70 years after WWII: Elegy of Japanese internment in Siberian labor camps

TOKYO — This year marks the passage of 70 years since about 600,000 Japanese were taken to Siberia by the Soviet Union after the end of World War II and detained in labor camps.

Those Japanese who were sent to detention camps were forced to perform hard labor such as felling trees and constructing railroads. Because of hunger and cold, about 10 percent of the detainees are said to have lost their lives there.

The port of Maizuru, in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, is where ships carrying former Japanese detainees from Nakhodka arrived.

At the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum, located near the former wharf site, bundles of white birch bark are kept in close custody.

Vividly remaining on the bark are words written by one of the detainees using a pen he made with an empty can and ink he made out of chimney soot he had collected.

The detainees were strictly barred from keeping any record, such as writing a diary, while at the camps. The words on the bark were poems written by Osamu Seno, who was detained at a camp on the outskirts of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, secretly expressing how unbearable life was as a detainee. (Seno later returned to Japan and died in 1995.)

Last year, the city of Maizuru applied to have the 570 collected items designated as documentary heritage in UNESCO's Memory of the World Program.

Koichi Ikeda, 93, from Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, who manages a center for supporting former Siberia detainees and keeping records, is increasingly concerned by the growing number of people who don't know about Japanese detained in Siberia after the war.

With a computer he learned to use only a few years ago, Ikeda tackles ignorance by transmitting related information, spending three hours at the keyboard every day at his home.

"As I was able to return to Japan alive, I will not stop sharing knowledge of this tragedy with the next generation until I die," Ikeda said.

Shoji Endo, 88, from Kawasaki, was detained for 3 1/2 years at labor camps, including one in a town 350 kilometers north of Nakhodka. Endo cannot rid his mind of images of fellow detainees who died back then.

Every Sunday, he dug holes to bury those who had died. As detainees rarely got new clothes, they had to strip the dead of their garments, which he said was the most painful part of the process.

Since about 20 years ago, Endo has been engaged in recovering the remains of former Japanese detainees in various parts of Russia.

"I don't know how many years I could do this, but as long as my health holds up, I want to have as many of them return to Japan as possible," Endo said.