Up to 760,000 Japanese were in Soviet Gulags

Newly found records in Russia reveal that up to 760,000 Japanese POWs were imprisoned in Siberian labor camps in the aftermath of World War II according to a somewhat overlooked July report from the Kyodo News.

According to the report, the revelation conflicts with virtually all previous Japanese estimates that reported about 560,000 people as being taken prisoner with approximately 53,000 deaths "after being taken to Siberia and other places to engage in railway construction."

The documents could start arriving in Japan as early as this year according to certain "government" sources noted in the report.

The historical context here should be seen as troubling, in any case.

From the History News Network:

Fresh from victory over the Nazi regime and emboldened by favorable political developments in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union turned its attention to Japan.

On August 8, 1945, after weeks of deflecting Japan’s requests to mediate a surrender to the United States and its allies, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented Japanese Ambassador Sato with a declaration of war, thereby breaching the Neutrality Pact that remained in force between the two countries. The declaration stated that, “the Soviet Government decided to accept the proposition of the Allies and joined the [Potsdam] declaration of the Allied Powers of July 26….”[1] Soviet acceptance of the Potsdam Proclamation meant recognition of the content of the Cairo Declaration of December 1943, which stated that the Allies “covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion.”[2] Two years earlier, the Soviet government had also clearly expressed “agreement with the basic principles of” the Atlantic Charter, which stated that the signatories “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other… [and] desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.”[3] The Soviet Union and the United States, between Yalta and the immediate postwar months, would fiercely negotiate territorial and other parameters of power centered on the distribution of territories including both the homeland and colonies of the defeated Japanese empire and the division of Korea into Northern and Southern zones.

Stalin’s promise to Roosevelt and Churchill to enter the war against Japan, long sought as a means to bring the war to a swift end and reduce allied casualties, manifested itself as Operation August Storm, the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, the Korean Peninsula, the island of Sakhalin and the Kuriles.[4] “August Storm” can be divided into two phases. The first was the week from August 9 to 14 when Soviet forces swept aside demoralized Japanese defenders in Manchuria and Korea and moved south in Sakhalin over the border at the 50th parallel.[5] The second was the two-week period from August 15 – the date when Japan formally accepted the Potsdam Proclamation – to September 2, when Japanese government representatives signed the instrument of surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri. While the former period saw a short but effective Soviet campaign that dealt a body blow to the Kwantung Army, the latter saw a determined push to occupy the territories discussed at Yalta and the unleashing of acts that targeted not only the Japanese military but also the helpless civilian population.

 "The Three Yokers at Yalta"

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Of some further interest, (for several years now, apparently) the notes of a Japanese soldier in the USSR, Kiuchi Nobuo, are preserved and presented here with personal drawings.

Note that even Mr. Nobuo, the former prisoner, has the number at "about 600 thousand."