Authors

Akina Kobayashi¹;  ¹ Tama University, Japan

Discussion

The still unresolved dispute over the Kuril Islands remains a central topic of research on the restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Soviet Union in 1956. However, it is little known that the repatriation of Japanese captives who had been taken prisoner at war’s close and moved to POW camps in Soviet territory was also a major topic of negotiation. At the time of the negotiations to restore diplomatic relations between Japan and the Soviet Union, there were over 1,000 Japanese who had not returned from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union reported that the number was 1,047, but the Japanese side claimed a higher number was still detained. In the Soviet government's view, these Japanese citizens were "war criminals" who had been convicted (most receiving 25-year prison sentences) at the 1949 Khabarovsk Tribunal and other trials. They were mainly former Kwantung Army commanders, staff officers, and high-ranking officials who had been detained for more than ten years since the end of the war. The USSR’s General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who had set the course for a new era of "criticism of Stalin" and initiated the “Thaw” agreed with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichirō to release and repatriate "war criminals" to Japan in the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration of October 1956, which led to the restoration of diplomatic relations (Article 5 of the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration). 

Based on a wide range of diplomatic and other archival sources in Japanese, Russian, and English, this paper aims to shine light on the background of the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration and the repatriation of Japanese "war criminals". It argues that the Soviet-Japanese normalization was not only a Cold War tale of diplomacy to return to Japan the Soviet-occupied Kuril Islands, but also had a human component seen in the fates of Japanese citizens in Soviet custody.