I’ve recently been wondering about Japanese prisoners in World War II. How they were treated and how they were received when they returned home after the war. I found this Link about Japanese prisoners in Word War II and it answered part of my original question. So on to the other part, how were Japanese prisoners treated when they returned home? Were people happy to see them or did they bring shame on themselves and their families?
Most accounts I’ve heard from Japanese POWs were that the treatment they received was pretty good, and that compared to the lack of food and medical supplies they were suffering from late in the war, the conditions were even better in the Allied prison camps. You might be interested in Shohei Ooka’s book Taken Captive, which is a semi-fictionalized account of his own experiences during the war (I haven’t read this one, but his other book, Fire on the Plains, about the fighting in the Philippines, was very good). I don’t know if it mentions what happened after the prisoners returned, but one of the main themes is the anxiety they feel about going back home, especially since they were living better as prisoners than their brothers still in the field, or even the civilians back in Japan.
One of my former students was a POW, captured by the British in Burma fairly late in the war (he was 19 in 1945). According to him, life in the prison was a lot better than life in the field; he was safer, better fed, and even made friends with some of the guards. One story he told me was that there were one or two Americans stationed with the British there, and one day an American plane arrived with supplies for them. Included in the crates was a full team’s worth of baseball equipment. My student said when he saw that, he realized just how absolutely outmatched Japan was. Not only that America could send planeloads of supplies all the way around the world while the Japanese soldiers were having to forage for food and scrounge for ammunition, but that supplies for the soldiers (and for the nation) were abundant enough to even consider loading a plane with something as inessential as sports equipment. Who knows? Maybe the purpose of the cargo was to deliver exactly that kind of morale shock. If so, it worked.
The Japanese PoWs captured and held in Australia staged the largest mass breakout of the war, referred to as The Cowra Breakout. The main reason posited for their desperation to escape is the deep shame they felt for having become PoWs in the first place.
Where they were breaking out to is anyone’s guess.
Are we discussing Japanese people who were held prisoner by other combatant or visa versa?
What about the Japanese captured by the Soviets? Did they ever make it home, or did they die in the wastes of Siberia like so many Germans?
In “Embracing Defeat,” an excellent history of occupation Japan written by John Dower, he goes into a very interesting discussion of Japanese POWs held by the Soviets, especially those who were in Manchuria at the time of the surrender. The basic point is that huge numbers of these Japanese simply never returned – I can’t recall the number cited, but it is in the area of many tens of thousands to possibly hundreds of thousands.
Dower also tells of a radio program, which later appeared on TV, in which widows would show pictures of their loved ones who were believed missing in the Soviet Union, appealing for anyone to provide any information about his whereabouts (presumably from soldiers who did return). Dower says that this program was on the air until the 1960s.
Members of the Japanese Military who surrendered to Allied Forces during World War II such as the 17 prisoners taken on Tarawa.
In the remote Northern town in Japan that I used to live in, there was a mountain community that originally consisted of Japanese people resettled after being turfed out of Russia.
The sad thing was that they were not returned to where they had come from in Japan and they were sent to this area, that was major hicksville by any standard, and even there, they were sent to live in the Mountains, away from the main settlement.
So, those returning from Russia didn’t get good treatment from their own country.
Found the pages in Dower’s book I was looking for. In the Spring of 1949, the Soviets announced that they’d return 95,000 Japanese POWs, but Japanese and American figures maintained that there were 400,000 Japanese held by the Rooskies. In 1991, the Soviet Union released the names of 46,000 Japanese known to be buried in Siberia. There are still 55,000 to 113,000 of these Japanese POWs unaccounted for.
They were breaking out in order to be killed, as that site clearly says: “The Australian guards thought the Japanese were attempting to take over the camp. Actually, they were attempting to kill themselves.”
Which makes me wonder…were they trying to regain their honor through death or did they figure they could never go home(due to shame) so they might as well get killed.
Were the POW’s coming back from Non-Russian prisons treated similarly, or were the Soviets’ prisoners given “special” treatment? If the latter, then how come?