Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union

After World War II there were from 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese personnel in the Soviet Union and Mongolia interned to work in labor camps as POWs.

[citation needed] The majority of the approximately 3.5 million Japanese armed forces outside Japan were disarmed by the United States and Kuomintang China and repatriated in 1946.

Soviet Union behavior was contrary to the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact from the beginning[citation needed], and also to the Potsdam Declaration, which guaranteed the return of surrendered Japanese soldiers to Japan.

[4] The repatriation of Japanese POWs started in 1946:[citation needed] Beginning in 1949, there were reports of returnees being uncooperative and hostile upon returning to Japan, owing to Communist propaganda they had been subject to during their imprisonment.

These incidents resulted in the Japanese public gaining a more negative perception of the returning soldiers, and increased SCAP's hostility towards the left-wing in Japan.

Following the death of Josef Stalin and the subsequent Khruschev Thaw, the Soviet attitude towards the remaining Japanese prisoners changed significantly.

Prior to repatriation, a banquet in Khabarovsk hosted by Nikolai Gagen was attended by high-ranking prisoners such as Jun Ushiroku.

[13] Historian S. Kuznetsov, dean of the Department of History of the Irkutsk State University, one of the first researchers of the topic, interviewed thousands of former internees and came to the following conclusion:[citation needed] "Siberian Internment" (the Japanese term) was a unique and paradoxical phenomenon.

All of them recall the ideological indoctrination during the compulsory daily "studies of democracy", however only a very small number of them embraced communism.However, many of the inmates do not share Kuznetsov's views and retain negative memories of being robbed of personal property, and the brutality of camp personnel, harsh winters and exhausting labor.

Many Japanese died while they were detained in the POW camps; estimates of the number of these deaths vary from 60,000, based on deaths certified by the USSR, to 347,000 (the estimate of American historian William F. Nimmo, including 254,000 dead and 93,000 missing), based on the number of Japanese servicemen and civilian auxiliaries registered in Manchuria at the time of surrender who failed to return to Japan subsequently.

The Japanese novelist Toyoko Yamasaki wrote the 1976 novel Fumō Chitai, about an Imperial Army staff officer captured in Manchuria, his captivity and return to Japan to become a businessman.

A dramatisation of experiences as a Soviet POW form a portion of the latter part of the epic movie trilogy, The Human Condition, by Masaki Kobayashi.

Kiuchi Nobuo reported his experiences about Soviet camps in his The Notes of Japanese soldier in USSR online comic series.