Prisoners in a foreign land

Janina de Guzman Japanese former prisoners of war Shigeru Kurihara, left, and Tsuneo Murayama on a visit to Primorye.

Japanese captured at the end of World War II cut timber, built stadiums, and provided labor for the Soviet Union. Now they – and their families – are returning to honor fallen comrades.

By Janina de Guzman

Valentina Forostovskaya remembers them well, though 50 years have passed.

Green uniforms and red fur hats. The clip-clop of wooden-heeled boots on cold ground. And singing, lots of singing. The Japanese prisoners of war loved to sing.

“They went to work singing ‘Katyusha,’ they went home singing ‘Katyusha,’” recalls Forostovskaya, who used to watch the Japanese working in a courtyard near her school, not far from the corner of Fokina and Svetlanskaya streets. “They gave us little souvenirs and playthings. We gave them bread rolls.”

The time was 1946-48. World War II was over, but for hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers captured by the Soviet army following Japan’s surrender, a new battle for survival was underway. Transported behind Soviet lines, they became a significant labor force for the country. They worked in factories and harvested timber in the frozen taiga. They built roads, canals, and edifices all across the Far East and Siberia.

The Japanese worked on Vladivostok’s Dinamo Stadium. They built the Ulan Ude Opera House.

Forty thousand are known to have died from cold, malnutrition, and disease before the last group headed home at the end of 1956. Some of the deceased were buried in cemeteries in Nakhodka or Irkutsk, others in makeshift graves in the taiga.

On Aug. 18, 1991 the Soviet Union handed over a list of the 40,000 Japanese dead and maps showing 503 grave sites.

Since then, the living have been coming to look for the dead.

“Children come to look for their fathers, wives for their husbands, sisters for their brothers,” says Valentina Buraya, who works at the Foundation to Protect Peace, an organization that helps Japanese locate the graves of loved ones in Primorye.

Buraya says the Japanese believe tending the graves of one’s ancestors is an obligation.

“They believe souls aren’t quiet in a different country,” says Buraya. “For years relatives try to get to the burial grounds, and when they reach this goal, I understand them.”

It’s hard to communicate how emotional the experience is for them, she says. One elderly woman lost consciousness when she found her husband’s grave in Artyom.

For seven years Buraya has searched through archives, poured over POW letters, interviewed locals in the know, and trekked through the taiga in search of grave sites.

“It’s difficult,” says Buraya. Rivers change course, clearings fill. An archival document might identify a cemetery as 150 meters from the camp – but how to find the camp?

Sakue Yakuzaki POWs were held in camps throughout the Soviet Union.

Of the 113 grave sites known in Primorye, about half have been located. From 1992 to March of this year, the remains of 1,097 Japanese were sent home from Primorye out of a total of 8,116 returned from the former Soviet Union, says Mitsuru Ota, vice consul at the Japanese Consulate. (Ota explains that Japan calls Japanese soldiers imprisoned in the Soviet Union after World War II “internees,” not prisoners of war, because the war was already over.)

Buraya believes Japanese POWs in Primorye numbered about 60,000.

Some tourist firms see money to be made. Vitaly Ivanyuta, director of the Kavalerovo tourist firm Alexander, is banking on it. For the past 18 months, a seven-man team has spent $1,500 looking for grave sites.

Working with the Foundation to Protect Peace, they’ve found 21 of the 40 POWs believed to be buried in Kavalerovo County.

“It’s complicated,” says Ivanyuta, who entertained his first three Japanese visitors mid-September. “But it’s a business, and a good business.”

He recorded the grave visits on video and gave the Japanese the cassette. Next time he will sell the cassettes.

“Maybe in the future more Japanese will come,” Ivanyuta says. “We’ll look and see how to go further.”

Unfortunately, he says, there is no local support of his efforts. “It’s just my initiative.”

At the Vladivostok suburb Tikhaya Bay, a simple stone marked “To eternal peace” in Japanese and Russian stands on a hillside, facing Japan. The monument was unveiled three years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.

On Sept. 23, former prisoner of war Shigeru Kurihara , 74, led five countrymen, including Tsuneo Murayama, 72, in lighting green incense sticks and placing them along the monument’s base. They put several boxes of sake on the monument.

Kurihara, a Tokyo resident, worked three years at the Ussurisk Oil Combine. He returned to pay respect to deceased friends. It was terrible being a prisoner, he says, but he had expected to be shot by the Soviets when they captured his brigade in Pusan at the war’s close. He was happy to be alive.

Murayama, 72, of Niigata, cut timber and worked in Khabarovsky Krai building the railway between Sovietskaya Gavan and Urgal for four years.

Sakue Yakuzaki Japanese prisoners bury a comrade.

“It was bad,” he says, “but it’s nostalgic for me. The years of your youth, they always make an impact.”

Back in Japan, former prisoners of war produced a stream of memoirs. (Kurihara wrote a series of nine books called “Northern Spring” based on his experiences.)

“Battle Friends Cry Under Frozen Ground,” a book of drawings by former Japanese POW Sakue Yakuzaki, paints a grim portrait of camp life in Eastern Siberia: marching to work in driving snows, burials in the frozen ground, eating cat and dog to stay alive. But there are bright moments: a dance scene, a woman slipping a soldier a hunk of bread, exchanging drawings of Mt. Fuji for food.

Sometimes there was love. Historian Zoa Morgun of the Far Eastern State University’s Eastern Institute accompanied former Japanese prisoners of war to Blagoveshchensk. A Japanese man tracked down a woman he had fallen in love with 40 years ago in the nearby town of Belogorsk and asked her to return to Japan with him.

Morgun’s specialty is Japanese in the Russian Far East in the early 20th century. However, she became intrigued by the “human dimension” of the relationship between Japanese prisoners of war and Russians. Russians were often no better off than the Japanese POWs, she says. Food was scarce, and the two helped each other out.

The Japanese POWs were said to love children. Interviewing residents in Kavalerovo, Buraya found a woman who could sing a couplet from a Japanese lullaby. Some residents remember how to count to 10 in Japanese.

Both Buraya and Morgun feel a sense of urgency. There is so much left to do, with witnesses to this chapter of Russo-Japanese history aging. “While people are still alive we have to record and write this down,” says Margun. “They’re passing away, and they’re historical witnesses. Five years from now this will be too late.”