsii protiv SSSR: Vzgliad s zapada,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 3 August 2015, http://w ww .rg.r u/2015/08/03/rodina-sankcii.html. 83. Saitō Akira, “Kami no nai shiberia yokury ū no kunan,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 5:400. 84. Kitagawa, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” 333. 85. Holl, After Stalingrad, 98. 86. Tōjō Heihachirō, “Ikiuzume no kei,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 2:163. 87. Amaya Konokichi, “Watashi no seishun: Shiberia ga nikui,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 5:148. 88. Whether this is a deliberate exaggeration it is hard to tell. In an NKVD directive dated 24 November 1945, Sergei Kruglov—then deputy minister (and later minister) of the interior—demanded that each camp “establish temperature limits under which outside works must be canceled” (“Direktiva NKVD SSSR No. 221 ob uluchshenii . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 744, l. 442–444), in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 232–233, document 3.43. However, POWs w ere commonly forced to work in the cold. 89. Takeyasu Kumaichi, “Furyoki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 2:90–91. 90. Heinz G. Konsalik, The Naked Earth, trans. H. Whitman (London: Anthony Gibbs and Phillips, 1961), 49. 91. Matsumoto Yasujirō, “Ue to samusa no kukyō kara manogare man 30 nen o kinen shite,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia 1:114–136. 92. Lori Watt explores how “repatriates” became a marginalized category in postwar Japan, looked on with suspicion by the population of the home islands (When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009]). 93. See, for example, Morisaki Tadataka, “Ima ni tsuzuku tashikento e no omoi: Wasurarenu josei Nājia-san,” in Tsuioku— Naboi gekijō kensetsu no kiroku:
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Shirukurō do ni umareta nihonjin densetsu, ed. Japan-Uzbekistan Association (Nihon Uzubekisutan Kyōkai, 2004), 32–34. And Takasugi wrote about his very special, albeit not openly romantic, relationship with Marusia, a young Russian w oman who became his close friend when he was an employee in the camp management office (Kyokkō no kageni, 55–180). 94. Nakamaki Yasuhiro, Toraware no seishun: mō hitotsu no shiberia yokuryū ki (Chōbunsha, 1991), 31 95. Komatsuzaki, “Kōshurei kara tashikento e,” 532. This memoir contradicts the widespread belief in Japan that the internees were not paid for their work and thus were slaves. 96. Ōtsuka Takeshi, Kikuchi Toshio, and Katō Kintarō, “Shiberia yokury ūsha zadankai: Onshū no arara ni musubareta kizuna,” Bungei shunjū, no. 9 (2014): 329–330. 97. Yamada Seizaburō, Shakaishugi kara kyō sanshugi e: Sobieto shimin seikatsu no genjitsu (Aoki shoten, 1952), 236. 98. Quoted in Yawatagaki Masao, “Watashi no seishun ki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia 2:28. 99. Hatakeda Kan, “Jijitsu wa shōsetsu yori mo ki nari,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia 8:46. 100. Takasugi, Kyokkō no kageni, 305–324. 101. Ibid., 130–131 and 184–187. 102. Watanabe Kazuo, foreword to Takasugi, Kyokkō no kageni, 4. 103. Takasugi, Kyokkō no kageni, 175. 104. Sawachi Hisae and Sataka Makoto, “Sedai o koete kataritsugitai sensō bungaku,” Sekai, no. 6 (2007): 213. 105. Takasugi, Kyokkō no kageni, 228–229. 106. Matthias Reiss, “Solidarity among ‘Fellow Sufferers’: African Americans and German Prisoners of War in the United States during World War II,” Journal of African American History 98, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 549. 107. Ōki, Ikite kaetta dame na heitai, 95. 108. Ibid. 109. Sawada Seikichi, “Shirarezaru shiberia o kataru,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia 11:14. 110. Jacques Rossi, Fragments of Lives: Chronicles of the Gulag, trans. Marie- Cécile Antonelli-Street (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2018), 99. 4. COLD, HUNGER, AND HARD LABOR
Epigraph: Jacques Rossi, Fragments of Lives: Chronicles of the Gulag (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2018), 125–126. 1. Gerald Figal, “How to Jibunshi: Making and Marketing Self-Histories of Shōwa among the Masses in Postwar Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (1996): 921.
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2. Saitō Akira, “Kami no nai shiberia yokury ū no kunan,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 5:398–401. 3. The Soviets’ treatment of German POWs has been analyzed in several works. See Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, “State Violence—Violent Societies,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 133–179; Andreas Hilger, “Re-Educating the German Prisoners of War: Aims, Methods, Results and Memory in East and West Germany,” in Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace: Captivity, Homecoming, and Memory in World War II, ed. Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 61–76. 4. See Stefan Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI: Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1956 (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995). I refer here to the Russian translation, Stefan Karner, Arxipelag GUPVI: Plen i internirovanie v Sovetskom Soiuze, 1941–1956, trans. O. Aspisova (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2002). 5. Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1995), 518. 6. Maksim Zagorul’ko, the editor of the first major collection of archival documents on POWs in the Soviet Union, writes in the foreword of that collection that between June 1941 and May 1945 the Red Army captured 4.38 million enemy combatants. With the addition of over 600,000 Japanese, the total number of POWs captured by the Soviets during WWII exceeded 5.00 million by the end of 1945. However, around 750,000 of these were released without entering Soviet captivity. See Maksim Zagorul’ko, “K chitateliam,” in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 12. See also Aleksandr Kuzminykh, Voennyi plen i internirovanie v SSSR (1939–1956 gody) (Vologda, Russia: Drevnosti severa, 2016), 3. 7. “Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” 27 July 1929, article 75, International Committee of the Red Cross, https://ihl-databases.icrc .org/ihl/ INTRO/305. 8. “Politicheskie repressii v SSSR,” Sakharov Center, https://w ww.sakharov -center.ru/node/11677, accessed 28 May 2021. 9. Rossi, Fragments of Lives, 48. 10. For example, in 1951, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) published Slave L abor in the Soviet World (New York: AFL, 1951). 11. Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The Economy of the Gulag,” in Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy: Evidence from the State and Party Archives, ed. Paul R. Gregory (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001), 113. 12. See, for example, Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The Economy of the OGPU, NKVD, and MVD of the USSR, 1930–1953: The Scale, Structure, and Trends of Development,” in The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, ed. Paul R. Gregory and V. V. Lazarev (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003), 45.
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13. “Provocations” was a frequent accusation the Soviets leveled at the Japanese in the 1930s. For example, in a January 1936 meeting with the Japanese ambassador Ōta Tamekichi, the Soviet deputy foreign minister Boris Stomoniakov used the term several times. “Zapis’ besedy Zamestitelia Narodnogo Komissara . . . , ” 30 January 1936, in Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, vol. 19: 1 January–31 December 1936, ed. G.K. Deev et al. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1974), 50–57 14. I. Shcherbakova, foreword to Ivan Chistyakov, Sibirskoi dal’nei storonoi (Moscow: AST, 2014), 6. 15. Khlevnyuk, “The Economy of the OGPU,” 51–52. 16. The famous phrase about catching up and overtaking the advanced nations is from Vladimir I. Lenin, “Groziashchaia katastrofa i kak s nei borot’sia,” in V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 34, 5th ed. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), 198; Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: A Pelican Introduction (London: Penguin, 2014);. 17. Khlevnyuk, “The Economy of the OGPU,” 53. 18. Walter Laqueur, Europe since Hitler (London: Penguin, 1972). 19. Irina Bystrova, Kholodnaia voina 1945–1960 gg.: Tokio-Moskva-Vashington (Moscow: Ekonomicheskaia literatura, 2009), 27. 20. For the famine and other outcomes of forced collectivization and dekulakization, see, for example, Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitzkii, and Denis Kozlov, eds., The War against the Peasantry, 1927–1930, trans. Steven Shabad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011). 21. For a history of “special settlements,” see Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 22. Varlam Shalamov, Vishera: Antiroman, in Varlam Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1998), 4:256. 23. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “Soviet Prisoners and Deportees in Central Siberia,” 8 December 1953, CIA-RDP80-00810A002701110001-8, https://w ww.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80-0 0810a002701110001-8 24. “Obrashchenie L.P. Berii v adres zamestitelia Predsedatelia SNK SSSR V. M. Molotova . . . ,” GARF f. 9401, op. 2, d. 70, l. 14, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 187, document 3.22. 25. Chistyakov, Sibirskoi dal’nei storonoi, 238. 26. Shcherbakova, foreword, 41. 27. Uchimura Gōsuke, Iki isogu: Sutārin goku no nihonjin, rev. ed. (Chūkō bunko, 1985), 17. 28. Itō Masao, Mahoruka: Shiberia yokuryū ki (Bungeisha, 2002), 12. 29. Adelbert Holl, After Stalingrad: Seven Years as a Soviet Prisoner of War, trans. Tony Le Tissier (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2016), 78.
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30. Ibid., 64–65. 31. “Prikaz NKVD SSSR No. 00398 o vyvoze voennoplennykh . . . ,” 1 March 1943, GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 637, l. 148–159, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 100–105, document 2.12. 32. S. G. Sidorov, “Vvedenie,” in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 30. 33. Evgenii Pisarev, Rada, Pot’ma, t’ma Gulaga . . . (Tambov, Russia: Proletarskii svetoch, 1999). 34. Sidorov, “Vvedenie,” 31. 35. Voennoplennye v SSSR, 11. 36. “Prikaz ob uporiadochenii raboty po evakuatsii voennoplennykh s fronta,” 2 January 1943, RGVA, f. 4, op. 11, d. 74, l. 1–6, in Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia otechestvennaia, Vol. 13 (2–3) (Moscow: Terra, 1997), 10–12. 37. Oleg Smyslov, Plen: Zhizn’ i smert’ v nemetskikh lageriakh (Moscow: Veche, 2014); Snyder, Bloodlands. 38. Quoted in Jean-Noël Grandhomme, “Des fantômes et des arbres: Le calvaire des ‘Malgré-nous’ alsaciens et mosellans dans la forêt de Tambov,” in La forê t dans tous ses é tats: De la préhistoire à nos jours, ed. Jean-Pierre Chabin (Besançon, France: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2005), 141. 39. Shimada, “Soren yokury ūki 1,” in Horyo taikenki 3:89. 40. Nakaya, “Rāda nite,” in Horyo taikenki 3. 41. “Instruktsiia o sanitarnom obespechenii . . . ,” 6 October 1943, GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 678, l. 248–261, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 449–452, document 5.5. 42. Immediately following Kruglov’s regulations w ere the 12 October 1943 joint NKVD-Narkomzdrav directive on improving medical care, “Direktiva NKVD SSSR . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 686, l. 159–159 ob., and the 22 October provision on hospitals, “Polozhenie o gospitaliakh . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 205, t. 14, l. 175–175 ob, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 452–454, documents 5.6 and 5.7, respectively. 43. S. P. MacKenzie, “The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II,” Journal of Modern History 66 (September 1994): 497 and 503. 44. Snyder, Bloodlands, 183. Ian Buruma puts the number of Soviet POWs who were “deliberately starved to death” at 3.3 million (Year Zero: A History of 1945 [London: Atlantic Books, 2014], 79). The Russian historian Elena Bondarenko agrees with Buruma’s estimate (“Inostrannye voennoplennye na Dal’nem Vostoke Rossii, 1914–1956gg,” PhD diss., Far East State University, 2004, 3). 45. In July 1942 the prominent Soviet poet Konstantin Simonov wrote a propaganda poem titled “Kill Him!,” which inspired the journalist Ilia Erenburg to pen an article titled “Kill!” Both were published in Krasnaia zvezda (The red star), the Red Army newspaper, one week apart. Konstantin Simonov, “Ubei ego!” Krasnaia zvezda, 18 July 1942; Ilia Erenburg, “Ubei!” Krasnaia zvezda, 24 July 1942.
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46. Viktor M. Kirillov, “Fizicheskoie sostoianie kontingentov zakliuchennykh I trudmobilizovannykh nemtsev ITL Bakalstroi-Cheliabmetallurgstroi, pokazateli ikh trudoispolzovaniia (1942–1946),” in Istoriia stalinizma: Prinuditel’nyi trud v SSSR. Ekonomika, politika, pamiat’, ed. L. I. Borodkin, S. A. Krasil’nikov, and O. V. Khlevnyuk (Moscow: Rosspen, 2013), 109. 47. Snyder, Bloodlands. 48. Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Boland (New York: Harcourt, 1982), 71, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (London: Phoenix Books, 2000), 159. 49. Viktor Berdinskikh, “Problemy ekonomiki Viatlaga,” in Prinuditel’nyi trud v SSSR, ed. Borodkin et al., 183. 50. Yamakawa Hayami, Rāgeru no gun’i: Shiberia horyoki (Kitakaze shobō, 1984), 78. 51. Ibid., 77. 52. Hata Ikuhiko wrote, “It is highly likely that the decision to transport Japanese POWs to Siberia had been an integral part of the holistic plan of the Soviet entry into the war against Japan [from the beginning]” (Nihonjin horyo: Hakusonkō kara shiberia yokuryū made [Chūkō bunko, 2014], 2:173–174). 53. Central Intelligence Group, “Japanese PW in Siberia,” 10 December 1946, CIA-RDP82-00457R000100730008-6, CIA Library, https://w ww.cia.gov /readingroom/document/cia-rdp82-0 0457r000100730008-6. 54. Rossi, Fragments of Lives, 126. 55. Jacques Rossi, Spravochnik po GULagu (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1987), 6. 56. Rossi, Fragments of Lives, 126. 57. Karlo Štajner, Seven Thousand Days in Siberia (Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing, 1988), 284. 58. Holl, After Stalingrad, 139. 59. Israel Emiot, The Birobidzhan Affair: A Yiddish Writer in Siberia (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 39, 40. 60. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (London: Penguin Classics, 1994). 61. Holl, After Stalingrad, 133. 62. Abe Gunji, “Daily Life for Japanese Forcibly Interned in Camps,” in The Japanese Internees and Forced L abor in the USSR a fter the Second World War, ed. Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation (Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation, 2008), 346. 63. Aaron William Moore, Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 10. 64. Ibid., 2. 65. See, for example, Mark G. E. Kelly, “Foucault, Subjectivity, and Technologies of the Self,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (London: Blackwell, 2013), 510–525.
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66. Inomata Kunio, “Sennō kyōiku mo noruma,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:24. 67. V. F. Zima, “Golod v Rossii 1946–1947 gg.,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1, 1993. For a good review of the literature on the famine, see R. R. Khisamutdinova, “Golod 1946–1947 godov v noveishykh issledovaniiakh istorikov (konets 1980kh—2000-e gody),” Otechestvennaia istoriia: Izvestiia Samarskogo nauchnogo tsentra Rossiiskoi akademii nauk 11, no. 6 (2009): 331–336. 68. Quoted in Takasugi Ichirō, Kyokkō no kageni: Shiberia furyoki, 12th ed. (Iwanami shoten, 2011), 15–16. 69. “Prikaz NKVD SSSR i nachal’nika tyla . . . ,” 28 September 1945, GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 729. l. 473–483, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 390–393, document 4.24. 70. Iitsuka Toshio, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 9:293. 71. “Akt komissii po obsledovaniiu sostoianiia lagerei iaponskikh voennoplennykh i gotovnosti sformirovannykh iz nikh batalionov k otpravke v SSSR . . . ,” f. 234, op. 3233, d. 23, l. 207–211, TsAMO RF, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, document 17, 37–38. 72. “Direktiva NKVD SSSR No. 184 . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 744, l. 299– 300, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 648–649, document 6.51. 73. “Dokladnaia zapiska nachal’nika UNKVD Khabarovskogo kraia Narodnomu Komissaru vnutrennikh del SSSR o sostoianii lagerei NKVD dlia voennoplennykh iapontsev na 1 ianvaria 1946 g.,” RGVA, f. 1 / p., op. 34a, d. 4, l. 1–44, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 49. 74. Iaponskie voennoplennye, 14. 75. “Spravka GUPVI MVD SSSR po kolichestvennomu i kachestvennomu . . . ,” Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumental’nykh kollektsii (TsKhIDK), d. 1 / p, op. 01e, d. 40, l. 53–61, in V. A. Zolotarev, ed., Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia, vol. 18 (7–2): Sovetsko-iaponskaia voina 1945 goda: Istoriia voenno- politicheskogo protivoborstva dvukh derzhav v 30–40-e gody. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Terra, 2000), 201, 203. 76. “Doklad nachal’nika otdela po delam repatriatsii . . . , ” TsAMORF, f. 142, op. 419618, d. 6, ll. 21–22, in Zolotarev, ed., Russkii arkhiv, vol. 18 (7–2): Sovetsko-iaponskaia voina 1945 goda, document 570, 208. 77. “Prikaz ministra vnutrennikh del SSSR No. 099 . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 205, t. 1, ch. 2, l. 173–174, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 71–72. 78. “Rasporiazhenie nachal’nika GUVS nachal’nikam OUVS MVD ob ob’iazatel’nom otpuske muki na prigotovleniie pityevykh drozhzhei voennoplennym,” RGVA, f. 1 / p, op. 13z, d. 18, l. 37, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 91. 79. Iaponskie voennoplennye, 14–15. 80. “Telegrafnoie rasporiazhenie . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 842, l. 289–290, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 509, document 5.62.
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81. See, for example, “Kyōsantō kyōiku no eikyō rekizen,” Asahi shimbun, 28 June 1949. 82. GHQ, “Special Report—Japanese Prisoners of War: Life and Death in Soviet P.W. Camps,” section 6, 3. Compiled by Military Intelligence Section, GHQ / SCAP Records, Box No. 2153, File No. 6, National Diet Library, Tokyo. 83. Uchiyama Takashi, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ū yonenkan,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 2:184–185. 84. Takeyama Takejirō, “Shiberia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 2:183. 85. Uchiyama, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ū yonenkan,” 2:185. 86. Takeyama, “Shiberia yokury ūki,” 2:183. 87. Tsuchibashi Haruyoshi, “Dōbutsu atsukai,” in Heiwa no ishizue, 1:16. 88. Watanabe Nobuo, “Yami no hi,” in Ikite sokoku e, vol. 3: Shiberia no akumu, ed. Hikiage Taikenshū Henshū Iinkai (Kokushokankōkai, 1981), 196. 89. Rossi, Fragments of Lives, 146. 90. Satō Kesao acknowledged that temperatures in northern Manchuria could fall to as low as -42˚C [Shiberia no akumu, iii). 91. “Donesenie Narkoma vnutrennikh del v SNK SSSR . . . ,” February 1946, TsKhIDK, f.1 / p, op.01e, d.40, 37–41, in Zolotarev, ed., Russkii arkhiv, vol. 18 (7–2), 195 (emphasis added). 92. Ibid. 93. “Svodnye dannye GUPVI MVD SSSR o iaponskikh voennoplennykh . . . ,” 26 April 1946, RGVA, f. 1p., op. 11z, d. 13, l. 1, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 77. 94. Tsuchibashi, “Dōbutsu atsukai,” 16. 95. “Iz doklada v instantsiiu nachal’nika UMVD po Khabarovskomu kraiu o rabote upravleniia po delam voennoplennykh i internirovannykh za period s sentiabria 1945 g. po aprel’ 1950 g.,” RGVA f. 1 / p, op. 35a, d. 51, l. 1–26, 34–38, 40–42, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 114–143. 96. Ibid., 116. 97. “Polozhenie NKVD SSSR o trudovom ispol’zovanii voennoplennykh,” 29 September 1945, GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 737, l. 180–214, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 628–641, document 6.45. 98. “Direktiva NKVD SSSR No. 175 . . . ,” 28 September 1945, GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 744, l. 278–280, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 627, document 6.44. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. “Polozhenie NKVD SSSR o trudovom ispol’zovanii voennoplennykh,” 29 September 1945, GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, op. 1, d. 737, l. 180–214, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 628–641, document 6.45. 102. “Telegramma zamestitelei Narodnogo komissara vnutrennikh del . . . ,” 23 October 1945, GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 205, t. 13, l. 400.
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103. Quoted in Stephen White, Understanding Russian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 106. 104. Natalia Surzhikova, “Ekonomika sovetskogo plena: Administrirovanie, proizvodstvo, potreblenie,” in Istoriia stalinizma: Prinuditel’nyi trud v SSSR. Ekonomika, politika, pamiat’, ed. L. I. Borodkin, S. A. Krasil’nikov, and O. V. Khlevniuk (Moscow: Rosspen, 2013), 79. 105. “Nachal’nikam glavnykh upravlenii i direktoram predpriiatii,” 26 March 1946, Russian State Archive of Economics (RGAE), f. 7647, op. 4, d. 26, l. 5, emphasis added. 106. Ibid., l. 15. 107. “Kruglov to Chekmenev in response to Letter No. 905s,” 2 November 1947, RGAE, f. 7803, op. 7, d. 167, l. 1. 108. “Skvortsov to Filippov,” 24 September 1947, RGAE, f. 7803, op. 7, d. 167, l. 4. 109. “Skvortsov to Kruglov,” 3 September 1947, RGAE, f. 7803, op. 7, d. 167, l. 9. 110. A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, eds., GULAG: Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, 1917–1960: Dokumenty (Moscow: Demokratiia, 2000); Borodkin et al., eds., Prinuditel’nyi trud v SSSR; Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Penguin, 2004). 111. Aleksandra Vorobiova, interview by author, Rada, Tambov Region, Russia, 1 September 2018. 112. Shimada, “Soren yokury ūki 1,” 87. 5. THE SKILLFUL APPLICATION OF PROPAGANDA PRINCIPLES
Epigraph: GHQ Civil Intelligence Section, “Jap Repatriates from Soviet Territory: Communist Indoctrination,” 2 February 1949, General Headquarters, Far East Command (FECOM) (Papers of General Douglas MacArthur; Record group 6), Call Number: MMA-18, Reel No. 13, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room (Kenseishiryōshitsu), National Diet Library, Tokyo. 1. Uchiyama Takashi, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ū yonenkan,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 2:186. 2. Yoshida Kōhei, for example, lamented the fact that the “Japanese framed each other, hated each other, abused each other. . . .” Shiberia horyo no shisō sen: Nihonjin sokoku no higeki (Roshia to no y ūkō shinzen o susumeru kai, 2008), 106. 3. Takahashi Daizō, “ ‘Kaisetsu’: Hangun / minshuka undō no keika,” in Horyo taikenki, ed. Takahashi Daizō (Soren ni okeru nihonjin horyo no seikatsu taiken o kiroku suru kai, 1984–1998), 8:3. 4. Aikawa Haruki, “Zaiso minshu undō no hito kessan,” Zen’ei 47, no. 3 (1950): 42. 5. Sokidō, Shinjitsu o uttaeru (Hachigatsu shobō, 1949), 19 (emphasis added). 6. “Soobshchenie 7-go Upravleniia GlavPURKKA o rabote sredi iaponskikh voennoplennykh . . . ,” 6 May 1946, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 212.
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7. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 8. 8. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 205. 9. Issa Pliev, Konets Kvantunskoi armii: Zapiski komanduiushchego konno-m ekhanizirovannoi gruppoi sovetsko-m ongol’skikh voisk, 2nd ed. (Ordzhonikidze, USSR: Ir, 1969), 23. 10. Ibid., 20. 11. Ibid., 69. 12. Aleksandr Kuzminykh, Voennyi plen i internirovanie v SSSR (1939–1956 gody) (Vologda, Russia: Drevnosti severa, 2016), 307. 13. S. G. Sidorov, “Vvedenie,” in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 38. 14. “Prikaz NKVD SSSR No. 00805 . . . ,” April–May 1943, GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 2, l. 33, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 175–176, document 3.14. 15. Ibid. 16. Sidorov, “Vvedenie,” 38. 17. Quoted in Kuzminykh, Voennyi plen, 313. 18. Adelbert Holl, After Stalingrad: Seven Years as a Soviet Prisoner of War, trans. Tony Le Tissier (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2016), 69. 19. Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumental’nykh kollektsii (TsKhIDK), f. 1 / p, op. 9a, d. 9, l. 17, quoted in Sidorov, “Vvedenie,” 38. 20. GHQ, “Special Report—Japanese Prisoners of War: Life and Death in Soviet P.W. Camps,” Compiled by Military Intelligence Section, GHQ / SCAP Records, Box No. 2153, File No. 6, National Diet Library, Tokyo; See also “Doklad nachal’nika operativnogo otdela . . . ,” 12 August 1946, RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 70, l. 178–188, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 286–293. 21. “Doklad nachal’nika operativnogo otdela . . . ,” 286. 22. “Doklad Ministra vnutrennikh del SSSR rukovodstvu strany o nastroeniiakh sredi iaponskikh . . . ,” 17 May 1946, GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 136, l. 188–191, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 277. 23. “Dokladnaia zapiska nachal’nika operativno-chekistskogo otdela . . . ,” 4 June 1946, RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 70, l. 22–23, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 278–280. 24. Iaponskie voennoplennye, 274. 25. “Doklad nachal’nika operativnogo otdela,” RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 70, l. 178– 188, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 287. 26. Ibid. 27. “Iz dokladnoi zapiski nachal’nika UMVD Amurskoi oblasti nachal’niku UMVD po Khabarovskomu kraiu o prodelannoi sredi voennoplennykh lageria MVD No. 20 politicheskoi rabote za iyun’ 1946 g.,” RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 70, l. 104–108, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 284. 28. Iz broshiury, “Opyt politicheskoi raboty sredi voennoplennykh . . .”, RGVA, f. 1p, d. 23a, op. 8, l. 107–127, 130–134, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 346.
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Notes to Pages 162–166
29. “Justice Demands International Trial of Japanese War Criminals,” USSR Information Bulletin 10, no. 4 (24 February 1950), 112. The item is a translation of an editorial published in Pravda on 4 February 1950. 30. Itagaki Tadashi, “Watashi wa shiberia ni umarekawatta,” Shinsō shō setsu, no. 18 (April 1950): 30. 31. Yoshida, Shiberia horyo no shisō sen, 89. 32. A. G. Shlikhter, Voprosy revoliutsii v Rossii i nekotorye problemy teorii obshchestvennoi mysli (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 197. 33. “Ukazanie nachal’nika politotdela lagerei voennoplennykh UMVD Khabarovskogo kraia politapparatu lagerei o podgotovke k smotru khudozhestvennoi samodeiatel’nosti v lageriakh voennoplennykh,” RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 72, l. 79, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 312. 34. Quoted in “Rōku to kyōshū o wasure: Shiberia no engei konk ūru,” Tokyo Times, 24 October 1947. 35. The term “amateur art activities” (khudozhestvennaia samodeiatel’nost’) is ubiquitous in archival reports about the cultural and educational work in the camps. For example, “Dokladnaia zapiska zamestitetlia nachal’nika . . . ,” 18 January 1947, TsAMO RF, f. 142, op. 536260, d. 4, l. 52–55, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 293–296; For an example of a Japanese professional singer being used in camp activities, see “Donesenie starshego instruktora po politprosvetrabote . . . , ” 30 August 1947, GARF f. 9526sch, op. 1sch, d. 357, l. 169–183, 194–202, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 315–321. 36. Inomata Kunio, “Sennō kyōiku mo noruma,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:23–26. 37. Steven Maddox, “Gulag Football: Competitive and Recreational Sport in Stalin’s System of Forced L abor,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 19, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 510. I am grateful to Richard Mills for recommending this article. 38. The a lbum with photographs of internees at the Transit Camp No. 380 at Nakhodka contains an image of a sumo match. “Fotoal’bom 380-go tranzitnogo lageria . . . ,” GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 731. 39. “Bodibilding, karate i drugie vidy sporta, za kotorye v SSSR mogli posadit’ v tiur’mu,” Rambler Sport, 1 May 2020, https://sport.rambler.ru/other/4 4117497 -bodibilding-karate-i-drugie-v idy-sporta-za-kotorye-v-sssr-mogli-posadit-v -t yurmu/; for Soviet attitudes toward “bourgeois” sports, see James Riordan, Sport, Politics, and Communism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991), 47. 40. Quoted in “Publikatsii v iaponskoi pechati . . . ,” RGVA, f. 56p, op. 2, d. 53, l. 82–94, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 364–365. 41. Richard Gid Powers, Hidetoshi Kato, and Bruce Stronach, eds., Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), 174. 42. John J. Harney, Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895–1968 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 132.
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43. Tim Wolter, POW Baseball in World War II: The National Pastime Behind Barbed Wire (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002), 2. 44. Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 218. 45. Yamada Rie, “Shiberia no nihon hei horyo shūyōjo ni okeru taiiku / spōtsu katsudō: ‘Nihon shimbun’ o tegakari ni,” Taiikugaku kenkyū 46, no. 6 (2001): 540. 46. Anatolii Koshkin, “Slovo o nastoiashchem cheloveke,” 12 February 2018, Regnum, https://regnum.ru/news/society/2379451.html. 47. “Ob izdanii ‘Iaponskoi gazety’ . . . ,” 1 September 1945, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1053, punkt (pt.) 231. “Half-format of Pravda” was a common reference in the USSR to tabloid newspapers that were roughly half the size of a broadsheet such as Pravda. 48. “Nihon gunbatsu to zaibatsu no konzetsu e: ‘Seisen’ no bimei o hatajirushi ni kokumin o sensō e makikomu / Shire! Gunbatsu to zaibatsu no inbō,” Nihon shimbun, 29 November 1945; “Yoshida handō naikaku seiritsu: Zenkokumin jōsei gekihen ni taiō zoku / Funsō tenkai,” Nihon shimbun, 28 May 1946. The quotes from both articles are from reproductions of the Nihon shimbun in Sugamo purizun / Shiberia nihon shimbun, ed. Chaen Yoshio (Fuji Shuppan, 1986), 144–145 and 164–165. 49. “Soren yokury ū no ‘nihon shimbun’ kōkai,” Tokushima shimbun, August 2, 1985, quoted in Chaen, Sugamo purizun, 142. 50. “Shiberia yokury ūsha no jōhōgen ‘nihon shimbun’ o ny ūshu / honsha hozonban no 4 nen bun satsuei,” Asahi shimbun, 12 March 1989. 51. “Dokladnaia zapiska nachal’nika operativno-chekistskogo otdela . . . ,” 4 June 1946, RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 70, l. 22–23, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 278–279. 52. Saitō Akira, “Kami no nai shiberia yokury ū no kunan,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 5:398. 53. Iitsuka Toshio, “Watashi no shiberia yokury ūki,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 9:291. 54. Iz broshiury, “Opyt politicheskoi raboty sredi voennoplennykh . . .”, RGVA, f. 1p, d. 23a, op. 8, l. 107–127, 130–134, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 344. 55. Quoted in Takahashi, “ ‘Kaisetsu,’ ” 8:10. 56. Shirai Hisaya, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū: Saitō Rokurō no kiseki (Iwanami shoten, 1995), 117–119. 57. Asahara Seiki, “Dema, chūshō ni kōshite,” Chūō kōron 71, no. 11 (October 1956): 162. 58. Quoted in Takahashi, “ ‘Kaisetsu,’ ” 8:7. 59. Elinor Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (Zur ich: Europa-Verlag, 1971), 51–52. 60. GHQ, “Life and Death,” section 6, 1.
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Notes to Pages 173–177
61. Yoshida, Shiberia horyo horyo no shisō sen; Komatsu Shigerō, Shiberia hiroku: Tamashii o utta otokotachi (Tairy ūsha, 1987). 62. The quote is from Kagawa Yutaka untitled recollection in Shiberia yokuryū taikenki: Jitsuroku eikon no tsumeato, ed. Zenyokukyō Chūō Rengōkai (Zenyokukyō, 1982), 184. 63. For an analysis of the origins of this widespread culture of denunciations, see Wendy Z. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 64. The phrase “citizenly initiative” is from Sergei Korolev, Donos v Rossii: Sotsial’no-filosofskie ocherki (Moscow: Progress-Mul’timedia, 1996), 82. 65. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London: Penguin, 2008), 124. 66. Hama Toshikazu, “Uzubeku nite,” Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:236–237. 67. Komori Kiyoo, “Tamashii o yasukuuri shita nihonhei,” in Shiberia yokuryū taikenki: Watashitachi ni totte shū sen wa nakatta, ed. Shiberia Yokury ū no Taiken o Kataritsugō Kai (Kobe: Kobe shimbun shuppan sentā, 1981), 256. 68. “Doklad nachal’nika operativnogo otdela upravleniia lageria MVD № 19 . . . ,” RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 70, l. 178–188, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 286–293. 69. Inada Yoshio, “ ‘Rōdō ga kowakatta kara’ to Asahara kokuhaku su,” in Nihon shimbun: Nihonjin horyoni taisuru soren no seisaku, ed. Imadate Tetsuo (Kagamiura shobō, 1957), 157–158. 70. Komatsu, Shiberia hiroku, 134. 71. “Donesenie starshego instruktora po politprosvetrabote . . . ,” 16 September 1947, GARF, f. 9526SCh, op. 1SCh, d. 357, l. 298–301, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 323. 72. Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 89–90. 73. “Fotoal’bom 380-go tranzitnogo lageria,” GARF, f. 9526, op. 6SCh, d. 731. 74. Tsumura Kenji, Nahotoka no jinmin saiban (Bunka hyōronsha, 1949). 75. National Diet, 17th session of the House of Councillors Special Investigative Committee on the Repatriation of Compatriots from Abroad, 5th Congress, 14 April 1949. National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf /100514356X01719490414, p. 37. 76. “Kanpan no mushi ippiki ga moto de: Shinyōmaru hikiagesha senchō ra yomei o ‘tsurushiage,’ ” Yomiuri shimbun, 27 July 1949. 77. “Kyō kettei: kiso, fukiso / Shinyōmaru jiken / Shiberia hikiage,” Yomiuri shimbun, 2 August 1949; See also Onda Shigetaka, Shiberia yokuryū (Kōdansha, 1986), 277. 78. The phrase “criminal labor” (ugolovnyi trud) was sometimes used in the 1930s documents. See Galina Ivanova, “Stalinskii lagerno-promyshlennyi kompleks: Spetsifika i kliuchevye kharakteristiki,” in Istoriia stalinizma: Prinuditel’nyi
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trud v SSSR. Ekonomika, politika, pamiat’, ed. L. I. Borodkin, S. A. Krasil’nikov, and O. V. Khlevnyuk (Moscow: Rosspen, 2013), 38. 79. Clare Makepeace, Captives of War: British Prisoners of War in the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 156. 80. Hashimoto Takuzō and Kimura Takao, Byakuya ni inoru: Soren chiku yokuryū hōkoku (Chūōsha, 1948), 4. 81. Hama, “Uzubeku nite,” 237. 82. For a discussion of “socialist competition,” see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 204. 83. Ibid., 203. 84. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Vol 2: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (London: Penguin, 2018), 74. 85. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 24. 86. Vladimir Shlapentokh, “The Stakhanovite Movement: Changing Perceptions over Fifty Years,” Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 2 (April 1988): 262. 87. Tanaka Kin’ichi, Yume wa uraru ni kiyu (Fukuoka: Nishi nihon shimbunsha, 1949), 37. 88. Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 134. 89. Iaponskie voennoplennye, 269. 90. Ishiguro Tatsunosuke, Sanga ariki (Bunka kensetsusha, 1949), 2. 91. Sokidō, Shinjitsu o uttaeru. 92. Iaponskie voennoplennye, 269. 93. Sekiguchi Zen’ichirō, “Shiken ni yori sokoku ni kaeru,” in Heiwa no ishizue: Shiberia, 1:296. 94. “Iz dokladnoi zapiski nachal’nika UMVD Amurskoi oblasti . . . ,” RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 70, l. 104–108, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 284. 95. “Delo s zametkami v stengazetu iaponskikh voennoplennykh,” RGVA, f. 52p., op. 4, d. 12, l. 1–2. 96. Quoted in Guzel’ Girfanova, “Pis’ma voennoplennykh,” http://morshansk.r u /content/v iew/379/37/, accessed 3 June 2021. 97. Quoted in ibid. 98. “UMVD po Tambovskoi oblasti, Lager’ No. 64 MVD SSSR,” 1 January–31 December 1946, RGVA, f. 52p, op. 4, d. 12, l. 70–71. 99. Yamada Seizaburō’s letter, RGVA, f. 56p, op. 2, d. 53, l. 9–17. 100. Annika A. Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 45. 101. Yamada Seizaburō’s letter, RGVA, f. 56p, op. 2, d. 53, l. 9–17. 102. Yamada Seizaburō, Shakaishugi kara kyō sanshugi e: Sobieto shimin seikatsu no genjitsu (Aoki shoten, 1952), 3–4. 103. Culver, Glorify the Empire, 198. 104. Shirai Hisaya, Kenshō shiberia yokuryū (Heibonsha, 2010), 116–117.
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Notes to Pages 186–196
105. Ibid., 116. 106. Aaron Stephen Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 25. 107. Aikawa Haruki, “Sobieto hy ūmanizumu o miru,” Chōryū 5, no. 2 (1950): 35. 108. Aikawa, “Zaiso minshu undō no hito kessan,” 43. 109. Moore, Constructing East Asia, 61, 62. 110. Itagaki, “Watashi wa shiberia de umarekawatta,” 22–35. 111. Ibid., 24. A pechka is a type of stove. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid., 25. 114. Holl, After Stalingrad, 81. 115. Itagaki, “Watashi wa shiberia de umarekawatta,” 25. 116. Ibid., 26. 117. Quoted in ibid., 27. 118. Ibid., 27. 119. Ibid., 32. 120. National Diet, 24th session of the House of Representatives Special Investigative Committee, 7th Congress, 12 April 1950, National Diet Library Website, https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf/100704267X02419500412, p. 4. 121. Ibid. 122. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Kazuhiko Togo, East Asia’s Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2008), 127–128. 123. Komatsu, Shiberia hiroku, 128. 124. Komatsu is engaging in wordplay. The original uses two words that are both read as henshin: one meaning “metamorphosis of the body” (変身), the other meaning “change of heart” (変心). 125. Komatsu, Shiberia hiroku, 129. 126. Kagawa Shōichi, “Asahara to iu soren no inu,” in Nihon shimbun, ed. Imadate, 223. 127. Inami Kiyoshi, “Hinomaru teidan no yurai,” in Nihon shimbun, ed. Imadate, 154. 128. Kagawa, “Asahara to iu soren no inu,” 223–224. 129. Furuhashi Shinzō, “Asahara no usoitsuwari no shōgen de,” in Nihon shimbun: Nihonjin horyoni taisuru soren no seisaku, ed. Imadate Tetsuo (Kagamiura Shobō, 1957), 205–206. 130. Ninomiya Jōbu, “Asahara no kyōgen jisatsu sōdō,” in Nihon shimbun, ed. Imadate, 203. 131. Matsumura Shōzō, “Asahara Seiki no botsuraku,” in Shiberia yokuryū taikenki, 238. 132. Asahara Seiki, Kunō no naka o yuku: Watashi no shiberia yokuryū ki danshō (Asahi shimbunsha, 1991), 211. 133. Ibid., 206.
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134. Hayashi Teru, Shiberia (Osaka: Shimpu shobō, 2010–2012), 3:9. 135. Edward J. Drea, “Missing Intentions: Japanese Intelligence and Soviet Invasion of Manchuria, 1945,” Military Affairs 48, no. 2 (April 1984): 70. 136. Yoshida, Shiberia horyo no shisō sen, 11. 137. “The International,” trans. Charles H. Kerr, accessed 15 April 2021, https://w ww.marxists.org /history/ussr/sounds/lyrics/international.htm. 138. Yoshida, Shiberia horyo no shisō sen, 12. 139. Ibid. 140. “Ukazaniia nachal’nika politotdela lagerei . . . ,” 28 October 1947, RGVA, f. 56p, op. 1, d. 72, l. 136, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 324. 141. Shirai, Kenshō shiberia yokuryū, 46–47. 142. Quoted in ibid., 219. 143. Inomata, “Sennō kyōiku mo noruma,” 1:24–25. 144. Ibid., 1:25. 145. Ibid., 1:25–26. 146. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 220. I am grateful to Masuda Hajimu for this reference. 147. “Zaiavleniia iaponskikh v / pl o priniatii ikh v gr-vo SSSR,” June 1949, GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 630. See also Kawagoe Shirō, Roshia kokuseki nihonjin no kiroku: Shiberia yokuryū kara sorenpō hō kai made (Chūō Kōronsha, 1994). 148. “Zaiavleniia iaponskikh v/pl o priniatii ikh v grazhdanstvo SSSR,” June 1949, GARF, f. 9526, op. 6, d. 630, l. 26. 149. Ibid., l. 67. 150. Ibid., l. 105. 151. Ibid., l. 274. 152. Ibid. 153. “Dokladnaia zapiska VrIO Upolnomochennogo . . . ,” GARF, f. 9526 s.ch., op. 1 s.ch., d. 629, l. 117, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 476–477. 154. “Dokladnaia zapiska Ministerstva vnutrennikh del . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 482, l.97–99, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 685. 155. “O vozvrashchenii v Iaponiiu vtoroi partii repatriantov,” GARF, f. 9501, op. 13, d. 116, l. 40, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 670–671. 6. IN THE COLD WAR CROSS FIRE
Epigraph: Iz broshiury, “Opyt politicheskoi raboty sredi voennoplennykh . . .”, RGVA, f. 1p, d. 23a, op. 8, l. 107–127, 130–134, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 349. 1. “Japan’s ‘Red Army’ Gets Back Home,” Life, 18 July 1949, 21. 2. “Victory Celebrations,” Life, 27 August 1945, 27. 3. “Prisoner Who Learned his Marxist Catechism Starts Life Anew in Japan,” Life, 18 July 1949, 24. 4. Ibid.
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Notes to Pages 208–212
5. “They Had Departed with Banzais, Returned to the ‘Internationale,’ ” Life, 18 July 1949, 22–23. 6. “Prisoner Who Learned his Marxist Catechism Starts Life Anew in Japan,” Life, 18 July 1949, 24–25. 7. Frank Gibney, Five Gentlemen of Japan: The Portrait of a Nation’s Character, 2nd printing (Rutland, VT and Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1976), 252. 8. “Japan’s ‘Red Army’ Gets Back Home,” 21. 9. Susan L. Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 10. 10. The term “overseas compatriots” or “overseas brethren” (kaigai dōhō) became a standard way to refer to the Siberian internees in the early postwar period, used widely by journalists and public figures. For example, in his address to the Diet Upper House on 1 July 1947, Prime Minister Katayama Tetsu talked about “facilitating the repatriation of overseas brethren.” “Address by the Minister of State,” 1 July 1947, National Diet House of Councillors, Kanpō (Japanese Government Gazette), Special Edition (2 July 1947), 43. National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf/100105254X00819470701. 11. “Red repatriate” (akai kikansha, or akai hikiagesha) became a common term to refer to the returnees from Siberia in 1949–1950. See Kurihara Toshio, Shiberia yokuryū: Mikan no higeki (Iwanami shinsho, 2009), 112. 12. Sejima Ry ūzō, Ikusanga: Sejima Ryū zō kaisōroku (Sankei shimbun shuppan, 2009), 314. 13. Ibid., 315. 14. Sassa Atsuyuki, “Sejima Ry ūzō wa soren no ‘kyōryokusha (sur īpā)’ datta: Nihonhan CIA sōsetsu e ketsui no shōgen,” Seiron 11 (2013): 96–112. 15. Ivan Kovalenko, “Soren tainichi kōsaku saikō sekininsha Ivan Kovalenko ga shōgen suru: Sejima Ry ūzō / shiberia no shinjitsu,” interview by Katō Akira, Bungei shunjū 70, no. 2 (February 1992), 104–136. 16. For example, Hosaka Masayasu, Sejima Ryū zō: Sanbō no shō washi, 19th ed. (Bunshun bunko, 2010) 17. Kyōdō Tsūshinsha Shakaibu, ed., Chinmoku no fairu: “Sejima Ryū zō” to wa nandatta noka (Shinchō bunko, 1996). 18. Sejima Ry ūzō, “Daihon’ei no 2,000 nichi,” Bungei shunjū 53, no. 12 (December 1975): 230–248, quoted in Hosaka Masayasu, Shō wa no kaibutsu: Nanatsu no nazo (Kōdansha, 2018), 202. 19. Hosaka Masayasu, “Sejima Ry ūzō no kenky ū,” Bungei shunjū 65, no. 6 (May 1987): 272–297. 20. Kirsten Sellars, “Crimes against Peace” and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 227. 21. Court Record of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 9 June 1947 (pp. 23,775–23,872), this quote 23,802–23,803, GHQ / SCAP Rec ords, International Prosecution Section; Entry No. 322, Narrative Summary
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and Transcripts of Court Proceedings for Cases Tried before the IMTFE, 1946–48, National Diet Library Website, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid /10269106/31 (hereafter IMTFE Court Record followed by page number and URL to the exact page). 22. IMTFE Court Record, 8,163, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/10268969/114. 23. Quoted in Hosaka, Shō wa no kaibutsu, 204. 24. Quoted in Panagiotis Dimitrakis, The Secret War for China: Espionage, Revolution and the Rise of Mao (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 66. 25. IMTFE Court Record, 23,788–23,789, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid /10269106/17. 26. Sejima, Ikusanga, 317–318. 27. Ibid. 28. IMTFE Court Record, 8,101, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/10268969/51. 29. IMTFE Court Record, 8,100–8,101, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid /10268969/50. 30. IMTFE Court Record, 8,125, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/10268969/ 75. 31. W. F. Webb, “Order, in re: Prosecution Witnesses Major General Matsumura, Tomokatsu; and Colonel Sejima, Ruiso,” 6 November 1946, https://legal-tools .org/doc/0db5ec/pdf. 32. Sejima, Ikusanga, 333. 33. Sejima Ry ūzō, Nihon no shōgen (Fuji terebi shuppan, 2003), 146. 34. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 246–262. 35. Quoted in Latha Varadarajan, “The T rials of Imperialism: Radhabinod Pal’s Dissent at the Tokyo Tribunal,” European Journal of International Relations 21 no. 4 (2014): 802. 36. Sejima, Nihon no shōgen, 152. 37. Higurashi Yoshinobu, Tōkyō saiban (Kōdansha gendai shinsho, 2008), 393. 38. Ibid., 392. 39. US Department of the Army, Reports of General MacArthur. MacArthur in Japan: The Occupation: Military Phase, volume 1: Supplement (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1966), 149–179. 40. Ibid., 161. 41. “Protokol soveshchaniia, provedennogo Upolnomochennym Soveta Ministrov . . . ,” GARF, f. 9526SCh (spets. chast’), op. 1SCh, d. 401, l. 138–140, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 413–414. 42. “Soobshchenie TASS ob okonchanii repatriatsii . . . ,” Izvestiia, 22 April 1950. 43. “Prikaz MVD SSSR No. 00916 o repatriatsii iz SSSR iaponskikh voennoplennykh,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 815–816, document 8.11. 44. Commentary to Document 6.72, “Dokladnaia zapiska S.N. Kruglova I. V. Stalinu . . . ,” 23 November 1946, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 965;
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“ Soobshchenie Ministra v nutrennikh del . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 143, l. 190–191, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 231–232. 45. F. O. Minute, Soviet Section F. O. R. D., “The Soviet Union and the Problem of Prisoners of War,” October 1955, folder “Japanese Prisoners of War Held by the Soviet Union,” National Archives of the United Kingdom (UKNA), Foreign Office (FO) 371 / 115283, 13. 46. D. N. Kriukov, “Grazhdanskoie upravlenie na Iuzhnom Sakhaline i Kuril’skikh ostrovakh v 1945–1948 gg. (Vospominaniia),” in Kraevedcheskii biulleten’, nos. 1–3 (1993). 47. Iu. I. Din, “Problema repatriatsii koreitsev Iuzhnogo Sakhalina v 1945–1950 gg.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 8 (2013):76. 48. “Dokladnaia zapiska Upolnomochennogo Soveta ministrov SSSR . . . ,” 22 February 1947, GARF, f. 9526sch, op. 1 sch, d. 401, l. 173–174, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 417. 49. Jacques Rossi, Fragments of Lives: Chronicles of the Gulag (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2018), 141. 50. Ibid., 133–134. Konoe Fumitaka, the son of Fumimaro who had been educated at Princeton University, died in mysterious circumstances in 1956, a few months before the repatriation of the last Japanese from the USSR. According to unconfirmed reports, he might have been “killed because he refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities” (“Soviets Tried to Get Konoe’s Son to Spy,” Japan Times, 25 July 2000). 51. Sherzod Muminov, “Prejudice, Punishment, and Propaganda: Post-Imperial Japan and the Soviet Versions of History and Justice in East Asia, 1945– 1956,” in The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation and Imperial Afterlife, ed. Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017), 146–164. 52. See, for example, Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 53. Muminov, “Prejudice, Punishment, and Propaganda.” 54. Office of the Military Adviser, Special Intelligence Report No. 379, “Repatriation of Japanese Prisoners-of-War still detained in colonial territories and the USSR . . . ,” 23 February 1951, Folder FO 371 / 92691, 36. 55. “Foreign Minister’s Letter of 14 May 1951 to President of the United Nations General Assembly,” Diplomatic Archives of Japan (Gaikōshiryōkan), Microfilm reel K’0001, 147–149. See also Elena L. Katasonova, Iaponskie voennoplennye v SSSR: Bol’shaia igra velikikh derzhav (Moscow: Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2003), chapter 4. 56. The Asahi Shimbun Company, Media, Propaganda and Politics in 20th- Century Japan, trans. Barak Kushner (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 111.
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57. “Hikiage mondai ni kansuru gaimushō happyō . . . ,” Diplomatic Archives of Japan, reel K’ 7. 1. 0.–1, folder “Taiheiyō sensō shūketsu ni yoru zaigai hōjin hogo hikiage kankei, dai 1 kan.” 58. Ad Hoc Commission on Prisoners of War, Third Session, “Summary Record of the Eighth Meeting,” 12 September 1952, UN Ad Hoc Commission on POWs, 4, in UKNA, FO 371 / 107018, “UN Ad Hoc Commission on POWs (papers 1–30).” 59. Ibid, 7. 60. UK Delegation to the UN to the Foreign Office, No. 1551 / 13 / 53P, 30 May 1953, UKNA, FO 371 / 107018. 61. Embassy of Japan to the UK Foreign Office, FO 92 / 53, 14 May 1953, UKNA, FO 371 / 107018. 62. Quoted in CIA, “Soviets Ready to Defend Manchuria; Ch’en I Troops Arrive in Mukden,” 27–29 November 1950, https://w ww.cia.gov/readingroom/docs /CIA-RDP80-0 0809A000600370203-5.pdf, accessed 5 June 2021. 63. “Japanese Corps May Be under Russian Control: Seized Island Group Could Provide Infiltration Base,” Daily Telegraph, 2 March 1951. UKNA, FO 371 / 92602: Reports on Soviet-indoctrinated Japanese troops on Sakhalin Island and despatch of Soviet troops from the mainland, 1951, 4. 64. UKNA FO 371 / 92691, 36. 65. See Tomita Takeshi, “Shimbun hōdō ni miru shiberia yokury ū —beiso kyōchō kara reisen he, 1945–1950 nen,” Yūrashia, May 2013, 7–13. 66. Kurihara Yasuyo, Shiberia horyo monogatari (Gyōmeisha, 1949), 1. 67. CIA, “Probability of a Communist Assault on Japan in 1951,” 17 August 1951, https://w ww.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp79s01011a000400050017 -3. 68. F.O. Minute, A.F. Maddock, Reference: FJ 1026 / 1, “Japanese Armed Forces in Sakhalin,” 2 March 1951, UKNA, FO 371 / 92602, 10. 69. United Kingdom Liaison Mission in Japan to Far Eastern Department, “Japa nese POW’s in the USSR, Encloses Japanese White Paper,” 31 July 1951, UKNA, FO 371 / 92691, Letter 304 / 8 / 51, 93. 70. Chancery Tokyo to Japan & Pacific Department, “Petition received from National Council . . . ,” 24 April 1951, FO 371 / 92691, Letter J1551 / 6, 54 (emphasis added). 71. UKNA, FO 371 / 92691, Letter 304 / 8 / 51, 92. 72. Chancery Tokyo to Japan & Pacific Department, “Petition Received from National Council . . . ,” 24 April 1951, No. 119 / 221 / 51, UKNA, FO 371 / 92691, 52. 73. Ibid., 53. 74. “Japanese Peace Treaty,” 10 August 1951, UKNA, FO 371 / 92691, Letter FJ 1551 / 18, 122. 75. FO 371 / 92691, Letter 304 / 9 / 51, 101.
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76. Beatrice Trefalt, “A Peace Worth Having: Delayed Repatriations and Domestic Debate over the San Francisco Peace Treaty,” Japanese Studies 27, no. 2 (September 2007): 177. 77. “Treaty of Peace with Japan (with Two Declarations).” 8 September 1951, https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%20136/volume-136-i-1832 -english.pdf. 78. CIA, “Military, Security, and Economic Conditions on Sakhalin . . . ,” 10 November 1955, https://w ww.cia.gov/readingroom /document /cia-rdp80 -0 0810a008000420005-5. 79. “The Soviet Union and the Problem of Prisoners of War,” October 1955, NS 1551 / 22, USSR 196 / 55, UKNA FO 371 / 115283, 9. 80. Ibid. 81. “Spravka o prebyvanii v SSSR delegatsii Iaponskogo Obshchestva Krasnogo Kresta . . . ,” November 1953, GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 84, l. 65. 82. National Diet, 5th session of the House of Representatives Special Investigative Committee on the Repatriation of Compatriots from Abroad, 18th congress, 8 December 1953, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go .jp/pdf/101803933X00519531209, p. 4. 83. “Pis’ma osuzhdennykh voennoplennykh, privezennye iz SSSR na rodinu iaponskimi uchenymi,” 28 June 1955, GARF, f. 4459, op. 27, d. 6426, l. 50, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 676. 84. “Japanese War Prisoners in the USSR,” December 1955, UKNA FO 371 / 115283, 21. 85. “Soprovoditel’noe pis’mo zam. ministra vnutrennikh del SSSR . . . ,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 482, l. 10–12, in Voennoplennye v SSSR, 337–338, document. 3.96. 86. The claim about ending exploitation was widespread in Soviet propaganda. The quote here is from “Children of One Socialist Homeland,” an editor’s note in Soviet Life December 1972, no 12 (195): 3. 87. Carruthers, Cold War Captives, 38. 88. Ibid., 107. 89. American Federation of Labor (AFL), Slave L abor in Russia: The Case Presented by the American Federation of L abor to the United Nations (Washington, DC: American Federation of Labor, 1949). 90. Jennifer Luff, “Labor Anticommunism in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, 1920–49,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 1 (2018): 110–111. 91. AFL, Slave L abor in Russia, Part III, “Affidavits by Former Inmates of Soviet Concentration Camps,” 37–84. 92. Timothy Barney, “ ‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.”: The Power of Place and the Rhetorical Life of a Cold War Map,” Rhetoric & Public History 16, no. 2 (2013): 317–353. 93. Carruthers, Cold War Captives, 101.
Notes to Pages 233–239
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94. “A Report to the President, Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950,” 7 April 1950, Section IV, “The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of Ideas and Values between the U.S. Purpose and the Kremlin Design,” 1. US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), President (1945–1953 : Truman). Office of the Personal Secretary. 1945–1953, Foreign Affairs File, 1940–1953: Russia: U.S. Relations with, National Archives Identifier: 750374, Online at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/ 750374. 95. GHQ SCAP, “SCAPIN-33: Press Code for Japan,” 19 September 1945, National Diet Library Website, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/9885095/1. 96. There were numerous examples, including Anticommunism (Hankyō), the organ of the Japan Anticommunist League; Anticommunist Free Newspaper (Hankyō jiyū shimbun), the mouthpiece of the East Asian Anticommunist League; and Anticommunist Times (Hankyō taimuzu), published by the Anticommunist Democratic League Association (Hankyō Minshu Dōmei Rengōkai). 97. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), Chapter 3, “Kyodatsu: Exhaustion and Despair.” 98. William De Lange, A History of Japanese Journalism: Japan’s Press Club as the Last Obstacle to a Mature Press (Richmond, UK: Japan Library, 1998), 167. 99. Carruthers, Cold War Captives. 100. “Shinryaku naki jiy ū sekai,” Mainichi shimbun, 5 January 1950, 1. 101. Quoted in GHQ, MIS, “Japanese Prisoners of War,” section 3, 1. 102. “Jū man jin’i shinda—Shiberia no higeki—Tanemura moto taisa no shōgen,” Mainichi shimbun, 7 February 1950. 103. Ibid. 104. National Diet, 10th session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Repatriation of Japanese Citizens Remaining Overseas, 7th cong., 6 February 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf /100714356X01019500206, p. 12. 105. “Jū man jin’I shinda.” 106. National Diet, 10th session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Repatriation of Japanese Citizens Remaining Overseas, 7th cong., 6 February 1950 (emphasis added), National Diet Library Website: https:// kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf/100714356X01019500206, p. 31. 107. “Jū man jin’i shinda.” 108. “Hikiage saikai daiissen kaeru: 2,000 mei takasagomaru de maizuru e,” Asahi shimbun, 28 June 1949. 109. “Shinsō shiranu hikiagesha: kyōsanshugisha ha saikōritsu,” Asahi shimbun, 28 June 1949. 110. “Kyōsantō kyōiku no eikyō rekizen,” Asahi shimbun, 28 June 1949. 111. William Jorden, “Hokkaido’s Hopes and Fears: People Dream of Power Plants, Industries but Live in Dread of USSR,” Japan Times, 29 March 1951. 112. Sokidō, Shinjitsu o uttaeru (Hachigatsu shobō, 1949), 3.
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113. “Soren kikansha seikatsu yogo domei,” 18 November 1949, GHQ / SCAP Rec ords, Government Section, Central Files Branch, Decimal File 1945–52, Box No. 2275EE, Folder No. 74, National Diet Library Document ID: 000006702969. 114. Quoted in “Moscow Radio Reports That Missing Japanese Prisoners of War Are Fighting for the Americans,” 29 June 1951, FJ 1551 / 10, FO 371 / 92691, 84–85, UKNA. 115. Ibid., 85. 116. “Pis’mo Ministra inostrannykh del Predsedateliu Sovmina . . . ,” GARF, f. 5446, op. 53, d. 5091, l. 8–9, in Iaponskie voennoplennye, 470–471. 117. “The Soviet Union and the Problem of Prisoners of War,” October 1955, NS 1551 / 22, USSR 196 / 55, UKNA FO 371 / 115283, 13. 118. The Japanese Communist Party, “Kyōsantō kara no tegami: Sodōmei kikansha shokun e,” May 1949, in Horyo taikenki, ed. Takahashi Daizō (Soren ni okeru nihonjin horyo no seikatsu taiken o kiroku suru kai, 1984–1998), 8:434. 119. Quoted in “Repatriates from Soviet Russia Visit Japan Communist Party Headquarters,” 10 July 1948, GHQ Far Eastern Command (FECOM), Military Intelligence Section (MIS), MacArthur Memorial Archives MMA-18, Reel 13, National Diet Library of Japan. 120. Robert A. Scalapino, The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 48–78. 121. Ibid, chapter 2, “Making Communism Lovable: The Initial Tactics of the Postwar Japanese Communist Party.” 122. Sebastian Conrad, The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in an American C entury, trans. Alan Nothnagle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 87. 123. Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, “Japan, the United States, and the Cold War, 1945– 1960,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. I: Origins, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 251. 124. GHQ Far Eastern Command (FEC), Military Intelligence Section (MIS), General Staff, “Japanese Prisoners of War: Life and Death in Soviet P.W. Camps,” section 7, 2, September 1950. Records of GHQ FEC, Assistant Chief of Staff, Box 24, Folder 1, National Diet Library of Japan, NDL ID: 024292924. 125. Quoted in Sherzod Muminov, “From Imperial Revenants to Cold War Victims: ‘Red Repatriates’ from the Soviet Union and the Making of the New Japan, 1949–1952,” Cold War History 17, no. 4 (2017): 426. 126. Kurihara, Shiberia yokuryū, 112. 127. Ibid. 128. Quoted in GHQ FEC, “Japanese Prisoners of War,” section 7, 2. 129. Andrew Gordon, The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8–10.
Notes to Pages 244–249
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130. John Price, Japan Works: Power and Paradox in Postwar Industrial Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 71–75. 131. Roman Cybriwsky, Historical Dictionary of Tokyo (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 143. 132. Justin Jesty, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 68. 133. Kenji Hasegawa, Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan (New York: Springer, 2018), 83, note 56. 134. “Pis’ma I. V. Stalinu i Mao . . . ,” 12 March 1951, GARF, f. 4459, op. 27, d. 13176, l. 213. 135. Thomas French, National Police Reserve: The Origin of Japan’s Self Defense Forces (Leiden, the Netherlands: Global Oriental, 2014), 49. 136. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 272. 137. Ruriko Kumano, “Anticommunism and Academic Freedom: Walter C. Eels and the ‘Red Purge’ in Occupied Japan,” History of Education Quarterly 50, no. 4 (November 2010): 514. 138. Maruyama Masao, “Nationalism in Japan: Its Theoretical Background and Prospects,” in Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japa nese Politics, expanded ed., ed. Ivan Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 135. 139. GHQ, “Japanese Prisoners of War,” section 7, 3–4. 140. Gibney, Five Gentlemen of Japan, 244–245. 141. GHQ Civil Intelligence Section, “The Soviet Fraction in the Japan Communist Party,” November 1947, MacArthur Memorial Archives, MMA-18, Reel No. 13, Kenseishiryōshitsu, National Diet Library, Tokyo. 142. “Hankyō no ‘Hirokawa kōsō’ ma ni auka ga mondai,” Asahi shimbun, 30 June 1949. 143. Quoted in “Bōryoku kakumei okonoeba kyōsantō kaimetsu sen,” Mainichi shimbun, 30 January 1950. 144. A. A. Kirichenko, “Voennoplennye ili internirovannye? Ocherki istorii iaponskikh voennoplennykh,” 12 December 2014, http://japanstudies.ru/index.php ?option=com_content&task=v iew&id=540&Itemid=2. The three articles by Yuri Rastvorov are “How Red Titans Fought for Supreme Power,” Life, 29 November 1954, 18–21, 146–156; “Red Fraud and Intrigue in the Far East,” Life, 6 December 1954, 174–192; and “Goodby to Red Terror,” Life, 13 December 1954, 49–58. 145. Kirichenko, “Voennoplennye ili internirovannye?” 146. Hiyama Yoshiaki, Sokoku o soren ni utta 36 nin no nihonjin (Sankei shuppan, 1982), 74–108. 147. David Wolff, “Japan and Stalin’s Policy t oward Northeast Asia a fter World War II,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 14, 28. 148. National Diet, 13th session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Issue of Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th Congress,
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Notes to Pages 249–252
23 February 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf /100714356X01319500223, p. 2. 149. “ ‘ Tokuda shi o tsuiky ū’ soren hikiage no Kubota shi kataru,” Asahi shimbun, 13 February 1950. 150. “Allied Council for Japan,” International Organization 4, no. 2 (May 1950): 339. 151. National Diet, 15th session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Issue of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th Congress, 16 March 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf /100714356X01519500316. 152. Interestingly, in his petition Kubota had named a different officer, Lieutenant Filatov. See National Diet, 13th session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Issue of Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th Congress, 23 February 1950, National Diet Library Website: https:// kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf/100714356X01319500223. 153. Elena L. Katasonova, Poslednie plenniki vtoroi mirovoi voiny: Maloizvestnye stranitsy rossiisko-iaponskikh otnoshenii (Moscow: Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2005), 79. 154. Tada Shigeharu, Uchinaru shiberia yokuryū: Ishihara Yoshirō, Kano Buichi, Kan Sueharu no sengoshi (Shakaishisōsha, 1994). 155. National Diet, 15th session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Issue of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th Congress, 16 March 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf /100714356X01519500316. 156. Nakano Shigeharu, “Kōsei no y ūwaku,” quoted in Tada, Uchinaru shiberia yokuryū, 24. 157. National Diet, 15th session of the House of Councillors, Special Committee on the Issue of Japanese Nationals, 7th Congress, 16 March 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf/100714356X01519500316, p. 11 158. National Diet, 16th session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Issue of Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th Congress, 18 March 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf /100714356X01619500318. 159. Kan countered this claim by saying that all the translators and other Japanese members of administrative and auxiliary staff automatically became labeled “activists,” for the banal reason that the camp authorities had to achieve targets set by the GUPVI for a minimum number of activists in each camp. These numbers w ere then reported to Stalin and others in the highest echelons of Soviet power. On the deputies’ reaction to Kan’s opposition to the imperial system, see Tada, Uchinaru shiberia yokuryū, 26–27. 160. National Diet, 19th session of the House of Representatives Special Investigative Committee on The Issue of Obstruction by the Communist Party of Japan of Repatriation of Japanese Compatriots Interned Overseas, 7th Con-
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gress, 5 April 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp /pdf/100704267X01919500405, p. 3. 161. Ibid. 162. “Jibun no yowasa ni zetsubō shite shinu / isho rokutsū hakken / Tokuda yōsei shōnin jisatsu,” Yomiuri shimbun, 8 April 1950. See also “Kan shōnin naze jisatsu shita ka / Tokuda yōsei shōnin jisatsu” Yomiuri shimbun, 8 April 1950. 163. “Karō ga gen’in / Hōjin hikiage bōgai mondai / Tokuda yōsei shōnin jisatsu,” Yomiuri shimbun, 8 April 1950. 164. Nakano was a rare exception. Tada Shigeharu has written that, as Nakano had been present when Kan testified in the House of Councillors and had had a chance to talk to Kan before, Nakano felt guilty that he had not warned Kan of the reality behind the scenes of parliamentary politics. Tada, Uchinaru shiberia yokuryū taiken, 25. 165. Tsurumi Shunsuke, Tsurumi Shunsuke shū, vol. 2: Senkō sha tachi (Chikuma shobō, 1991). 166. Jenny Edkins provides an interesting analysis of political sacrifice, which has inspired my use of the word “sacrifice” in relation to Kan (Trauma and the Memory of Politics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 99–110). 167. National Diet, 23rd session of the House of Councillors Special Committee on the Issue of Obstruction by the Communist Party of Japan of Repatriation of Japanese Compatriots Interned Overseas, 7th cong., 10 April 1950, National Diet Library Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/p df /100704267X0231950 0410, p. 1. 168. I borrow the term “foundational narrative” from Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 169. Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 97. 170. “Manshū nisei,” in Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 139. 171. Sawachi Hisae and Sataka Makoto, “Sedai o koete kataritsugitai sensō bungaku,” Sekai, no. 6 (2007): 207. 172. Ishiguro Tatsunosuke, Sanga ariki (Bunka kensetsusha, 1949), 3. 173. Gibney, Five Gentlemen of Japan, 245. 7. WE CANNOT DIE AS SLAVES
Epigraph: Quoted in Kurihara Toshio, Shiberia yokuryū: Mikan no higeki (Iwanami shinsho, 2009), 171. 1. Uchimura Gōsuke, Iki isogu: Sutārin goku no nihonjin, red. ed. (Chūkō bunko, 1985), 56. 2. Murai Misao, Shū yō jo rettō no ningengaku (Shin jinbutsu ōraisha, 1974), 234.
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3. “Hikiage ni tsuite: Kaisetsu,” in Hikiage engo no kiroku, ed. Hikiage Engochō (Hikiage Engochō, 1950), 13–14. 4. Ibid., 14. 5. F. W. Warner, “Repatriate Organizations in Japan,” Pacific Affairs 22, no. 3 (September 1949): 272. 6. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 133. 7. Quoted in Shirai Hisaya, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū: Saitō Rokurō no kiseki (Iwanami shoten, 1995), 191. 8. Ōtsuka Takeshi, Kikuchi Toshio, and Katō Kintarō, “Shiberia yokury ūsha zadankai: Onshū no arara ni musubareta kizuna,” Bungei shunjū, no. 9 (2014): 334. 9. Ibid., 335. 10. Oguma Eiji, Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925– 2015, trans. David Noble (International House of Japan, 2018), 144. 11. Ōhira Hirayuki, “Onky ū hō ni nikagetsu tarinai,” in Shiberia yokuryū taikenki: Watashitachi ni totte shū sen wa nakatta, ed. Shiberia Yokury ū no Taiken o Kataritsugō Kai (Kobe: Kobe shimbun shuppan sentā, 1981), 327. 12. “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Japan: Joint Declaration,” Signed at Moscow, on 19 October 1956. Treaties and International Agreements Registered or Filed and Recorded with the Secretariat of the United Nations263, no. 3768 (1957). UN Website: https://treaties.un.org /doc/ Publication / UNTS / Volume%20263/v263.pdf. 13. Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), vii. 14. Ibid., viii. 15. Ibid., 6. 16. Miki Y. Ishikida, Toward Peace: War Responsibility, Postwar Compensation, and Peace Movements and Education in Japan (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 30. 17. Lee Pennington, Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 18. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006); Simon Andrew Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 19. Nagasawa Toshio, Shiberia yokuryū to sengo nihon: Kikanshatachi no tatakai (Yūshisha, Japan: 2011), 2. 20. Takuya Horiguchi, “Campaign to Demand Compensation for Internees,” in The Japanese Internees and Forced Labor in the USSR a fter the Second World War, ed. Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation (Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation, 2008), 679. 21. Nagasawa, Shiberia yokury ū to sengo nihon, 42.
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22. Ibid., 42–43. 23. For a history of unredressed victims of the war, see Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins. 24. Tetsuya Fujiwara, “Japan’s Other Forgotten Soldiers,” in Japan since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble, ed. Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S. George (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 126. 25. Pennington, Casualties of History, 202. 26. Fujiwara “Japan’s Other Forgotten Soldiers,” 125. 27. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan, “Onky ū seido no gaiyō,” http://w ww.soumu.go.jp/main_ sosiki/onkyu_toukatsu/onkyu.htm, accessed 7 June 2021. 28. Nagasawa, Shiberia yokuryū to sengo nihon, 26. 29. “Shohei Kikan Sokushin Remmei Honbu (Headquarters of Hastening for the Repatriation of Officers and Soldiers League),” 10 January 1949, GHQ / SCAP Records, Government Section, Central Files Branch, Organization File 1945–52, Box No. 2275Y, Folder No. 40, NDL Doc. ID: 000006702576, National Diet Library Website: https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/9897546/1, pp. 2, 3, 4. 30. Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 223. 31. “Soren kikansha seikatsu yogo domei,” 18 November 1949, GHQ / SCAP Rec ords, Government Section, Central Files Branch, Decimal File 1945–52, Box No. 2275EE, Folder No. 74, NDL Doc. ID: 000006702969, National Diet Library Website: https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/9897921/6, pp. 4, 9. 32. “Soviet Repatriates Livelihood Protection League . . . ,” 28 July 1949, GHQ / FEC, MIS, General Staff, GHQ / SCAP Records, Government Section, NDL Doc. ID: 000006702969, National Diet Library Website: https://dl.ndl .go.jp/info:ndljp/pid /9897921/83. 33. From DS to G-2, 18 August 1949, GHQ / FEC, MIS, General Staff, GHQ / SCAP Records, Government Section, NDL Doc. ID: 000006702969, National Diet Library Website: https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/9897921/82. 34. Nagasawa, Shiberia yokuryū to sengo nihon, 36. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 36–37. 38. Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 227. 39. Shirai Hisaya, “Zenyokukyō undō, tōitsu to bunretsu,” Sekai 4 (1995): 305. 40. Quoted in Nagasawa, Shiberia yokuryū to sengo nihon, 49–50. 41. “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Japan: Joint Declaration,” Article 6, 114. 42. Ishikawa Masumi, Sengo seijishi (Iwanami shoten, 1995), 78. 43. “Statement released by the Department of State to the Press, December 15, 1955,” in American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, ed. G. Bernard Noble and E. Taylor Parks (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1957), 1:338.
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Notes to Pages 271–281
44. “Joint Declaration by Japan and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” Articles 4 and 5, 114. 45. Quoted in Nagasawa, Shiberia yokuryū to sengo nihon, 54. 46. This synopsis of Saitō’s life is based on Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū. 47. Ibid., 227–229. 48. Shirai, “Zenyokukyō undō,” 306–308. 49. Quoted in Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 231. 50. Saitō Rokurō, Shiberia horyoshi: Sono shin’in to zenyokukyō undō (Nami Shobō, 1981); Shirai, “Zenyokukyō undō.” 51. Quoted in Shirai, “Zenyokukyō undō,” 302. 52. Horiguchi, “Campaign to Demand Compensation for Internees,” 671. 53. Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 236. 54. Website of the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates, https://w ww.heiwakinen.go.jp/english-index/, accessed 7 June 2021. 55. Zaidan Hōjin, “Zenkoku kyōsei yokury ūsha kyōkai,” http://zaidan-zenyokukyo -com.ssl-xserver.jp/about.html, accessed 7 June 2021. 56. Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 241. 57. Shirai Hisaya, “Kokusaihō kara mita nihonjin horyo no shiberia yokury ū,” Annals of the Japanese Association of Russian and East European Studies 23 (1994): 42. 58. Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 242. 59. Horiguchi, “Campaign to Demand Compensation for Internees,” 672. 60. Quoted in Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 243. 61. “Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949,” Article 66, International Committee of the Red Cross, accessed 19 April 2021, https://w ww.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/ART/375- 590081 ?OpenDocument. 62. “Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949,” Article 68, International Committee of the Red Cross, accessed 19 April 2021, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/ 7c4d08d9 b287a42141256739003e636b/6fef854a3517b75ac125641e004a9e68. 63. Shirai, Dokyumento shiberia yokuryū, 246–247. 64. Quoted in Shirai, “Kokusaihō kara mita nihonjin horyo no shiberia yokury ū,” 42. 65. Lev Sukhanov, Kak Yel’tsin stal prezidentom: Zapiski pervogo pomoshchnika (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011), 112. 66. “Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii o nagrazhdenii ordenom Druzhby narodov grazhdanina Iaponii Saito Rokuro,” Moscow, Kremlin, 20 February 1993, http://pravo.gov.ru/proxy/ips/?doc_ itself=&&nd =102021723&&page=1&rdk=0 #I0. 67. Horiguchi, “Campaign to Demand Compensation for Internees,” 673.
Notes to Pages 281–288
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68. “War Victims Unite Efforts to Win Redress from Japan,” Japan Times, 12 February 1999, https://w ww.japantimes.co.jp/news/1999/02/12/national/war -v ictims-unite-efforts-to-w in-redress-from-japan/#.XchbzL-nzOQ. 69. Quoted in Hiro Saito, The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 87. 70. Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 16. 71. Tachibana Akira, “Tooku shiberia no chi ni nemuru kokka ni misuterareta hitobito no haka,” 8 August 2013, https://diamond.jp/articles/-/39961?page=4. 72. Saikōban hanrei, Jiken bangō: Heisei 5 (O) 1751, 13 March 1997, “Courts in Japan” Website: https://w ww.courts.go.jp/app/files/hanrei_jp/ 788/052788 _hanrei.pdf, pp. 3, 4. 73. Sayuri Umeda, “Japan: WWII POW and Forced Labor Compensation Cases,” 39, Law Library of Congress, September 2008, http://w ww.loc.gov/law/help /pow-compensation / Japan-pow-compensation.pdf. 74. National Diet, 1st session of the House of Representatives Budget Committee, First Department meeting, 4 March 1980, National Diet Website: https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/pdf/109105266X00119800304, p. 7. In this session deputies mention Saitō’s negotiations with the government. 75. Nagasawa, Shiberia yokuryū to sengo nihon, 171. 76. Ibid., 172. 77. Text of the Special Law on Postwar Forced Internees, “Sengo kyōsei yokury ūsha ni kakaru mondai ni kansuru tokubetsu sochi hō,” E-Government Electronic Portal, https://elaws.e-gov.go.jp/document?lawid =422AC1000000045_20160401_426AC0000000069. 78. Quoted in Kurihara, Shiberia horyo monogatari, 171. 79. Hiratsuka Mitsuo, “ ‘Sengo kyōsei yokury ūsha tokubetsu sochi hōan’ seiritsu o ukete,” 16 June 2010, http://list.jca.apc.org/public/cml/2010-June/004505.html. 80. Ibid. EPILOGUE
1. Murayama Tsuneo, “Shusaisha daihyō aisatsu,” in The Bulletin of the Center for Supporting the Siberian Internees and Recording Their Experiences, no. 5 (2013): 2. 2. Inokuma Tokurō, “Kataritsutaeru koto wa ikinokotta mono no sekimu,” in The Bulletin of the Center for Supporting the Siberian Internees and Recording Their Experiences, no. 5 (2013), 5. 3. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), 407. 4. Hiratsuka Mitsuo, “ ‘Sengo kyōsei yokury ūsha tokubetsu sochi hōan’ seiritsu o ukete,” 16 June 2010, http://list.jca.apc.org/public/cml/2010-June/0 04505 .html.
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Notes to Pages 289–293
5. Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan: Sengoshi no naka no hen’yō, 6th ed. (Iwanami gendai bunko, 2009), 100. 6. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006); Lee Pennington, Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 7. Sabine Fr ühst ück, Playing War: C hildren and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), chapter 3. 8. GHQ Far Eastern Command (FEC), Military Intelligence Section (MIS), General Staff, “Japanese Prisoners of War: Life and Death in Soviet P.W. Camps,” section 7, 2, September 1950. Records of GHQ FEC, Assistant Chief of Staff, Box 24, Folder 1, National Diet Library of Japan, NDL ID: 024292924. 9. “Hero-v ictims” is Ran Zwigenberg’s adaptation of James Orr’s phrase (Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 7). See James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). 10. Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates, Sengo kyō sei yokuryū: Shiberia kara no tegami (Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates, 2012). 11. Ozawa Yuki, Koori no te (Koike shoin, 2012). 12. Ibid., 250–251, emphasis added. 13. Oguma Eiji, Ikite kaette kita otoko: Aru nihonhei no sensō to sengo (Iwanami shoten, 2015). The English translation (from which I am quoting) is Return from Siberia: A Japanese Life in War and Peace, 1925–2015, trans. David Noble (International House of Japan, 2018). 14. Oguma, Return from Siberia, 293. 15. Ibid., 290. 16. Asaka Yū ho, “Chūgoku, shiberia kara kaetta chichi to kurumaisu no watashi,” in Sengo o kataru, ed. Iwanami shinsho henshūbu (Iwanami shoten, 1995), 1–8. 17. Ibid., 4. 18. Thomas U. Berger, War, Guilt, and World Politics a fter World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter 4 19. The translation of nihonjinron is from Yoshio Sugimoto, “Making Sense of Nihonjinron,” Thesis Eleven 57, no. 1 (May 1999): 81. 20. Ōtsuka Takeshi, Kikuchi Toshio, and Katō Kintarō, “Shiberia yokury ūsha zadankai: Onshū no arara ni musubareta kizuna,” Bungei shunjū, no. 9 (2014): 333–334. 21. Japan-Uzbekistan Association, ed., Tsuioku-Naboi gekijō kensetsu no kiroku: Shirukurō do ni umareta nihonjin densetsu (Nihon Uzubekisutan Kyōkai, 2004).
Notes to Pages 293–298
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22. For Silk Road diplomacy, see “Tai shiruku rōdo chiiki gaikō ni tsuite,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, July 2002, http://w ww.mofa.go.jp/mofaj /kaidan /yojin /arc_02/silkroad_a.html. 23. “Prime Minister Abe Visits Uzbekistan,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, accessed 20 April 2021, http://w ww.mofa.go.jp/erp/ca_c/uz/page3e_0 00402 .html. 24. “Shushō, urajio de nihon kigyō kankeisha to kondan, yokury ū shibōsha ireihi mo hōmon,” Sankei shimbun, 6 September 2019, https://w ww.sankei.com /politics/news/190906/plt1909060010-n1.html. 25. “Eastern Economic Forum and Other Events: Third Day,” Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, 6 September 2019, https://japan.kantei.go.jp/98_ abe /actions/201909/_0 0006.html. 26. Yukiko Koga, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption a fter Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 27. The number quoted has been calculated using data on the MHLW Website. An overview of activities to memorialize the war dead can be found at: “Senbotsusha irei jigyō no jisshi (shikiten, ikotsu shūshū nado),” MHLW Website, https://w ww.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/hokabunya/senbotsusha /seido01/index.html. 28. “Kokkan no chi ni nemuru tomo yo chichi yo: Ikotsu shūshū sedai koete,” Asahi shimbun, 9 August 2014. 29. Tanaka Takeshi, interview by author, Tokyo, 24 October 2014. 30. Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 44. 31. Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 156. 32. Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), ix. 33. Snyder, Bloodlands, 387. 34. Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 5. 35. Takasugi Ichirō, Kyokkō no kageni: Shiberia furyoki, 12th ed. (Iwanami bunko, 2011).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have incurred countless debts in the years of researching and writing this book. First, I am indebted to Barak Kushner, who took a chance on me as his PhD student at Cambridge University in 2011, and helped conceive and develop the ideas that form the book’s foundation. Between 2015 and 2017, my research benefited greatly from the vibrant scholarly and friendly community that Barak gathered in Cambridge around his European Research Council Project, “The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965.” Throughout the years Barak has been incredibly generous with his time and advice, going through countless iterations of my manuscript, and his good humor and hospitality during many gatherings at the house he shares with his partner, Mami Mizutori, made my time in Cambridge unforgettable. Aaron William Moore has been a champion of this project from its very beginning, giving generously of his time and providing helpful advice and encouragement in many conversations. Aaron read the w hole manuscript and provided helpful comments that made the book better. I am also indebted to Sho Konishi, John Nilsson-Wright, Caroline Rose, Nathan Gilbert Quimpo, Carole Faucher, and other mentors and colleagues for their advice and helpful comments about this work. I am thankful to the instructors at the 2014 European Summer School on Cold War History—particularly to Silvio Pons, Federico Romero, and Kaeten Mistry—for their valuable comments on my presentation. At Cambridge, Anthony Brooks, Giulio Pugliese, Nikolay Murashkin, Lauri Kitsnik, Deokhyo Choi, Arnaud Doglia, Ōtsuka Aiko, Kuan-Jen Chen, and Andrew Levidis w ere g reat teammates and friends. Laura Moretti generously lent me the DVD set of Fumō chitai. Tash Sabbah, Nadya Mullen, Susie Nightingale, 351
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Jill Cooper, and other staff members at the Faculty of Asian M iddle Eastern Studies w ere always there to help. Koyama Noboru, the former librarian for Japanese materials at the University Library, aided my searches for books and articles. Friends at the University of Cambridge Writing Groups created an atmosphere of camaraderie, which made the writing process less lonely. Friends at the Cambridge Central Asia Forum, led by Siddharth Saxena and Prajakti Kalra, helped me maintain a cultural connection to home. I am also grateful to Sherzod Eraliev, Watanabe Shūko, Kanda Yutaka, Lily Chang, Yamamori Toru, Endō Satoshi, Rudolph Ng, Simon Lewis, Guljakhon Amanova, Rosemarie Bernard, Igata Akira, David Byers, Timur Dadabaev, and Guzal Sultanova. In Tokyo, Shimotomai Nobuo hosted me at Hosei University during my fourteen months as a Japan Foundation Fellow in 2013–2014 and was extremely generous with his support and time. Kobayashi Akina, my sempai at Hosei, has been a great friend and colleague ever since we met, and her assistance and advice has helped this project immensely. This book would not be the same without her support and advice. Arimitsu Ken of the Centre for Supporting the Siberian Internees and Recording Their Experiences constantly offered support and encouragement, and helped reach out to the former internees. I am also grateful to the Centre for awarding me the inaugural Murayama Tsuneo Prize for the Advancement of Research into the Siberian Internment. Of the former internees, I remember with fondness the late Tanaka Takeshi and Murayama Tsuneo, whom I had the pleasure to meet while in Tokyo. I am grateful to former internees Satō Kashio, Hayashi Teru, Sekine Tadayoshi, Masuda Shun, and Nagatani Rokuya, for the opportunity to interview them about their Siberian experiences. I am indebted to Yoshida Yutaka for his valuable advice during our meeting at Hitotsubashi University in 2014 and for generously giving me the magazine containing Itagaki Tadashi’s article; Tomita Takeshi, for the opportunity to join and present my research at the Siberian Internment Workshop; Yamauchi Ry ūji, for giving me access to the film collections at Nichiei Eizō; and Katō Kiyofumi, for his comments on my research and his introduction to Furumi Ken’ichi. I am grateful to Furumi Ken’ichi and Taguchi Yasushi for agreeing to talk to me about their respective fathers. Miki Ken’ichirō generously gave me his blessing to include a photograph taken by his father, the photographer Miki Jun, which appears in Chapter 6. Katō Tsumugi of the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates has helped obtain the permissions to images held by the museum. Thomas French generously sent a copy of his book. Masanori Takaguchi of the Japan Foundation in Tokyo was always ready to help during my time as a fellow. In Moscow, Elena Katasonova has been a great mentor and friend who shared valuable comments on my thesis and on the archives, in addition to helping me
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find affordable accommodation during my graduate student years. Vladimir Vsevolodov in Krasnogorsk gave his support to this project and generously shared rare photographs of camp life with me. Sergey Kim has been a great colleague and friend ever since our first meeting in April 2013. Polly Jones and Alexander Titov were great guides during the Russian Archive Training Scheme in 2013. My colleagues at the University of East Anglia are a generous bunch of scholars and teachers, and I have enjoyed being part of this community. I am especially thankful to the head of the School of History, Matthias Neumann, for his continuous support and encouragement, and to the Faculty of Humanities for the generous support in the form of a Publications Fund, which helped immensely in the preparation of this book. Richard Mills provided valuable advice on the history of sport in the USSR, and I have enjoyed many conversations with Ra Mason and David Milne on this and other topics. I am thankful to the Centre for Japanese Studies and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, both led by Simon Kaner, for the opportunity to maintain the Japan connection along with my work in the School of History. At Harvard University Press, Kathleen McDermott patiently and expertly guided this project toward publication, and her advice during the process of revision greatly improved the original manuscript. Kathleen Drummy was accessible and helpful throughout the publication process. Masuda Hajimu generously recommended the book for publication as a reader for the press, along with one anonymous reader, and their constructive comments urged me to reconsider parts of the manuscript and eliminate inconsistencies and mistakes. Jeanne Ferris improved my prose with g reat attention to detail, and Angela Piliouras patiently guided me through the final stages of the publication process. Needless to say, any errors that remain are my own. This research was supported by many grants; in addition to Barak Kushner’s ERC project mentioned above, I am grateful to the Open Society Foundations, the Cambridge Trust, the University of Cambridge Faculty of Asian and M iddle Eastern Studies, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, the Japan Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, and the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee. I am also grateful to all colleagues who invited me to speak about this research at venues which are too numerous to list h ere. I have saved the most important thanks for last. I would like to thank my wife, Nigora, and our boys, Kamron and Samir, for their support, love, and encouragement over the decade that it took me to see this project to its end. Nigora patiently shouldered parental responsibilities through various periods when I was writing this book, and she has always been by my side, providing the best advice and support. I am forever in her debt. Kamron was eleven months old when I started this project, and Samir was born three years into it, so they both grew with this book.
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My brother Farhod and his family provided me with a bed and hospitality in Yoko hama during many research visits. My m other, Mariyam, was my greatest inspiration in life and taught me the virtues of hard work and perseverance. Along with my f ather, she worked to give me and my siblings a good education, but she did not live to enjoy the fruits of her efforts. I devote this book to her, in loving memory.
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations, the letter m following a page number denotes a map Abe Gunji, 38–39, 134, 302n10 Abe Shinzō, 293–294, 296 African Americans, 108 Agamben, Giorgio, 101 Aikawa Haruki, 99, 151–153, 185; apology for the USSR, 99, 186–187; on the Democratic Movement, 186–187; in the serv ice of the empire, 110, 186; tenkō, 186, 196 Aizawa Hideyuki, 97, 277 Akahata (newspaper), 251 Akikusa Shun, 212 Akita Prefecture, 275 Aleksandrovskii Tsentral Prison, 13m, 98m, 132–133 Allied Council for Japan, 218, 239, 249–250 Allied Occupation of Japan, 3, 14, 36, 71, 130, 260, 264–265. See also United States: Occupation of Japan Allied Powers, 62, 68, 227, 233, 239; defeat of Axis armies, 2, 119, 219; disagreements over postwar justice, 217, 223; good w ill and trust between, 227; joint occupation of Austria, 183; lobbying of by internee groups, 226–229; POW camps in, 116 Allied POWs in Japanese captivity, 30, 54
All-Japan Council for Demanding and Promoting Compensations for Forced Internees (Aizawa Zenyokukyō), 97, 264, 277–278, 281; connections with LDP, 277–278; rivalry with Saitō Zenyokukyō, 277–278, 281 All-Japan Council for Demanding and Promoting Compensations for Forced Internees (Zenyokukyō, Original organization), 273 All-Japan Council for the Compensation of Internees (Sait ō Zenyokuky ō), 262, 272, 276–278, 280, 282–284; afterlife of, 283; diplomatic efforts of, 279–281; failure of, 283; lawsuits against the Japanese government, 278–279; lobbying politicians, 284; sit-in protests, 284; support among internees, 282; receipt of internee lists from Russia, 280 Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Kazakhstan), 12m, 98m, 104 Altai Territory (Russia), 91 Amaya Konokichi, 103 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 232, 320n10 Amur Region (Russia), 184 355
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anticommunism: of the internees, 197–198, 200, 269–270; of Japanese historians, 37; in Japanese society, 110, 224, 247, 254; Japan’s role in, 295; networks forged by the US, 295–296; newspapers in Japan, 233; of the US Occupation authorities, 234 Aomori Prefecture, 275 Araki Sadao, 212 Arctic Circle, 91, 141 Arimitsu Ken, 283–284 Armstrong, Orland Kay, 232 Army Air Force Academy (Japan), 237 Army Ministry (Japan), 46 Army War College (Japan), 6 Article 58 of the Russian Criminal Code (1927), 5–6, 215, 303n22 Artyom (Russia), 13m, 98m, 294 Asaeda Shigeharu, 54 Asahara Seiki, 6–7, 151, 152, 187, 197; arrest of, 5, 195, 221; avoiding l abor, 196; confrontation with Kusachi Teigo, 198; on the Democratic Movement, 55, 171, 196; editor of Nihon shimbun, 5, 167; memoir of, 195–196; previous history of Marxism, 5, 185; repatriation of, 5; resentment toward, 5, 37, 194–195 Asahi shimbun, 36, 55, 168, 234, 247, 264; coverage of repatriation, 237–238; coverage of the Tokuda Incident, 249–251 Asaka Yū ho, 292 Associated Press, 237 Association for Accelerating the Repatriation of Compatriots from the USSR (Zaiso D ōhō Kikan Sokushin Kai), 266–267. See also Long-Term Internees’ League (Chōyokudō) Association for Recording the Life Experiences of Japanese POWs in the USSR (Kirokusuru Kai), 170 Association of Shinto Shrines, 282 Association of the Families of the Missing (Rusu Kazoku Dantai Zenkoku Kyōgikai), 228–229, 261 atomic bomb victims (hibakusha), 268, 281, 295; compensations for, 262–263, 281; victimhood of, 29–30, 71, 73, 270 Australia, 224
Austria: Communist Party of, 183; communists in, 121, 133, 183; POWs in the USSR, 5, 121; prisoners in the USSR, 110 Axis POWs in the USSR, 41, 115, 125–127, 131, 156; at Morshansk camp, 182; at Rada camp, 115, 123–125, 147–148, 166. See also individual countries Baikal Amur Railway Mainline (BAM), 13m, 98m, 317n65; alternative to Trans- Siberian Railway, 118; Japanese POWs building the, 5, 26, 101, 118, 272; origins of, 118. See also Chistyakov, Ivan “barbed-w ire disease,” 177 Barshay, Andrew, 43, 54 baseball, 166 Bei’an (China), 13m, 98m, 83 Belorussia, 232 Beria, Lavrentii, 121, 124, 141, 159 Biisk (Russia), 12m, 91, 98m Birobidzhan (Russia), 13m, 85 Blagoveshchensk (Russia), 13m, 98m, 122 Blakeney, Bruce, 212–214 Bolsheviks, 66–67, 133 Bratsk, 13m, 92, 98m, 105 Buchegger, Ernst, 183 Buddhism, 25, 65, 99, 156, 164 Bulganin, Nikolai, 230 Bungei shunjū (The Literary Chronicles), 74, 104, 211 Carruthers, Susan, 208, 232 Central Asia, 91, 97, 104, 142, 293. See also Kazakhstan; Uzbekistan Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 120, 225–226 Chernyshov, Vasilii, 138, 143–144 Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (Tokyo), 286, 295 China, 1, 18, 74, 208; alliance with the USSR, 235; civilian repatriation from, 64–66; fear of joint invasion of Japan, with USSR, 225; Japanese diplomatic considerations toward, 193; Japanese interests in, 50–54; Japanese internees in, 226–227; Japanese mistreatment of the population of, 53, 73; Japanese ship crews captured by, 264; Japanese troops
Index
stationed in, 7, 11, 48, 51, 54, 63, 83; Japanese withdrawal from, 49–50, 86; treatment of Japanese war criminals by, 75 China Eastern Railway, 118 Chinese Civil War, 11, 49, 242 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 49, 246–247; allegations of funding JCP, 247 Chistyakov, Ivan, 118, 121–122 Chita (Russia), 13m, 65, 87, 94, 98m, 162, 196 Cold War: anticommunism, 19, 110, 287; bilateral treaties dictated by, 260, 264, 281; discourses in Japan, 28, 32–33, 71; early, 10, 18, 23, 33, 43; ideological confrontation of, 48, 66; increase in tensions, 231, 240, 242; influence on historiography, 19, 34–37, 41, 111, 297–298; international order of, 15, 17, 24, 34, 253, 296; legacies of, 31, 77, 209, 288; media b attles of, 208–209; origins of, 16, 209; in the Soviet POW camps, 23, 155; victims of, 253 “comfort women,” 260, 281 Cominform, 245–246 communism, 149, 253; as alternative to capitalism, 150; converts to, 149, 158, 225; Japanese, 185, 241, 246; propaganda against, 232–234, 247; Soviet, 17, 181, 185; study of, 162; suspicion of, 259, 263 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 156, 167, 174, 179, 229; allegations of giving funds to JCP, 246; history of, 190–191; influence on JCP, 248; leadership of, 229–230; Politburo of, 168; propaganda efforts of, 67, 154 Conrad, Sebastian, 36, 44–45, 241 “consolation payments” (isharyō), 264, 265–266, 284 Council on Passing Legislation on the Siberian Internment (Shiberia Rippō Suishin Kaigi), 283–285 Culver, Annika, 184–185 Daily Telegraph (London), 225–226 decolonization, 261 Democratic Liberal Party (Minjitō), 247 Democratic Movement (Soviet reeducation program for Japa nese internees), 5;
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activists of, 23, 174–175, 177, 179, 182–183, 267; agitators of, 162, 181, 190; attraction of, 17, 185, 187; efficiency of, 167, 187; expansion of, 161, 167–168; goals of, 150, 159, 186–187; impact on non-officers, 61, 194; incentives to participate in, 174, 177, 194; influence on internee thinking, 22, 47, 55, 152, 159, 172, 191; Japanese reactions to, 150–152, 180–183, 185–198; “kangaroo courts,” 175–176, 177, 195; memories of, 22, 150, 180, 199–200; methods of, 107, 155–156, 167–168, 175, 189–190; as national humiliation for the Japanese, 37; opportunists in, 151, 159, 180, 193–194; origins of, 100, 150–156, 181; Party History Study Group, 194; perceptions in the West, 149–150, 208; resistance to, 150, 180, 189, 194, 197–198; role in raising production, 177–180; scope of, 161; Soviet reports on, 171; strategists of, 185–187; Youth Action Group (Seinen Kōdōtai), 162, 191 Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), 284 Dimitrov, Georgi, 121 Din, Iuliia, 221 Dodge, Joseph M., 244 Dodge Line, 244 Doihara Kenji, 212 Dolgikh, Ivan, 138, 145, 174 Drea, Edward, 64, 197 Dudorov, Nikolai, 203 Eels, Walter C., 245 Einsidel, Heinrich Graf von, 158 Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 206–207 Elabuga (Russia), 12m, 166, 187–190, 194 Emiot, Israel, 134 emperor system, 57, 162, 164, 189, 251 Empire of Japan, 11, 17, 31, 56–61, 184, 210; collapse of, 1, 48–49, 61–66, 200, 289; colonialism of, 38; disappearance from public consciousness, 14; expansionism of, 16, 28, 38, 68, 150, 295; foreign outposts of, 10; history of, 14, 43, 216; informal, 11; legacies of, 10, 19, 41, 56, 253, 264, 296; memory of, 14, 50, 57, 76–77, 295; nostalgia about, 74–75; pan-A sianism of, 17, 50; in postwar
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Empire of Japan (continued) consciousness, 14, 16–17, 28–29, 57–58, 71, 295; propaganda about, 48, 186; sacrifices for, 18, 20, 49–50, 56, 82, 185–186; and the Siberian Internment, 21–22, 49; transition to nation-state, 11, 43, 49, 78, 295; victims of, 20, 31, 54, 281, 297 Endō Shōji, 295 Field Serv ice Code (Senjinkun), 46, 81 Fifteen-Year War, 44 French POWs in the USSR, 147 Fujiwara Tei, 61, 65 Fukushima Prefecture, 9, 244, 275 Furuhashi Shinzō, 195 Furumi Tadayuki, 53, 58–60; on Manchukuo, 62, 69, 74, 77; on repatriation, 65; on the Soviets, 84 Fushun War Criminals Management Center, 75 Futaba Kaname, 77, 84–86 Garibaldists’ Union, 157 Gavrilov, Viktor, 138, 139, 161, 181 General Affairs State Council (GASC) of Manchukuo, 53 General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ SCAP): anticommunism of, 32, 108, 241, 244–245, 248; attitudes t oward Siberian internees, 46, 237, 242–244; efforts to hasten repatriation of the Japanese from the USSR, 3, 218, 224; Press Code, 233; reforms, 259–260, 264–265; rewriting the history of WWII, 44, 73; on Soviet propaganda efforts, 149, 155, 234–235; special reports of, 16, 149, 236, 242, 246; surveillance of returnee groups, 266–267. See also Allied Occupation of Japan; MacArthur, Douglas Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of POWs, (Second, 1929), 116 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of POWs (Third, 1949), 116, 278–279, 283 German Officers’ Union, 157 German POWs in the USSR. See Nazi Germany: POWs in the USSR Gibney, Frank, 208, 240, 246, 255
Ginzburg, Eugenia, 128 glasnost, 40 Gobi Desert, 156 Golubev, Konstantin, 218–219 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 279–280 Great Terror (1937–1938), 122, 166 Gromyko, Andrei, 203, 233 Guadalcanal, 11 Gulag, 14, 138, 141, 155; consciousness in the West, 114–115, 232; contrast with Tsarist prisons, 110; historiography of, 41, 44, 121–122; impact on the GUPVI, 112, 115, 117–132; inmate solidarity in, 133–134; mortality rates in, 128; purposes of, 116–117; recreation activities in, 164–166; role in the Soviet economy, 118–119, 128–129; testimonies of survivors, 117, 132–134; as a tool to criticize the USSR, 231–240; transportation of Europeans into, 113; treatment of inmates in, 41, 111, 117, 147 GUPVI: Antifascist Movement Section of, 196; attempts to improve conditions in, 137–140, 143–147; broader historical context of, 14, 113; camps as correctional institutions, 116–117; conditions in, 41, 123, 129–131, 138–139; difference from Gulag, 14, 115, 130; differences from other POW camp systems, 116–117; experiences of foreigners in, 14–15, 123; foreign knowledge of, 112–113; goals of, 115; history of, 114–123; impact of Gulag on, 115; inner workings of, 16, 120–121; management of, 117, 121, 127, 137–147; mechanisms of control, 117, 120–121, 167–168; multiethnic and multinational nature, 15, 45, 114, 123; role of forced labor in, 40, 116. See also Soviet camps for POWs Hakamada Mutsuo, 196 Hakamada Satomi, 196, 248 Hama Toshikazu, 174, 177–178 Handō Kazutoshi, 65 Haneda Airport, 211 Harbin, 13m, 65, 72, 98m, 215 Harbin Special Organization (Harubin tokumu kikan), 83, 196 Harvard-Yale football match, 166
Index
Hasegawa Hideo, 203 Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, 66 Hasegawa Uichi, 267–269 Hashimoto Takuzō, 77, 91, 177 Hata Hikosaburō, 71–72 Hata Ikuhiko, 63, 130, 323n52 Hatakeda Kan, 105 Hatoyama Ichirō, 270 Haushofer, Karl, 52 Hayashi Mutsuo, 182 Hayashi Teru, 7, 196–197 Heilongjiang Province (China), 52, 83, 272 Heiwa no ishizue memoir collection (Foundation for Peace), 77, 78, 125, 135, 277 hibakusha. See atomic bomb victims Hidaka Makoto, 189 Higurashi Yoshinobu, 216 Hill, Christopher L., 34 Hiratsuka Mitsuo, 257, 261, 284–285, 288 Hiratsuka movement, 179 Hirohito, Emperor of Japan: caricature of, 164; gifts of honor from, 6; Imperial Broadcast of 15 August 1945, 2, 11, 77, 82; in imperial propaganda, 52; loyalty to, 70, 81, 194, 198, 242; role in the war, 163; sacrifices for the, 162–163; and the Siberian internees, 57–59, 82, 162, 191, 242; and the Tokyo Trial, 162, 217 Hirokawa Kōzen, 247 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, 71, 73, 295. See also atomic bomb victims Hiroshima Prefecture, 173 Hirota Kōki, 62, 311n50 history problems (rekishi mondai), 261, 297 Hitachi (corporation), 244 Hitler, Adolf, 158 Hodgson, William Roy, 249 Hokkaido, 13m, 26, 98m, 130, 238 Holl, Adelbert, 83, 85–86, 103, 110; on inmate solidarity, 133; on the Japanese internees, 188; on Soviet poverty, 85, 122–123; on Soviet reeducation efforts, 158; on the treatment of foreign inmates, 134 Honshu, 13m, 26 Horyo taikenki (Records of POW Experiences), 77–78, 153, 170 Hosaka Masayasu, 211–212 Hōsei University (Manchukuo), 59
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Hungarian National Committee, 157 Hungarian POWs in the USSR, 130–131, 147–148, 312n73 Hungary, 1 Ide Shōichi, 281 Igarashi Yoshikuni, 42, 314n3, 343n168 Iitsuka Toshio, 3, 86, 92, 100–101 Ikite sokoku e memoir collection (Returning Alive to the Motherland), 86, 94 Imperial General Headquarters, 6, 61, 62, 64 Imperial Japanese Army Academy (Shikan Gakkō), 6, 187 Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), 3, 14, 63, 212, 230; class warfare in, 197–198; defeat of, 7, 82; Fourth Army, 82, 210; general staff, 213; ideological training in, 237; Koreans in, 7, 181, 230, 260, 285, 292; military discipline (gunki) in, 54–55, 154, 188, 200; Military Operations Department, 213; military pensions, 260, 264–265; officers of, 6, 27, 55–56, 72, 182, 188; opportunism in, 193; shame of becoming POW in, 58; Thirty-Third Army, 74; uniforms of, 14, 49, 84, 142, 205–206; violence in, 22, 54–55, 100, 173–174. See also Kwantung Army Imperial Palace (Tokyo), 58, 188, 286 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (1945), 81 Inada Yoshio, 175 Inami Kiyoshi, 194 Inner Mongolia, 156 Inokuma Tokurō, 286 Inomata Kunio, 90, 136, 199–201 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). See Red Cross “Internationale” (song), 23, 178, 189, 197, 208, 242 International Memorial POW Cemetery at Tambov-Rada, 147–148 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). See Tokyo Trial Irkutsk (Russia), 13m, 26, 98m, 132, 170, 257, 272 Ishiguro Tatsunosuke, 55, 180, 200, 255 Ishihara Yoshirō, 7 Ishiwara Kanji, 52, 74 Itagaki Seishirō, 52, 60, 187, 190–191, 212
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Itagaki Tadashi, 42, 151, 204; becoming communist, 181, 185, 187, 189–191; on the decadence among Japanese internee officers, 188–189; as a Democratic Movement activist, 191; Diet testimony of, 191–192, 236–237; on the emperor system, 162; on his father’s role in the war, 190–191; on the Nihon shimbun, 60, 189; post-repatriation career, 192–193; transfer to Khabarovsk, 189 Italian POWs in the USSR, 131, 147 Itō Masao: on the emperor, 58; on the imperialist war, 47–48, 59; on the memory of internment, 79; on Soviet poverty, 122 Itō Sadao, 275 Ivanovo (Russia), 12m, 157, 230, 268 Iwate Prefecture, 94, 239, 275 Izvestiia (newspaper), 171 Japan: aggressive plans against the USSR, 6, 66, 211, 214; Allied Occupation of, 130; anticommunism in, 224, 231, 247–248, 252–253; anti-Soviet feelings in, 224–226, 231–234, 238, 256, 287; as an Asian model of modernity, 52, 74–75; Attorney General of, 247, 266; citizens’ groups, 31, 74, 227, 232, 254, 261, 264, 271; climate of, 91, 140; defeat in WWII, 36, 43, 57, 81–82, 287; disabled veterans in, 30, 71, 263, 265; experience in WWII, 47, 61, 81, 134, 265; fear of Soviet invasion in, 23, 225–226; imperialism, 36, 48, 52–55, 59–60, 71, 75, 161, 184; joining the United Nations, 260, 271; Livelihood Protection Law, 267; militarism of, 51, 67, 73, 159, 162, 168, 171, 184, 191–192, 237, 265; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of, 225, 258, 281; Ministry of Health, L abor, and Welfare of, 258, 274, 294; Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of, 277; Ministry of Transport of, 258; nationalism of, 185, 216; postwar prosperity in, 112, 290; postwar reconstruction and remaking, 17, 19, 31, 43, 45, 209, 295–296; Silk Road diplomacy of, 293; Supreme Court, 271, 273, 283; surrender to the Allies, 2, 26, 51, 58–59, 63, 67, 81–82, 131,
152, 308n3; territorial disputes, 41, 281; unresolved “history problems,” 261; victim narratives in, 29–33, 38, 76, 104, 289–292, 297; victimization of Asians, 53–54, 261, 297; war memory in, 27–28, 31, 35, 44, 50–51, 71, 78–79; war responsibility, 36, 189; working people of, 7, 53, 164, 184, 244–245, 247, 256, 273. See also Empire of Japan Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), 8–9, 200 Japan Disabled Veterans Association (Nihon Shōi Gunjin Kai), 265 Japanese Communist Party (JCP), 184, 187, 192–193; allegations of foreign influence, 246–247; attempts to reestablish during wartime, 185; attempts to use internment for political goals, 240–246; commemoration of the Siberian Internment, 287; criticism by Cominform, 245; disputes within, 246, 248; history of, 191; internees opposed to, 252; Japanese government prosecution of, 247; “kamikaze policy,” 248, 252; “lovable,” 241; media attacks on, 223, 231, 234, 240; Occupation policies against, 240, 245, 248; perceived threat from, 245; publications of, 153; relations with Occupation authorities, 241; Siberian returnees joining, 23, 207–208, 242, 249; Soviet influence on, 248; success at the 1949 elections, 18, 241–242, 244; threat of a “violent revolution,” 18, 149, 225, 246–248 Japanese POWs and internees in the USSR: applications for Soviet citizenship, 201–203, 231; convicted as war criminals, 3, 6, 38, 132, 229; deaths of, 39, 59, 125–127, 142, 171, 199, 236, 276, 286, 290, 302n9; divisions within, 100, 150, 167, 173, 176, 203; encounters with locals, 104–105, 189, 201–202; experiences of defeat, 81–86, 152; gulf between postwar Japanese society and, 34–35; imperial consciousness of, 42, 47–50, 59–61; as instruments in the Cold War, 18–19, 221, 240; mistreatment of, 3, 103, 117, 150; payment for labor of, 87, 104, 194, 278, 285; postwar campaigns for compensation, 18, 23, 31, 36, 46,
Index
260–283, 287, 291; pursuit of truth about the internment, 27–28; reintegration into postwar society, 28, 203, 258–260, 263, 275; return to Japan of the remains of, 294–295; special treatment provided to, 129–134, 147, 157, 194; suspicion faced after repatriation, 23, 34, 80, 104, 150, 199, 208, 259, 263; as witnesses of the USSR in postwar Japan, 32, 42, 184; working on the construction of BAM, 5, 26, 101, 118, 272. See also memoirs of the Siberian Internment Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS), 4, 7, 229–230 Japanese Returnees League (Nichikidō), 266, 267. See also League for Supporting the Livelihoods of Returnees from the USSR (Sokidō) Japan-Russia Friendship Association, 87 Japan Times, 238 Japan-Uzbekistan Association, 293 Japan War Bereaved Families Association (Nihon Izokukai), 192, 282 Jewish Autonomous Region (Russia), 85, 196 jibunshi (self-history), 27–28, 111 Johnston, Charles Hepburn, 228 Kagawa Shōichi, 5, 194, 195 Kagawa Yutaka, 173 Kaifu Toshiki, 277 Kaji Ryōsaku, 252 Kambayashi Tomoya, 281, 283 kamikaze units (tokkōtai), 187, 237 Kamiya Kyōhei, 170 Kannon, 25 Kan Sueharu, 191, 209, 250; allegations of communism, 253; as a philosopher, 253; suicide, 252–254; summons to the National Diet, 250–251 Kanzaki Tatsuo, 65 Karafuto (Southern Sakhalin), 7, 50, 55, 63, 302n5; repatriation from, 221, 229. See also Sakhalin Karafuto Agency, 212 Karaganda (Kazakhstan), 12m, 141, 250, 251 Kasahara Kinzaburō, 176 Katakura Tadashi, 74
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Katasonova, Elena, 138, 139, 161, 181, 280 Katō Kintarō, 61, 259 Katō Ky ūzō, 92 Kawabe Torashirō, 63 Kazakhstan, 104, 141, 146, 250 Kazuki Yasuo, 7, 304n30 Keiō University, 166 KGB (Committee for State Security), 121, 195, 247–248. See also MGB Khabarovsk Territory, 145, 164, 169, 201; Asahara Seiki’s activities in, 5; Demo cratic Movement in, 190, 194–195; Department of Internal Affairs, 138, 174; Itagaki Tadashi transferred to, 189; mistreatment of the Japanese in, 194; propaganda authorities in, 156; reeducation courses in, 181, 193; regional directorate for POW affairs, 143; Tanaka Takeshi’s return to, 295 Khabarovsk Trial, The (1949), 217, 222 Khalkhin-Gol. See Nomonhan Incident Khingan Range, 68, 156 Khruliov, Andrei, 124 Khrushchev, Nikita, 119, 230 Kikuchi Toshio, 104, 259 Kimura Battalion, 171 Kimura Kōhei, 253 Kimura Takao, 77, 91, 177 Kirichenko, Aleksei, 63, 247–248, 280 Kitagawa Nagayoshi, 93, 102 Kiyose Ichirō, 214 KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party), 49 K ō an-m aru (ship), 4–5 Kobayashi Akina, 39 Kolyma (Russia), 128 Komatsu Shigerō, 173, 175, 193 Komatsuzaki Risaku, 94 Kōmeitō Party, 270, 284 Komori Kiyoo, 174 Komsomolsk-on-Amur (Russia), 171, 179 Komsomol (Young Communist Movement), 106, 317n65 Kondō Takeo, 79, 83–84 Kōno Akira, 170 Kōno Chiharu, 69 Konoe Fumimaro, 72, 222 Konoe Fumitaka, 222, 313n94, 336n50 Konsalik, Heinz, 103
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Kōrakuen Stadium (Tokyo), 166 Korean internees in the USSR, 7, 229, 230, 260, 285 Korean peninsula, 4, 64, 142, 187, 208; as Japanese colony, 50; repatriation from, 29; partition of, 49 Korean War, 18, 32, 208, 223–227, 240 Koshkin, Anatolii, 167 Kotkin, Stephen, 99, 200 Kovalenko, Ivan, 5, 167, 184, 196; influence on Soviet policy on Japan, 168; leadership in the Democratic Movement, 185; on the selection of Japanese witnesses for Soviet prosecution at the Tokyo Trial, 211 K ō za-ha, 186 Krasnogorsk (Russia), 12m, 157 Krasnoyarsk Territory (Russia), 12m, 98m, 120, 203 Kriukov, Dmitrii, 221, 336n46 Krivenko, Mikhail, 138 Kruglov, Sergei, 82, 145; on the internees’ l abor exploitation, 146, 220; on the internees’ physical condition, 125, 141–142; on the political mood among the Japanese, 159; on repatriation, 15–16, 89, 219–220; order to start antifascist training, 157 Kubota Zenzō, 249–250 kulaks, 115, 173 Kurihara Yasuyo, 89, 225, 239 Kuril Islands, 1, 37, 50, 67, 81, 221, 281 Kuroyanagi Moritsuna, 165, 200 Kuroyanagi “Tetchan” Tetsuko, 200 Kurumizawa Kōshi, 7 Kusaba Tatsumi, 210–212 Kusachi Faction, 197–198 Kusachi Teigo, 197–198 Kwantung Army, 50, 92, 106, 153, 159, 186; antipathy in Japanese society toward, 71, 73; atrocities in Manchuria, 54, 184; commanders of, 2, 6, 48, 62, 64–65, 71–72, 184, 230, 268; failure to protect Japanese in Manchukuo, 31, 36, 48, 51, 61–62, 65–66, 70, 198; inflated reputation of, 52–53, 63, 301n3, 301n4; Information Bureau (Jōhōbu), 268; military strategies of, 62–64, 214; mobilization into, 7, 66, 70, 214, 260; Operations
Division, 197; responsibility for Siberian Internment, 55–56; role in colonizing Manchuria, 50–56, 71; Russian Education Unit, 5; Staff, 197, 210, 212; surrender of, 71–72, 115; violence toward soldiers in, 54–55; weakening of, 48, 61–62, 81. See also Imperial Japanese Army Kyodo News Agency, 203 Kyoto, 13m, 177, 207, 216, 242 Kyushu, 26, 264, 276 Labor unions, 244, 245, 259 Lago-Ozerov, Boris, 222 Lake Baikal, 13m, 86, 89, 98m Lake Khasan Incident, 134 League for Hastening the Repatriation of Officers and Soldiers Abroad (Zaigai Shōhei Kikan Sokushin Dōmei), 266–267 League for Obtaining Compensations and Consolation Payments for Wart ime POWs (Senji Horyo Hoshōkin Isharyō Kakutoku Suishin Kyōgikai Dōmei), 264 League for Supporting the Livelihoods of Returnees from the USSR (Sokidō), 100, 153, 238, 266–267. See also Japanese Returnees League (Nichikidō) lebensraum, 52 Lenin, Vladimir, 47, 119, 312n77, 321n16 Leninism, 106, 199. See also Marxism; Marxism-Leninism Liaoning (China), 52, 75 Liberal Democratic Party, LDP (Japan), 192, 264, 276–278, 282, 284, 287 lieux de mémoire, 29 Life (magazine), 205–209 Lipper, Elinor, 117, 172 “literature of hardship,” 80, 89, 104, 114, 135, 297 London, 4, 87, 225, 228, 230 Long-Term Internees’ League (Chōyokudō), 266, 268–271 Lutz, Robert, 125 MacArthur, Douglas, 3, 26, 63, 249 Maddocks, Arthur F., 227 Maeda Akihiro, 264, 273 Magadan (Russia), 13m, 141 mahjongg, 188
Index
Mainichi shimbun, 234–237 Maizuru, 5, 13m, 14, 240, 257; cold reception at, 259; disturbances at, 23, 177, 241–242, 244, 255, 289; interrogation of returnees at, 32, 235–236, 242; last repatriation vessel at, 4; repatriation procedures at, 274 Malinovskii, Rodion, 72 Manchukuo, 1–2, 9, 21, 81, 83; bandits in, 53, 69; climate of, 3, 141; collapse of, 51, 58, 74–75, 82, 289; contrast with the USSR, 122; defense of, 48, 62–64; Department of Communications, 87; development plans for, 48, 74; dismantling of industry by the Soviets, 2, 85; as an expansionist project, 52, 184; government employees of, 6, 59, 65, 75, 87; imperial f amily of, 65; imperial propaganda about, 48, 53, 56, 60, 61, 184; importance within Japanese Empire, 50, 52, 60, 62; importance for the Siberian Internment, 50, 74–75; Japanese colonization of, 31, 53–55; Japanese settlers in, 7, 50–51, 56–57, 62–65, 82, 186; Japanese troops stationed in, 48, 54–56, 60, 81, 131, 272; Japanese victimhood in, 44, 57, 62–63, 68–73, 74–75; memories of, 36, 50, 55, 71, 74–75; military conscription in, 7, 8; pan-Asian dream of, 45, 48, 52–53, 71–75; repatriation from, 29, 65, 69–70; Soviet occupation of, 236; Soviet plunder of, 2, 62, 84, 94, 143; White Russians in, 88, 215 Manchu people, 53, 83 Manchuria. See Manchukuo Manchurian Incident (1931), 52, 74 Manchurian Offensive, 1–2, 38, 50, 66–68, 72–73, 156, 167, 197. See also Soviet- Japanese War (1945) Manstein, Erich von, 158 Mao Zedong, 242, 245 Maritime Province (Russia), 3, 72, 147, 294 Marunouchi (Tokyo), 211 Marxism, 5, 17, 119, 182–183, 185, 191. See also Marxism-Leninism Marxism-Leninism, 110, 151, 181, 194, 199, 233. See also Marxism; Leninism Masuda Kōji, 9–10, 165 Matsukawa Incident, 244–245
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Matsumoto Shun’ichi, 4 Matsumoto Yasujirō, 103 Matsumura Shōzō, 195 Matsumura Tomokatsu, 210–213, 215 Matsuno Hisayoshi, 165 May Day, 189, 273 McCarthyism, 232, 252 McManus, Lawrence J., 214–215 Meiji Emperor, 23 memoirs of the Siberian Internment, 24, 27; as attempts to forge identities, 28; as best sellers, 7; biases in, 79–80, 199; civilian vs military, 27, 42, 50–52, 70–71, 289; cold weather in, 8, 59, 80, 89, 140–141; collections of, 76–77, 86, 135, 153, 175, 194, 277, 293; contempt for the Democratic Movement in, 150–151, 168–170, 175, 180; by converts to Marxism, 23, 188; diversity of experiences in, 7, 27–28, 32, 76–77, 80, 97; in the early postwar, 21, 71; by German POWs, 78, 158; hard labor in, 8, 59, 80, 89, 143; as historical sources, 10–11, 14, 16, 22, 43, 135; hunger in, 8, 59, 80, 89, 94–96, 140, 174; importance of, 28; Japanese defeat in, 81–86; Japanese Empire in, 57–60; limitations of, 28, 35, 48, 111, 127, 137; Manchukuo in the, 71, 122, 289; need to combine with archives, 113–114, 130, 150; nostalgia in, 79, 125, 188, 290; political utility of, 78; positive experiences in, 104–108; readers of, 35, 80, 103–104, 106, 109, 135–136; reliance on memory in, 79, 135; Soviet women in, 83, 94, 102, 104–105, 107, 125, 203; suffering in the, 8, 89–104, 134, 290, 293. See also “literature of hardship” Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates (Heiwa Kinen Tenji Shiryōkan), 91, 277, 291 Meretskov, Kirill, 72 MGB (Ministry of State Security of the USSR), 121, 195–196 Miki Jun, 205 Mikoyan, Anastas, 230 militarist cliques (gunbatsu), 61, 168 Minamiguchi Saichi, 100 Minami Jirō, 212
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Minami Nobushirō, 182 Mitaka Incident, 244 Miura Kōichi, 9 Miyakawa Funao, 71, 72 Miyake Mitsuharu, 212 Mizuhara Shigeru, 166 Molotov, Viacheslav, 5, 121, 159, 220, 229, 303n19 Mongolia, 225; Japanese internment in, 104, 236; participation in the Manchurian offensive, 156–157 Moore, Aaron William, 34, 135 Morozov, Pavlik, 173 Morshansk (Russia), 12m, 182–183, 185 Moscow, 12m, 87–88, 188, 208, 211, 217; as the administrative center of the Soviet system, 130, 138–139, 221; archives in, 296; camp authorities in, 125, 128, 147, 156, 167; Ivan Chistyakov’s nostalgia for, 121–122; Japanese representatives in, 62; Konoe Fumimaro’s aborted mission to, 72; as reference to the USSR as a whole, 3, 123, 229, 232, 233, 250, 281 Moscow Radio, 239 Mudanjiang (China), 13m, 86–87, 98m, 137 Munakata Hajime, 186 Murai Michiaki, 168 Murai Misao, 257 Murata Jinsaku, 94 Murayama Tsuneo, 286, 302n9 Mutō Akira, 230 MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, 1946–1991): attempts to improve camp conditions, 139–140, 143; control of internee labor exploitation, 144–146; controlling the repatriation of the Japanese, 218–221, 223; inspections of camps, 146; monitoring the mood among internees, 159; recruitment of Japanese for intelligence, 248; rejection of Japanese citizenship applications, 203; role in the Soviet economy, 119. See also NKVD Nagase Ryōji, 38 Naitō Misao. See Uchimura Gōsuke Naitō Takashi, 191 Nakamaki Yasuhiro, 104 Nakano Intelligence School (IJA), 83, 212
Nakano Shigeharu, 250, 343n164 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 193 Nakayama Kōzō, 8–10 Nakaya Masataka, 92, 100, 125 Nakhodka, 13m, 98m, 175–176, 191; arrival from, 4, 240, 242, 247; communist reeducation at, 255, 267; port of, 4; sea route to Maizuru from, 4–5, 274 Nanbara Shigeru, 230 Napier, Jack P., 266–267 Narita Ry ū ichi, 57, 60 Narita Seiji, 166 Nasukawa Masashi, 282–283 Nasu Tadao, 100 National Archives and Records Administration of the United States (NARA), 212 National Committee for a Free Germany, 157 National Council for Accelerating the Repatriation of Japa nese Nationals Abroad (Zaigai Dōhō Hikiage Sokushin Zenkoku Kyōgikai), 226–227, 229, 261 National Diet (Japan), 21, 23, 175–176, 209, 242; discussion of internee compensations at, 268–270, 284; House of Councillors (Upper), 192, 236, 247, 249, 253; House of Representatives (Lower), 252, 284; Itagaki Tadashi testimony at, 191–193; JCP increasing its representa tion at, 241–242, 244; Kan Sueharu’s testimony at, 251–253; Siberian internees submitting demands to, 242, 249, 264, 268, 283–284; Tokuda Ky ū ichi’s testimony at the, 249–250 National Railway Workers’ Union (Kokutetsu Rōdō Kumiai), 244–245 Navoiy Theater (Tashkent), 293–294 Nazi coa lit ion, 119, 129 Nazi Germany, 2, 66, 157, 159; concentration camps, 124, 127, 232; defeat of, 83; internment history in, 113; Occupied by the Allies, 44, 315n27; POWs in the US, 108; POWs in the USSR, 78, 117, 157, 320n3; rape of women by Soviet soldiers, 70; Reichsbahn, 85; Third Reich, 83; treatment of Soviet POWs, 127; victims of, 148; war trophies removed from, 85; Wehrmacht, 127 New York City, 206
Index
Nihonjinron, 293 Nihon shimbun, 152, 160; editorial team of, 99, 154, 167, 185–186; Friends of (tomo no kai), 162, 172, 273; influence on internee thinking, 55, 170–171, 201; internee attitudes t oward, 60, 154, 170–172, 189; leadership of, 5; origins of, 168; portrayal of Japan in, 34–35, 163, 238; role in the Democratic Movement, 55, 167–169 Niibori Jūzō, 86–87 Niigata Prefecture, 97, 186 Nimmo, William, 41 Ninomiya Jōbu, 195 Nippon Light Metal Company, 54 Nishizawa Ry ūji, 248 Nizhny Novgorod (Russia), 131 NKVD, 2, 7, 14; accommodation of the internees, 112, 131, 141; attempts to improve camp conditions by, 125–126, 138, 318n88; confiscation of internees’ items by, 84; construction projects of, 119; labor exploitation of internees, 118, 143–144; prosecution of the Japanese internees, 221–222; renting of internees as labor force, 144; transportation of internees, 96, 131; treatment of the Japanese internees, 132. See also MVD Nomonhan Incident, 14, 66 noncommissioned officers (NCOs): attitudes to the Democratic Movement among, 61, 154; food rations for, 139; grievances against officers, 99–100; labor exploitation of, 144; postwar pensions of, 265; Soviet reeducation of, 159, 194, 200 non-Japanese internees, 18, 134, 285. See also entries on internees from individual nations Norilsk, 12m, 91, 98m, 141 Northern Territories Issue, 37, 67, 281 North K orea (DPRK), abduction of Japanese citizens by, 38 noruma (daily work quota), 99–100, 104, 179, 199 Nosaka Sanzō, 248 Novikov, Aleksandr, 72 nuclear weapons, 242, 295 nurses: Japanese, 7, 205–207, 303n28; Soviet, 102
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365
Ob’ River (Russia), 91 October Revolution. See Russian Revolution OGPU, 118. See also NKVD; MVD Oguma Eiji, 93, 259, 291–292 Oguma Kenji, 93, 259, 291–292 Ōhira Hirayuki, 260 Ōki Eiichi, 266–267 Ōki Tatsuji, 63, 82–83, 85–86, 108–109 Oranki (Oranskii) Monastery camp (Russia), 12m, 131, 157 Ōshima Hiroshi, 212 Ōtsuka Michio, 274, 276 Ōtsu Toshio, 212 Owada Mitsu, 54–55, 81 Ō yama Ikuo, 229 Ozawa Yuki, 291–292 Pacific Ocean, 217; eastern, 33; islands in, 295; southern, 239 Pacific War, 44, 61–63 Pakhta-Aral (Kazakhstan), 12m, 146 Pal, Radhabinod, 216 Pan-Asianism, 16, 17, 50 Paulus, Friedrich, 157 Pennington, Lee, 30, 71, 81, 263, 265, 289 Perevertkin, Semion, 230–231 Petrov, Ivan, 144, 157 Pliev, Issa, 64, 156–157 Poglitsch, Emerich, 110 Pokrovskii (Ukraine), 124 Poland, 1, 14, 147 Politburo of the CPSU (USSR), 118, 168 Potsdam Declaration, 71, 82; Soviet disregard of, 26, 63, 223–224, 226, 228; as a tool to put pressure on the USSR, 228–229 Pravda (newspaper), 168, 171 “Prayer at Dawn Incident,” 175–176 Project Stitch, 32, 242 Project Wringer, 32, 242 propaganda: anti-American by USSR, 150, 199, 239, 248; anti-Soviet, 209, 227, 231–234, 238–239; Japanese wart ime, 48, 52–54, 56, 59–61, 152, 184; impact on Soviet citizens, 84, 106–108; reeducation in the Soviet camps, 5, 10, 17, 21, 38, 47, 55, 61, 121, 129. See also Democratic Movement
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Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation (Heiwa Kinen Jigyō Tokubetsu Kikin, PFPC), 266, 276–278 Pu Yi, 65, 312n67 Pyongyang, 1 racism, perceived lack of in the USSR, 15, 108 Rada Camp (Russia), 12m, 89, 115, 123–125, 147–148, 166, 182 Radchuk, Iosif, 146 rape: of German w omen by Soviet soldiers, 312n73; of Japanese women by Soviet soldiers, 36, 68–70, 74. See also “comfort women” Rastvorov, Yuri, 248, 341n144 “recalcitrant repatriates,” 242–245, 255, 258 Red Army (Soviet), 64, 82, 84, 124, 156–158, 181, 186, 232; atrocities committed by, 62, 66; Chief Political Directorate of, 168; history of, 68; looting by, 83–86; and rape of German w omen, 70, 312n73; and rape of Japanese women, 36, 68–70, 74, 83; military might of, 64; propaganda about, 168; symbols of, 148; victory over IJA, 2, 52; war against Germany, 127. See also Soviet-German War “Red Banner Brigade” (Akahata Teidan), 249 Red Cross (ICRC), 109, 175, 229. See also Japanese Red Cross Society “Red Purge,” 245, 259 “red repatriates,” 177, 209, 242, 244, 254–255, 259, 263, 267. See also “recalcitrant repatriates” Rehabilitation camps (ozdorovitel’nyi lager’), 126, 139, 142, 146 repatriation: announcement of the end of, 219; as a Cold War battlefield, 217–231; coverage in Japanese newspapers, 234; Japanese agencies, 242, 258; Japanese efforts to hasten, 223–230; media pressure on the USSR, 231–240; memories of, 57; promise of, 177–178; “recalcitrant repatriates,” 242–245, 255, 258; Soviet approaches to, 218–222, 240; from US-and UK-c ontrolled areas, 213, 218
Repatriation Assistance Bureau (Hikiage Engochō), 242, 258 repatriation literature (hikiage bungaku, also hikiagemono), 51, 69 “Rising Sun Brigade” (Hinomaru Teidan), 194, 249 Rodzaevskii, Konstantin, 215 Romanian National Bloc, 157 Romanian POWS in the USSR, 130, 148, 157 Rosenblit, Solomon, 212, 213 Russian Fascist Union (Harbin), 215 Russian Federation (Penal Code; ) Russian Revolution (1917), 66, 119, 168 Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), 182–184 Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), 44, 66–67, 312n77 Saga Prefecture, 264 Saitama Prefecture, 95 Saitō Akira, 102, 169 Saitō Rokurō, 259, 280; awarded Russian Order of Friendship, 280; as a Demo cratic Movement activist, 273; death of, 282, 285; efforts to expand Zenyokukyō, 276–277; election to Tsuruoka City Council, 273; established Zenyokukyō prefectural branch, 274; lawsuits against the Japanese state, 278–279, 283; legacy of, 283–285; Siberian Internment of, 272–273; split with the Aizawa Faction, 277–278; start of campaigning, 272, 274; vision of, 274, 276–277; visits to Russia, 279–280, 282; writings of, 275; as Zenyokukyō leader, 262, 276 Sakhalin, 1, 13m, 69, 98m, 225; Japanese residents remaining in, 203; sovietization of, 221. See also Karafuto Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 144 San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951), 226–228, 270–271 Sataka Makoto, 69 Satō Kashio, 25–27, 33, 45, 86, 272, 296 Sawada Seikichi, 109 Sawatari Hideo, 101 Scott, C. Peter (British diplomat), 227 Sea of Japan, 4, 8, 11, 86, 272, 274 Sebald, William J., 228, 239, 249, 267
Index
Sejima Ry ūzō, 188; confrontation with Asahara Seiki, 198; early c areer of, 6; internment memoir of, 7, 72, 211, 213; in Manchukuo prior to Soviet invasion, 61–66; postwar interviews of, 216; postwar success as business leader, 42, 259; repatriation of, 5–6; sentencing in the USSR, 6, 215; as Soviet witness at the Tokyo Trial, 6, 209–216, 254; as strategist in the Imperial General Headquarters, 61–66, 213–214; at surrender negotiations with Soviets, 71–73; suspected role in offering Japanese soldiers to the USSR, 72–73; suspicions of collaboration with the Soviets, 211 Sekai (magazine), 291 Sekine Tadayoshi, 94–95 Semionov, Grigorii, 215 Seno Eijirō, 270 Seno Osamu, 91 Seraphim, Franziska, 31, 263, 282, 289 Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Walther von, 158 Shalamov, Varlam, 117, 120, 303n22 Shenyang, 13m, 65, 98m Shiki Theater Company, 9 Shikoku, 26 Shikoku Gorō, 7 Shimada Shirō, 89, 125, 148 Shimazu Tadatsugu, 229–230 Shimizu Hiroshi, 270 Shimoyama Incident, 244 Shimoyama Sadanori, 244 Shinkyō (Changchun), 13m, 59, 63, 65, 98m Shin Toho Film Studio, 9, 239 Shinyō -m aru (ship), 177 Shirai Hisaya, 198; on internee campaigns for compensation, 267–269, 278; on the Japanese responsibility for the Siberian Internment, 55; on Saitō Rokurō, 278 shock workers, 179. See also Hiratsuka movement; socialist competition; Stakhanovite movement shōgi (board game), 188 Showa Emperor. See Hirohito Showa period, 28 Siberia Day (memorial serv ice on 23 August), 286, 290 Siberian internment: archives on, 10–11, 14–16, 26, 38–40, 77, 84, 112; attitudes
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in Japanese society toward, 21, 33, 35, 37, 235; as a Cold War battleground, 16, 41, 209, 216–217; commemoration of, 9, 22, 29–30, 277, 286–287; compared to abduction of Japanese by North Korea, 38; compared to Babylonian Captivity, 11; complexity of, 19, 44, 77–80, 115, 292; conspiracy theories about, 72–73, 210–211; controversial nature of, 36–37, 261; as a corollary of WWII, 19, 43, 50; end of, 4, 6; as a global history event, 21, 33–34, 41, 43–46, 288; as a historical lens, 43, 297; historiography of, 14, 33–43, 50, 115; in history, 10–20, 29–30; illegality of, 20, 35, 41, 86, 88–89, 130, 219, 283; Japanese responsibility for, 31, 50–51, 55–56, 73; length of, 4, 218; narratives and memoirs of, 22, 30, 32, 57–61, 73, 76–80, 91, 102–104, 134; origins of, 2–3, 25–27, 49, 75; significance of, 11, 29, 41, 261, 288; Soviet attitudes to, 66–68, 106, 126–127, 279, 312n78. See also memoirs of the Siberian Internment Siberian intervention, 66 Silk Road, 293 Sino-Soviet Alliance, 235 Skvortsov, Nikolai, 146–147 Slovak POWs in the USSR, 147 soccer, 166 Socialist competition, 178–179, 183, 194. See also Hiratsuka movement; Stakhanovite movement Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 6, 10, 117, 303n22 Sophia University (Tokyo), 1 Southeast Asia, 50, 61, 73, 184, 239, 296 Southern Sakhalin. See Karafuto South Manchurian Railway Company (Mantetsu), 53, 65 Soviet camps for POWs, 14, 22, 45–46; afterlives of POWs, 148; broader context of, 22, 39, 113, 296; class struggle in, 150–152, 154–155, 163–164, 175–177, 193–194; contrast with Gulag camps, 14, 41, 96, 114–117, 147; contrast with other POW camp systems, 114, 116–117, 125, 127, 133; food and nutrition in, 39, 91–96, 136; geography of, 11, 91, 140–142; history of, 38–41, 111–112;
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Soviet camps for POWs (continued) improvement in conditions in, 110, 137–140, 143–147, 220; knowledge about the USSR gained in, 19, 76, 107, 112; labor exploitation in, 22, 96–102, 116, 129; leadership of, 128; management of, 120–121, 127, 144–145; memories of, 109, 111, 290; mortality rates in, 124, 220; recreation in, 166; perceptions of, 236; Red Cross visits to, 4; reeducation in (see Democratic Movement); survivors of, 35, 76, 287, 288; transfers of POWs between, 9, 131; transit camps, 3, 21, 125, 145; transportation into, 38, 51, 86–89, 113, 124, 128, 130–131, 218; violence in, 100, 175–177, 273. See also GUPVI Soviet-German War (1941–1945), 15, 85, 118, 122, 157–158 Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration (1956), 4, 230, 260, 270–271, 288 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact (1941), 37, 55, 88, 211 Soviet-Japanese normalization talks (1955–1956), 4, 222, 230, 270–271 Soviet-Japanese War (1945), 1–2, 81, 88, 167, 289. See also Manchurian Offensive Soviet postwar, 26, 231–232, 245–246 Soviet prewar and wartime, 40, 67–68, 119, 153–154, 157–158 Soviet reeducation program in the camps. See Democratic Movement Soviet Union: collapse of, 77, 211; Commissioner for Repatriation, 220–221; conditions in early postwar, 113, 136; construction ministry (Narkomstroy), 145; contribution to Allied victory, 67, 168, 219; de-Stalinization in, 232; development of atomic bomb, 242; egalitarianism in, 108; forced labor in, 22, 41, 99, 111, 113, 118, 129, 231; foreign criticism of, 16, 219, 220, 223, 227, 231–240; forestry ministry (Narkomles), 146; freedom of the press in, 172; geopo litical aims in East Asia, 68; Great Terror in, 122, 166; hunger in, 15, 96, 136–137, 321n20, 324n67; international image a fter WWII, 220, 231; labor shortages after WWII, 44, 102; ministry of cellulose
and paper industry, 146; ministry of railway transport, 219; ministry of state-owned farms (Minsovkhoz), 146; ministry of the coal industry (Narkomugol’), 146; Pacific Fleet of, 72; policies t oward foreign captives, 118; political purges, 173, 222; population losses to war, 318n82; postwar influence in Japan, 44; postwar Japanese views of, 19, 32, 76, 88; in postwar period, 112–113, 122; postwar reconstruction of, 26, 97, 137, 187; reasons for holding on to foreign POWs, 129; State Defense Committee of, 2; stereotypes about, 106, 189, 237; system of government, 17, 100, 105, 109, 163, 189, 191–192, 200, 232; at the Tokyo Trial, 211–217, 223; victory in WWII, 67, 122, 128, 168; wart ime conditions in, 110 special settlements (USSR), 119, 321n21 Štajner, Karlo, 133 Stakhanovite movement, 178–179, 194 Stalin, Iosif, 23, 45, 159, 288, 289; crimes committed during the reign of, 17, 40–41, 112, 116, 173; cult of personality, 158, 161, 163, 194, 255; death of, 1, 4, 6, 229, 231, 240; entry into the war against Japan, 66–67, 312n78; forced migrations initiated by, 15, 273; ideology of, 119, 179; industrial projects initiated by, 317n65; influence on the JCP, 248; on Japan’s defeat, 67, 312n77; letters from families of Matsukawa Incident suspects, 245; letters of thanks by POWs to, 184, 195, 201; motivations for interning the Japanese, 26–27, 126, 132, 221; on the need to industrialize, 178; order to dismantle Manchukuo industrial facilities, 85; order to intern the Japanese, 2–3, 26, 44, 51, 68, 72, 96, 218, 286; plans for postwar reconstruction of the USSR, 113, 119, 136, 221; proposal to Truman to jointly occupy Japan, 16, 26, 130; reports on the Siberian internees to, 15, 82, 171, 220, 240, 342n159 Stalingrad, the Battle of, 124, 127, 157, 158 Stalin Peace Prize, 229 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), 200, 245
Index
Suchan (Russia), 13m, 94, 98m sumo, 166, 328n38 Suslov, Mikhail, 154, 167–168 Sutherland, Richard K., 63 Suzuki (corporation), 244 Taishet, 13m, 26, 27, 98m, 272 Taishō period, 38 Taiwan, 49, 50, 166 Takahashi Daizō, 153, 170, 171 Takahashi Takao, 94 Takahashi Yoshirō, 97 Takasago-m aru (ship), 237, 247 Takasugi Ichirō, 11, 272; attempts to study the USSR and its people, 24, 105–107, 180; decision to record his Siberian experiences, 254; friendship with a Russian woman, 107, 318n93; on humanity in the camps, 107–108, 298; on the humiliation of Japanese internees, 27; on hunger in the USSR, 136–137; on Japan’s war of aggression, 54; memoir of Siberia by, 7, 77; on Soviet ideology, 106 Takayama Hideo, 190, 194 Takayama Noboru, 171 Takeyama Itsurō, 9 Takeyama Takejirō, 140 Takeyasu Kumaichi, 103 Takura Hachirō, 87–88, 92 Tambov (Russia), 12m, 115, 125, 147, 182–183 Tanabe Minoru, 183 Tanaka Kin’ichi, 179 Tanaka Takeshi, 295 Tanemura Suketaka (Sakō), 236 Tashkent, 12m, 94, 104, 293–294 Tatarstan, 188 TBS Telev ision, 279 Telegraph Agency of the USSR (TASS), 219, 240, 250 tenkō (recantation), 183–185, 186, 196 Time (magazine), 179 Times Square, 206 Tochigi Prefecture, 101 Toho Film Studio, 304n32, 316n46 Tōhoku University (Japan), 230 Tōjō Heihachirō, 103 Tōjō Hideki, 187, 212 Tokuda Incident (Tokuda yō sei mondai), 209, 223, 248–254
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Tokuda Ky ūichi: message to returnees from Siberia, 241; participation in postwar politics, 241; Stalin’s influence on, 248; summons to the Diet, 249–250. See also Tokuda Incident Tokushima Prefecture, 168 Tokyo, 13m; firebombing of, 73; flights between Vladivostok and, 294; Gorbachev’s visit to, 279–280; internees’ arrival to, 23; Metropolitan Government Building, 277; symphony orchestra of, 200 Tokyo Agricultural University, 171 Tokyo damoi, 3, 86–87 Tokyo District Court, 279 Tokyo Giants, 166 Tokyo High Court, 279 Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo), 5, 185, 230 Tokyo School of Foreign Studies, 83 Tokyo Times, 164, 166 Tokyo Trial, 6, 209, 210, 254; as a Cold War battlefield, 210, 216–217; crossexamination of witnesses at, 211; defense counsels at, 213–215; dissent of Radhabinod Pal at, 216; legacies of, 216; Soviet prosecution at, 6, 209, 211; verdict of, 187, 190, 217, 223 Tomita Takeshi, 38–39, 225 Toshiba (corporation), 244 Trans-Siberian Railway, 26, 118 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (1965), 260 Truman, Harry S., 16, 26, 45, 130 Tsuchibashi Haruyoshi, 89–90, 94, 142–143 Tsumura Kenji, 176, 267 Tsurumi Shunsuke, 253 Turgenev, Ivan, 125, 148 Uchimura Gōsuke, 23, 84; arrest and sentencing of, 5; friendship with Jacques Rossi, 132–133, 221; on hunger, 95–96; memories of Siberia, 1, 77; on Soviets, 122; repatriation of, 3–5, 257 Uchiyama Takashi, 140, 151 Ueda Shunkichi, 247 Ueda Takao, 276–277 Uemura Mikio, 82 Ukraine, 119, 124 Umezu Yoshijirō, 212
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Unit 731 (IJA), 7, 217 United Kingdom (UK), 4, 50, 162, 224; Commonwealth, 249; embassy in Japan, 226–227; Foreign Office, 226–227, 230; Liaison Mission, 225–226 United Nations, 224, 232; Ad Hoc Commission on POWs, 224; General Assembly, 224; Japanese membership in, 260, 270–271 United States (US), 43; alliance with Japan (see US-Japan Alliance); anticommunism of, 232, 295; archives in, 225; confrontation with the USSR, 210, 216–217, 221; Congress, 232; Department of State, 271; diplomatic disputes with the USSR, 16, 163, 209, 218, 223–224; government officials of, 233–235, 242; imperialism of, 150, 163, 199, 239, 248; influence in East Asia, 44, 217, 242; intelligence officials, 229; Occupation of Japan, 140, 149, 204, 210, 221, 224, 298; policies toward the USSR, 233, 247; POW camps in, 108; public of, 232; racism in, 108; Soviet defectors to, 248; version of postwar order, 204; at the Tokyo Trial, 210, 212, 215; war with Japan, 15, 44, 58, 73 Uno Sōsuke, 42 Ural Mountains, 68, 97 US-Japan alliance, 17, 44, 209, 235, 261 (origins of, 216) US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), 263 USSR. See Soviet Union Uzbekistan, 104, 293 Vasilevskii, Aleksandr, 72, 167 V-J Day, 206–207 Vladimirskii Tsentral Prison, 12m, 212 Vladivostok, 9, 13m, 87, 94, 98m, 210, 225, 294; Abe Shinzō’s visits to, 294; antifascist school in, 136, 199 volleyball, 166 Vorkuta, 12m, 91 Vyshinskii, Andrei, 240 Wakatsuki Yasuo, 30, 37 War Victims’ Relief Association (Sensai Engo Kai), 258 Waseda-Keiō baseball rivalry (Sōkeisen), 166 Waseda University, 166
Washington, DC, 225, 228, 239 Watanabe Kazuo, 107 Watanabe Nobuo, 141 Watt, Lori, 42, 259, 318n92 Webb, William, 215 White Russians, 88, 92 women internees in the USSR, ix, 7, 8, 169, 231, 303n28 women’s groups, 258 World War I, 110 World War II, 11, 116, 119, 264, 297; devastation caused by, 264; European theater of, 2, 67, 127; internees’ experiences of, 20, 152; Japanese views on, 29, 289; last battles of, 1, 49; legacies, 35, 261, 288, 297; Marxist critique of, 308n2; Pacific theater of, 44, 61, 63, 295; population displacement caused by, 15, 296; soldier diaries of, 135; victims of, 260; world order emerging a fter, 79, 152, 218; writing the history of, 34, 41 Yalta Conference, 26, 63, 312n78 Yamada Ichirō, 101 Yamada Kunisuke, 207–208, 240 Yamada Otozō, 230, 268 Yamada Seizaburō, 104, 110, 184–186 Yamagata Prefecture, 272, 274 Yamakawa Hayami, 129 Yanami Hisao. See Aikawa Haruki Yasukuni Shrine (Tokyo), 193 Yawatagaki Masao, 105 Yeltsin, Boris, 279–280 Yokoyama Shūdō, 87 Yomiuri shimbun, 5 Yoshida Kōhei, 163, 173, 197, 198 Yoshida Shigeru, 73, 168, 224, 227–228, 270–271 Yoshida Tadashi, 9–10, 304n35 Yoshikawa Mitsusada, 266–267 Yoshimura Hisayoshi (Ikeda Shigeyoshi), 176–177 Yumashev, Ivan, 72 Yuzha camp (Russia), 12m, 157 zaibatsu, 168 Zavedeev, Aleksandr, 183 Zharikovo, 72 Zhdanov, Andrei, 159