Postwar Repatriation: Bringing Home the Millions of Japanese Stranded Overseas After the War

The War Ends and a New Chapter of Suffering Begins

At the time of Japan’s defeat in August 1945, around 6.6 million Japanese nationals found themselves stranded outside the country. This total was made up of roughly equal numbers of military personnel and civilians. Repatriation of soldiers and other members of the armed forces got under way in September, in accordance with the provisions of Item 9 of the Potsdam Declaration, which decreed that: “The Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed, shall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives.”

The situation for civilians was different. There were no legal provisions in place regarding the repatriation of civilians, and the Japanese government was slow to respond to the developing crisis. In the earliest days after the surrender, the government even instructed Japanese nationals overseas to stay where they were. In many cases, this led to chaos. Depending on where they were, Japanese civilians were subject to the authority of five different zones of military control, each run by a different Allied power: China, the Soviet Union, the United States (in Saipan and other southern parts of the defeated Japanese empire, the Philippines, and the southern part of Korea, among other locations), Britain and the Netherlands (most of Southeast Asia), and Australia (in Borneo and New Guinea). The victorious powers varied greatly in the treatment they meted out to Japanese.

Those who ended up under Soviet authority fared particularly badly. Areas in the Soviet zone of control included the former Japanese puppet state in Manchuria (northeastern China), northern parts of the former colony of Korea, Sakhalin (the southern half of which had been the Japanese territory of Karafuto), and the Kuriles. In the closing days of the war, the Soviet Union unilaterally abrogated its treaty of neutrality and declared war on Japan. Soviet troops invaded Manchuria, home to around 1.55 million Japanese at the time, including groups of agricultural pioneers who had been sent to settle and develop the colony.

Since most of the young men and adolescent boys had been mobilized into the Kwantung Army in the desperate final stages of the war, it was largely women, the elderly, and children who were left to flee for their lives. They wandered on foot through fields and wilderness, coming under attack from a frequently hostile local population, and when they finally reached urban areas were met with violence and looting at the hands of Soviet soldiers. Many children were handed over to Chinese families in a desperate attempt boost their chances of survival, while many women gave up any hope of ever returning to Japan.

A boy waits forlornly to be repatriated to Japan. Orphaned and alone, the boy was not allowed to board a ship because he had no papers to prove his identity. This photograph is believed to have been taken in Busan in 1946. (Courtesy of Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates)

The Soviets had no interest in repatriating Japanese civilians left behind in Manchuria, and it was only after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops in May 1946 that repatriation finally began, using American transports. Some of the people on board the first ships to leave had traveled 2,000 kilometers from the Soviet border to the port of Huludao in southern Manchuria, the departure point for the repatriation transports. Some 245,000 people lost their lives in Manchuria, including those killed in the fighting with Soviet troops at the end of the war—more than those who died in the massive fire-bombing raids on Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or the Battle of Okinawa.

The disarmed Japanese troops did not fare much better. The Soviet Army rounded up around 575,000 disarmed Japanese soldiers and carted them off to the Siberian Gulag, where they were forced to labor in temperatures of 20 to 40 degrees below zero, on minimal rations. Around 55,000, or nearly one tenth of the total, succumbed to the harsh conditions and starvation during this Siberian captivity.

Dying with Disease within Sight of Home

Each transport carried between 2,000 and 3,000 people. The ships were subject to strict quarantine rules to prevent the spread of infectious disease. In April 1946, there was an outbreak of cholera on a repatriation vessel that had sailed from Canton and had already entered the port of Uraga near Yokosuka, Kanagawa. A strict offshore quarantine was imposed on 20 ships waiting to offload their passengers. Around 70,000 returnees were forced to wait with their homeland agonizingly within reach. Some 400 of them died on board before touching Japanese soil.

Yamaguchi Takayuki, curator at the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates, located in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, says that for many returnees, the hardships continued even after they eventually did make it back to Japan. Many had abandoned everything they owned in the countries they had been forced to flee, and had nothing left on which to rebuild their lives once they got back home. In the case of people who had been caught up in the Soviet sphere of control, the young men who would normally have been the breadwinners often failed to come home for years, making it impossible for families to rebuild their lives in the turmoil and upheaval of postwar Japan.

The indigent condition of many of the repatriated Japanese was covered in the media and became a social scandal. The government established a benefit system for repatriated nationals and granted them a small subsidy, but these paltry payments were rarely enough to live on, and the assets that people had left in the colonies and occupied territories were lost forever.

Return to Maizuru

The task of bringing home Japanese nationals from the shattered ruins of empire was a massive undertaking, which continued until 1958. After 1950, all returnees to Japan reentered the country through the port of Maizuru on the coast of Kyoto Prefecture, which had prospered before the war as Japan’s only naval port on the Sea of Japan. In the 13 years following the end of the war, some 660,000 people passed through the port on their way home, along with the repatriated remains of around 1.6 million Japanese who had died overseas. Japanese prisoners interned in Siberia faced an ordeal that dragged on for up to 11 years for the unluckiest cases. When they finally returned, it was from this port on the Sea of Japan that they caught their first glimpse of home.

In 1988, the city opened the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum and applied to have materials related to the repatriation experience registered on UNESCO’s list of tangible world heritage. In 2015, this bid was successful, and materials documenting the repatriations were added to the International Memory of the World Register under the title “Return to Maizuru Port: Documents Related to the Internment and Repatriation Experiences of Japanese (1945–1956).”

In the film Rāgeri yori ai o komete (From Siberia with Love), released in December 2022, the protagonist is a Japanese soldier in a Soviet internment camp. The film depicts his unvanquished belief that he will one day return to Japan, and his love for his family, who long for his return. Today, the film comes at a time when the tragedy of war is tearing families apart again, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For increasing numbers of people in Japan, war feels closer than it has for many decades. In this context, a recent exhibition was held to pass on memories of the war and its aftermath to the next generation and communicate a message of peace for the future.

A New Approach to Passing on History

In a collaborative first, the Repatriation Memorial Museum in Maizuru and the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates in Tokyo held a joint exhibition to bring the repatriation issue to the attention of a new audience of younger people. Under the title Rāgeri kara no messēji: Shiberia yokuryū no kioku o tsunagu (Messages from the Camps: Remembering the Siberian Internment), the exhibition displays around 90 pieces drawn from the collections of the two museums. The exhibition ran from February 22 to March 5, at the Kitte (Tokyo Central Post Office) building opposite the South Marunouchi entrance to Tokyo Station.

The Maizuru museum contributed several materials registered on the International Memory of the World Register, including copies of the Shirakaba nisshi (White Birch Journal) that was put together by Japanese inmates in the Siberian internment camps. With no access to paper, prisoners used birch bark to write waka poems in which they expressed their longing for their homes and families back in Japan.

Other exhibits included materials that belonged to Hashino Ise, a mother who never gave up hope believing that her only son, who had been called up and sent to fight overseas, would one day return. She traveled repeatedly to Maizuru to meet the ships bringing home repatriated soldiers, and was the model for the Ganpeki no haha (Mother on the Wharf), a popular song and later a television drama depicting the plight of bereaved mothers waiting in vain for sons to return from the war. The exhibition also featured a model of the landing bridge built inside the harbor at Maizuru, across which thousands of returnees took their first steps on Japanese soil after their perilous journeys home.

The Shirakaba Nisshi, inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World, was one of the items on show in the joint exhibition. The journal contains around 200 poems written by Japanese internees in Siberian camps. The prisoners used the bark of white birch trees instead of paper. (Courtesy of the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum.)

A reconstruction of the landing bridge built after the war in Maizuru harbor, across which many thousands of repatriated Japanese reentered the country. The Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum is nearby. (Courtesy of the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum.)

Nagamine Mutsumi, a curator at the museum, says the idea behind the exhibition was to bring an important message to as many people as possible: “We toured all the ports around the country that were used to repatriate soldiers and citizens after the war, communicating the facts about the repatriation and the Siberian internment, and about the preciousness of peace. With the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war approaching in 2025, our hope was that this joint exhibition in the national capital would provide an opportunity for people all over the country to think again about the importance of peace.”

One innovative decision the exhibition took was to use young people from Maizuru as narrators and guides. For the first time, people born in the twenty-first century told stories that were previously always narrated by people who had experienced the events at first hand. This marked the passing of the torch to a new generation: the work of passing on the history to the next generation was being done by people who belong to the same generation themselves. During the exhibition, 15 middle school students, 13 high school students, one university student, and one from a junior college worked as narrators, passing on the story of Maizuru’s history to other young people of their own generation.

A junior high school student works as a guide, passing on the lessons of history to a group of young visitors to the Repatriation Memorial Museum in Maizuru. (Courtesy of the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum.)

Important Resources in Danger

The museum and others like it face serious problems as the last survivors of the war generation pass away. In many cases, materials and other souvenirs that survivors preserved during their lives are scattered or simply thrown away when their owners die. Nagamine, who worked to get materials relating to the Japanese repatriation experiences included in the Memory of the World register, says he’s worried that precious memories and historical documents may be lost. “Some 6.3 million people were brought back home alive. It was a huge undertaking. And now it’s starting to fade from Japanese history,” he says.

The Memorial Museum in Tokyo says the museum has been approached by an increasing number of people—both survivors and their children—who want to donate items to the museum. But he says he is worried about the next generation. “The grandchildren are often less informed or concerned about these things that were so important to their grandparents, and items tend to get scattered and lost.

“From January to April, we’re running an exhibition of postcards sent by the last internees to return from Siberia. These men often spent a decade or more in Siberia before returning on the last repatriation vessels. This exhibition collects some of the cards they sent to their friends and family back in Japan,” says Yamaguchi. “The exhibits include a selection of nineteen postcards from a larger collection donated to the museum just last August. So materials like this do get brought in from time to time. But once materials are dispersed, most of the time, that’s it. They don’t come back. So that would be my message to people who might have anything like this: Please talk to a public museum or archive first before throwing anything away that might have historic value.”

The repatriation of millions of Japanese from the ruins of the defeated empire was a huge operation that happened across vast stretches of Asia and the Pacific. It is to be hoped that the joint exhibition and other projects organized by these two museums will help to preserve the memories of these events and to pass on a message to young people of the misery and suffering caused to ordinary people by war.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Japanese evacuees boarding a repatriation ship in Busan, Korea, having escaped from the Soviet zone of control in northern Korea. Courtesy of the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates.)