From imperial revenants to Cold War victims: ‘red repatriates’ from the Soviet Union and the making of the new Japan, 1949–1952

Abstract

When over half a million former Imperial Japanese Army soldiers returned home from long captivity in Soviet labour camps in the late 1940s, they brought back more than their memories of hardship and humiliation. In post-war society, the Siberian returnees were the uncomfortable remnants of the failed Japanese Empire; yet it was their brush with the communist enemy that caused suspicion and dragged them into the domestic political struggles. In this article, I use the experiences of Siberian internees as a lens to reconsider Japan’s formative post-war decade, when the onset of the Cold War eclipsed the inconvenient legacies of empire.

Keywords:

• Empire
• Cold War – Origins
• Soviet Union
• Japan
• forced labour camps

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2014 European Summer School on Cold War History at the University of Trento, where it was selected as the Best Paper. I would like to thank Professor Shimotomai Nobuo, Dr. Barak Kushner, Professor Nathan Gilbert Quimpo, and the instructors at the Summer School, especially Professor Silvio Pons, Professor Federico Romero, and Dr. Kaeten Mistry, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for the Cold War History, for their helpful comments and suggestions on the earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

¹ Different from the ‘hellship’ Shinyō Maru, sunk by the US Navy in September 1944 carrying over 700 Allied prisoners-of-war, only eighty-two of whom survived. Thomas Saylor, Long Hard Road: American POWs during World War II (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007), p. 187.

² ‘Kyō kettei: kiso, fukiso / Shinyōmaru jiken / Shiberia hikiage’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 2 August 1949, Morning edition, p. 2; Onda Shigetaka, Shiberia yokuryū (Kōdansha, 1986), p. 277. Unless noted otherwise, all Japanese titles are published in Tokyo. Japanese names are in the traditional order, with the surname preceding the given name.

³ Takasugi Ichirō, Kyokkō no kageni: shiberia furyoki (Iwanami Shoten, 2011), p. 359.

⁴ General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Far Eastern Command (FEC), Military Intelligence Section, Special Report ‘Japanese Prisoners of War: Life and Death in Soviet P.W. Camps’, 1949, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room, National Diet Library of Japan, Microfiche resource, Box 2153, File 6, Section 7, p. 2.

⁵ Kurihara Toshio, Shiberia yokuryū: mikan no higeki (Iwanami Shoten, 2009), p. 112.

⁶ GHQ FEC, ‘Japanese Prisoners of War,’ Section 7, p. 1.

⁷ Kurihara, Shiberia yokuryū, p. 111.

⁸ GHQ FEC, ‘Japanese Prisoners of War,’ Section 6, p. 1.

⁹ ‘Ueno eki wa kōshiki kangeisha dake / Hikiage demukae gochūi / Soren hikiage’, Asahi Shimbun, 1 July 1949, Morning edition, p. 2; ‘Dantai ōhaba ni seigen / Hikiagesha demukae’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 13 August 1949, Morning edition, p. 2; ‘Cabinet Orders’, Official Gazette (English Edition), Extra No. 103, 11 August 1949, online at http://jalii.law.nagoya-u.ac.jp/official_gazette/nag_pdf/19490811e_eb.00103.010.000_0010.0010.0_a.190100.02114900.pdf, accessed 5 June 2016.

¹⁰ Tomita Takeshi, ‘Shimbun hōdō ni miru shiberia yokuryū– beiso kyōchō kara reisen e, 1945–1950 nen’, Yūrashia, May 2013, pp. 7–13; Sherzod Muminov, ‘The ‘Siberian Internment’ and the Transnational History of the Early Cold War Japan, 1945–56’, in Transnational Japan as History: Empire, Migration, and Social Movements, ed. Pedro Iacobelli et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 71–95.

¹¹ GHQ FEC, ‘Japanese Prisoners of War’, Section 7, p. 1.

¹² Takahashi Daizō, ‘‘Kaisetsu’: hangun/minshuka undō no keika’, in Horyo taikenki, Vol.8: Minshu undō hen, ed. Takahashi Daizō (Soren ni okeru nihonjin horyo no seikatsu taiken o kirokusuru kai, 1992), p. 3.

¹³ Sherzod Muminov, ‘Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of the New Japan, 1945–1956’, PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, September 2015.

¹⁴ Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2009); Yoshikuni Igarashi, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

¹⁵ Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013).

¹⁶ Igarashi, Homecomings.

¹⁷ According to Tony Judt, Europeans similarly ‘turned their heads resolutely away’ from the war after its end. Judt, ‘The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe’, The New York Review of Books, 14 February 2008, online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/02/14/the-problem-of-evil-in-postwar-europe/, last accessed 20 June 2016.

¹⁸ 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: Routledge 2017), pp. 146–164.

¹⁹ Sebastian Conrad, ‘The Dialectics of Remembrance: Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2014, 56 (1), pp. 4–33, this quote p. 22.

²⁰ I use the terms ‘yokuryūsha’ and ‘internee’ interchangeably to refer to Japanese captives in Soviet camps. The term ‘returnee’ refers to the internees after repatriation.

²¹ Conrad, ‘Dialectics of Remembrance’; Ian Nish, ‘Regaining Confidence: Japan after the Loss of Empire’, Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1980): pp. 181–195.

²² Muminov, ‘The ‘Siberian Internment’’, p. 74.

²³ Hiraide Setsuo, Shiberia ni uzumeta karute (Bungeisha, 2000), p. 5, added emphasis.

²⁴ For a poignant analysis of Japanese experiences on the Chinese mainland, see, for example, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

²⁵ Sejima Ryūzō, Sejima Ryūzō kaisōroku: Ikusanga (Sankei Shimbun Shuppan, 1996), pp. 277–281.

²⁶ As quoted in Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 5.

²⁷ ‘Postanovlenie GKO SSSR o priiome, razmeshchenii i trudovom ispol’zovanii voennoplennykh Iaponskoi armii’, 23 August 1945, Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation (TsAMO RF), fond (f.) 66, opis’ (op.) 178499, delo (d.) 1, listy (l.) 593–598.

²⁸ While I use the phrase ‘Siberian Internment’ in this paper for reasons of convenience, it is not entirely accurate. The captivity was not confined to the geographical region of Siberia, and the camps with Japanese captives were scattered across the USSR. The word ‘internment’ in Russian (internirovaniie) has a narrower meaning than in English: it only denotes the captivity of civilians as opposed to that of the ‘prisoners-of-war’ (voennoplennye).

²⁹ ‘O sozdanii komissii po vyvozu trofeinogo oborudovaniia iz Man’chzhurii’, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), f. 644, op. 1, edinitsa khraneniia (ed. khr.) 459.

³⁰ GHQ Civil Intelligence Section (CIS), Special Report ‘Japanese Repatriates from Soviet Territory: Communist Indoctrination’, 8 March 1949, MacArthur Memorial Archives, MMA-18, Reel No. 13, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room, National Diet Library, Tokyo.

³¹ RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1053, punkt (p.) 231.

³² ‘Doklad ministra vnutrennikh del SSSR rukovodstvu strany o nastroeniiakh sredi iaponskikh voennoplennykh…’ 17 May 1946, GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 136, l. 188–191, reprinted in V.A. Gavrilov, E.L. Katasonova, Iaponskie voennoplennye v SSSR, 1945–1956: Dokumenty (Moscow: Demokratiia, 2013), hereafter Iaponskie voennoplennye, pp. 276–278.

³³ Iaponskie voennoplennye, p. 274.

³⁴ Itō Masao, Mahoruka: shiberia yokuryūki (Bungeisha, 2002), p. 89.

³⁵ Itagaki Tadashi, ‘Watashi wa shiberia ni umarekawatta’, Shinsō shōsetsu, No. 18 (April 1950), pp. 22–35.

³⁶ National Diet, House of Representatives, 7th Congress, Special Investigative Committee Session 24, 12 April 1950.

³⁷ Sawachi Hisae and Sataka Makoto, ‘Sedai o koete kataritsugitai sensō bungaku’, Sekai, No 6, 2007, pp. 206–214, this quote p. 207.

³⁸ Clifford Kinvig, ‘Allied POWs and the Burma-Thailand Railway’, in Japanese Prisoners of War, ed. Philip Towle, Margaret Kosuge and Yoichi Kibata (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), pp. 37–57, this quote p. 48.

³⁹ Fujimori Takayuki, ‘Aishū no tōdo’, in Heiwa no ishizue: shiberia kyōsei yokuryūsha ga kataritsugu rōku (Heiwa kinen jigyō tokubetsu kikin, 1991–2012), Vol. 9, pp. 190–204, this quote p. 202.

⁴⁰ Tomita Takeshi, Shiberia yokuryūshatachi no sengo: reisenka no yoron to undō, 1945–56 nen (Jinbun shoin, 2013), pp. 101–112; Barshay, The Gods Left First, Chapter 3, ‘Knowledge Painfully Acquired: Takasugi Ichirō and the ‘Democratic Movement’ in Siberia’, pp. 81–120.

⁴¹ ‘‘Tokuda shi o tsuikyū’ – soren hikiage no Kubota shi kataru’, Asahi Shimbun, 13 February 1950, p. 2.

⁴² National Diet House of Councillors, Special Committee on the Issue of Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th congress, 13th session, 23 February 1950.

⁴³ National Diet House of Councillors, Special Committee on the Issue of Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th cong., 16th session, 18 March 1950.

⁴⁴ On Kan’s opposition to the emperor system, see Tada Shigeharu, Uchinaru shiberia yokuryū taiken: Ishihara Yoshirō, Kano Buichi, Kan Sueharu no sengoshi (Shakaishisōsha, 1994), pp. 26–27.

⁴⁵ Ibid. See also Odagiri Tadashi, ‘Kan Sueharu: ‘Bungeiteki shinrigaku e no kokoromi’ josetsu (sono 7)’, Hokkaido University of Education - Jōsho shōgai kyōiku kenkyū kiyō 20 (2001).

⁴⁶ ‘Jibun no yowasa ni zetsubō shite shinu/isho rokutsū hakken / Tokuda yōsei shōnin jisatsu’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 8 April 1950, Evening edition, p. 2; ‘Kan shōnin naze jisatsu shita ka/Tokuda yōsei shōnin jisatsu’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 8 April 1950, Morning edition, p. 3.

⁴⁷ ‘Karō ga gen'in/Hōjin hikiage bōgai mondai/Tokuda yōsei shōnin jisatsu’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 8 April 1950, Morning edition, p. 3.

⁴⁸ Nakano Shigeharu was a rare exception; he was present at Kan’s testimony and felt guilty he had not warned Kan of what awaited him at the hearing. Nakano, ‘Kōsei no yūwaku’, quoted in Tada, Uchinaru shiberia, p. 24.

⁴⁹ Jenny Edkins’ Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 99–110) provides an interesting analysis of political sacrifice.

⁵⁰ National Diet House of Councillors, Special Committee on the Issue of Repatriation of Japanese Nationals Overseas, 7th cong., 23rd session, 10 April 1950.

⁵¹ Douglas MacArthur, ‘The Other Minority’, in A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, ed. Major Vorin E. Whan, Jr. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), pp. 204–209.

⁵² John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 272.

⁵³ Robert A. Scalapino, The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920–1966 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), Chapters 2 and 3, pp. 48–96.

⁵⁴ Susan L. Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 123–124.

⁵⁵ For example, James Joseph Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

⁵⁶ On the role of newspapers in society, see, The Asahi Shimbun Company, Media, Propaganda and Politics in 20th-Century Japan, trans. Barak Kushner (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

⁵⁷ ‘Soren horyo mondai de ronsō’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 16 February 1948, Morning edition, p. 1.

⁵⁸ ‘Kazoku ga matte iru yokuryūsha no jōhō – Seborudo kōshi soren daihyō ni yōkyū’, Asahi Shimbun, 27 April 1949, p. 2.

⁵⁹ ‘Senman nin o kyōsei rōdō: Ei kokuren daihyō shūyōjo chōsa o yōkyū’, Yomiuri Shimbun, 24 July 1949, p. 1.

⁶⁰ The National Archives of the UK, FO 371/92602, pp. 4–10. Tomita Takeshi explained the discrepancy in internee numbers through a difference in interpretation: the Soviets counted only the captives in the USSR, whereas US officials included prisoners in all 'Soviet-controlled territories'. The difference of about 300,000 people was then exploited in news and propaganda reports. Tomita, ‘Shimbun hōdō’.

⁶¹ Kurihara, Shiberia yokuryū, p. 171.

⁶² Tōjō Heihachirō, 'Ikiuzume no kei', in Heiwa no ishizue: shiberia, Vol. 2, p. 163.

⁶³ Amaya Konokichi, 'Watashi no seishun: shiberia ga nikui', in Heiwa no ishizue: shiberia, Vol. 5, p. 148.

⁶⁴ It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate exaggeration. In an NKVD directive dated 24 November 1945, then deputy minister (later minister) Sergei Kruglov demanded that each camp 'establish temperature limits under which outside works must be cancelled', GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 205, tom (t.) 13, l. 95–96). However, cases when POWs were forced to work in the cold were common.

⁶⁵ Takeyasu Kumaichi, 'Furyoki', in Heiwa no ishizue: shiberia, Vol. 2, pp. 90–91.

⁶⁶ For example, the TASS archives in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) contain ample evidence of the Soviet Party and state’s constant paranoia about its representations in foreign press. GARF, f. 4459, op. 27.

⁶⁷ Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 49.

⁶⁸ Barshay, The Gods Left First, pp. 165–188.

⁶⁹ Yawatagaki Masao, 'Watashi no seishun ki', in Heiwa no ishizue: shiberia, Vol. 2, p. 28.

⁷⁰ E-Government Electronic Portal of the Japanese Government, ‘Sengo kyōsei yokuryūsha ni kakaru mondai ni kansuru tokubetsu sochi hō’ [Special Law on Postwar Forced Internees], http://law.e-gov.go.jp/htmldata/H22/H22HO045.html, last accessed 21 July 2015.