The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956
Andrew E. Barshay
Abstract
As the Japanese empire collapsed in August 1945, over six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers in Manchuria surrendered to the Red Army and were transported to Soviet labor camps, mainly in Siberia. There they were held for between two and four years, and some far longer. The Siberian Internment, as it is known, brought prolonged forced labor and exposure to an intense campaign of Stalinist reeducation in which Japanese activists played an important role. Long before Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) appeared in the USSR, Japanese gulag veterans began to produce not ju ... More
Keywords: Siberian Internment, Japanese empire, Manchuria, gulag memoirs, Stalinism, memory
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520276154 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2014 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520276154.001.0001 |
