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Internment of Japanese personnel and others in Siberia started on this day 79 years ago. Many people had their lives disrupted and ruined by the war waged by the state of Japan. We must pass down the lessons learned from history.
The internment order was issued by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on Aug. 23, 1945, shortly after World War II ended in Japan. Former Japanese military personnel and others were taken away from Manchuria in northeast China and the Korean Peninsula, and sent to the Soviet Union and Mongolia as labor forces.
According to a Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare estimate, the number of internees totaled around 575,000. They were detained for up to 11 years, and approximately 55,000 people are said to have died.
A gathering to mourn internment camp victims was held in Tokyo on Aug. 23 this year, along with a memorial event with volunteers reading out the names of victims online from a list of some 46,300 internees.
The name list was created by the late Tsuneo Murayama, a former internee. He spent 10 years from 1996 working diligently on the roster on his own, using an incomplete name list written in katakana syllabary that was released by the welfare ministry. He checked the data against information gathered from bereaved families, and also visited former internment sites to copy the names inscribed on the tombstones of victims to find out the kanji characters for their names.
“I want to mark in history the sorrows of each and every victim and the preciousness of their lives, etched into their own names,” Murayama had said before he passed away 10 years ago.
In 1991, the Japanese government concluded an agreement with the Soviet Union shortly before its dissolution, and has since collected the remains of 20,264 internment camp victims. However, the remains of more than 30,000 internees have yet to return.
Due to the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian crisis, on-site investigations in Russia have been suspended since 2020. The Japanese government is continuing surveys in Mongolia and Kazakhstan about internees who perished there.
The number of former internees alive today has dipped below 3,000, and their average age is estimated to be above 100. It is the Japanese government’s responsibility to shed light on the reality of internment and retrieve the remains still left there and identify them.
Nearly 80 years on since the end of World War II, the world is still plagued by wars. More than 11,500 civilians have been killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and over 40,000 have died in the Israeli military’s attacks on Gaza.
Yet we cannot talk about victims just by the numbers. They each have their own names and the gravity of their lives. To never repeat tragic wars, let us keep this in mind.
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