Eleven winters of discontent : the Siberian internment and the making of a new Japan

**The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan.** In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home. The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to “reeducation” glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn’t survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state. Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives―including memoirs and survivor interviews―to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. __Eleven Winters of Discontent__ reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs. Cover Dedication Contents Note on Terms Abbreviations Eleven Winters of Discontent Introduction: In the Prisons Stalin Built The Siberian Internment In History And Memory Outline Of The Chapters 1. Beyond the Nation: The Siberian Internment in Global History Victimhood And Subjectivity: Citizenship And Authorship in Cold War Japan Writing The Internment’s History In Japan And Abroad Toward A Global History Of The Making Of A New Japan 2. Embodiments of Empire: The Internees as Imperial Vestiges Where It All Began: Japan’s Imperial Project in Manchuria and Karafuto The Fall Of Manchuria, The Fall Of Empire Manchukuo And The Hierarchy of Japanese National Victimhood 3. Bedbug Country Chronicles: The Soviet Union in Japanese Camp Memoirs Defeat Deception And Injustice The Siberian Trinity Of Suffering The Other Soviet Union 4. Cold, Hunger, and Hard Labor: Japanese Experiences in the Soviet Camps Penal Labor In The USSR: A Prehistory Of The Gupvi The Legacies And Imprints of the Gulag on the POW Camp System The Case Of Camp No. 188 At Rada, In The Tambov Region Japanese Experiences Against The Background of the Archives Literature Of Hardship 5. The Skillful Application of Propaganda Principles: POWs and Soviet Reeducation Origins Of The Democratic Movement Divide And Entice, Discipline And Punish Japanese Reactions To The Democratic Movement 6. In the Cold War Cross Fire: Returnees and the Superpower Confrontation The Tokyo Trial Battles Over Repatriation Criticizing The Slavery Kingdom The Cold War Domestic Storm The Tokuda Incident 7. We Cannot Die as Slaves: The Struggle for Recognition and Compensation Internee Activism In The Early Postwar Period Saitō Rokurō: The Sisyphus Of Interest Group Politics Shadows of the Internment In Contemporary Japanese Society Internment Memory In The Service Of The Nation Epilogue: Breaking Boundaries Breaking Boundaries Notes Acknowledgments Index The odyssey of 600,000 imperial Japanese soldiers incarcerated in Soviet labor camps after World War II and their fraught repatriation to postwar Japan. In August 1945 the Soviet Union seized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, capturing more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers, who were transported to labor camps across the Soviet Union but primarily concentrated in Siberia and the Far East. Imprisonment came as a surprise to the soldiers, who thought they were being shipped home. The Japanese prisoners became a workforce for the rebuilding Soviets, as well as pawns in the Cold War. Alongside other Axis POWs, they did backbreaking jobs, from mining and logging to agriculture and construction. They were routinely subjected to "reeducation" glorifying the Soviet system and urging them to support the newly legalized Japanese Communist Party and to resist American influence in Japan upon repatriation. About 60,000 Japanese didn't survive Siberia. The rest were sent home in waves, the last lingering in the camps until 1956. Already laid low by war and years of hard labor, returnees faced the final shock and alienation of an unrecognizable homeland, transformed after the demise of the imperial state. Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives--including more than a hundred memoirs and survivor interviews--to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan afterward. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. Superpower confrontation played out in the Siberian camps as surely as it did in Berlin or the Bay of Pigs "In this book, Sherzod Muminov draws on extensive Japanese, Russian, and English archives-including more than a hundred memoirs and survivor interviews-to piece together a portrait of life in Siberia and in Japan after World War II. Eleven Winters of Discontent reveals the real people underneath facile tropes of the prisoner of war and expands our understanding of the Cold War front. This book is the first comprehensive English-language study of the captivity of more than 600,000 Japanese former servicemen in the Soviet labor camps in the wake of World War II"-- Provided by publisher At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union captured 600,000 Japanese prisoners of war and interned them in Siberian labor camps. Sherzod Muminov details the soldiers' varied experiences of imprisonment, including their indoctrination in Soviet dogma and the shock and alienation of repatriation to a homeland transformed under US occupation.