Eleven winters of discontent : the Siberian internment and the making of a new Japan / Sherzod Muminov.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Muminov, Sherzod, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prisoners of war--Russia (Federation)--Siberia--History--20th century.

Prisoners of war.

Prisoner-of-war camps--Russia (Federation)--Siberia--History--20th century.

Prisoner-of-war camps.

Prisoners of war--Japan--History--20th century.

Cold War.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (385 pages)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2022]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

NOTE ON TERMS

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION: IN THE PRISONS STALIN BUILT

CHAPTER ONE. BEYOND THE NATION: THE SIBERIAN INTERNMENT IN GLOBAL HISTORY

CHAPTER TWO. EMBODIMENTS OF EMPIRE: THE INTERNEES AS IMPERIAL VESTIGES

CHAPTER THREE. BEDBUG COUNTRY CHRONICLES: THE SOVIET UNION IN JAPANESE CAMP MEMOIRS

CHAPTER FOUR. COLD, HUNGER, AND HARD LABOR: JAPANESE EXPERIENCES IN THE SOVIET CAMPS

CHAPTER FIVE. THE SKILLFUL APPLICATION OF PROPAGANDA PRINCIPLES: POWs AND SOVIET REEDUCATION

CHAPTER SIX. IN THE COLD WAR CROSS FIRE: RETURNEES AND THE SUPERPOWER CONFRONTATION

CHAPTER SEVEN. WE CANNOT DIE AS SLAVES: THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION AND COMPENSATION

EPILOGUE: BREAKING BOUNDARIES

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Muminov, Sherzod Eleven Winters of Discontent

ISBN:

9780674269705

0674269705

9780674269699

0674269691

OCLC:

1286428896