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Stories from Beyond the Grave: Investigating Japanese Burial Grounds in North Korea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Mark Caprio  and
Mizuno Naoki
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The ravages of World War II and its aftermath in both Europe and Asia provoked one of the most extensive human migrations hitherto witnessed in world history as refugees scurried to escape the destruction. After the guns of war had been silenced and peace restored, these displaced peoples either by choice or force embarked on a long, and often dangerous, journey back to their homelands. Hundreds of thousands of these refugees, many further fleeing post-World War II battles in “liberated” states, died en route. Ben Shephard, in The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (London, Bodley Head 2010), dubs this “largely ignored” story the “war's most important legacy” (p. 4). The figures that Shephard provides of European refugees are mindboggling: as many as 17 million foreigners and Germans displaced within Germany; 11 million Germans returning from their country's occupied territories; millions of displaced peoples from German-occupied territories, including Jews released from concentration camps, returning home.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 12 , Issue 9 , March 2014 , e3
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2014

References

Notes

1 In total an estimated 700-800-000 Japanese resided on the Korean peninsula at the time of the war's conclusion. According to Ch'oe Yŏngho of Yŏngsan University in Pusan, Japanese relocating to the Korean peninsula in large numbers during the final months of the war to escape Allied bombing of Japan's cities make it difficult to arrive at an exact number. See his Ilbunin sehwahoe (Japanese Relief Society) (Seoul: Nonhŏng, 2013).

2 One important exception is the work of Morita Yoshio, Chōsen shūsen no kiroku (Records of the War's End in Korea) (Tokyo: Gannando, 1964). Tessa Morris-Suzuki examines Japanese who remained in North Korea until the mid-1950s in her “The Forgotten Japanese in North Korea: Beyond the Politics of Abduction. Asia Pacific Journal.

3 Numbers of buried from Ministry of Welfare, Zokuzoku hikiage engo no kiroku (Records of Returnee Relief, 3rd edition) (1963), 269. Place names are those that existed in 1945. Those place names rendered in bold were the ones we could confirm.

4 Translators Note: On August 8, 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and sent its armies into Manchuria the next day. Over the next week Soviet troops would enter northern Korea, arriving at the North Hamgyŏng cities of Unggi on August 10 and Ch‘ŏngjin on August 13, followed by the South Hamgyŏng city of Wŏnsan on August 16. On August 24 Soviet troops reached P'yŏngyang. The first American troops, an advance team, landed at Inch‘ŏn in southern Korea in early September, to be followed by the XXIV Corps arrival in Seoul on September 8.

5 Bruce Cumings writes that the poandae formed as a police unit soon after liberation to assist in collecting rice and taxes and coordinating the movement of people in northern Korea. This corps would later form the basis of the North Korean military. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 394, 411-413.

6 Over the 1990s and early 2000s a number of Japanese published memoirs of their experiences in northern Korea. For a review essay on these narratives see Mark E. Caprio, “Japanese Narratives on Life in Late-Colonial Korea: From Wartime to Repatriation,” Journal of Korean Studies 14 (2009): 117-32.

7 Morita Yoshio et al, eds. Chōsen shūsen no kiroku;shiryō hen vol.3, p. 509.

8 Sakurai Shūji Kikan hōkoku: Shūsen kara dasshutsu made (A Report to Japan Iron Company), p. 79. This publication was published informally and is available in a limited number of libraries.

9 Translator's note: The Soviet Union tacitly allowing Japanese to pass through southern Korea to return to Japan often drew criticism from Commanding officer John R. Hodge, who exchanged letters on this issue with his Soviet counterpart Colonel General Ivan Chistiakov.

10 Hikiage taikenshū henshūkai, Ikite sokoku e 5: shi no sanjū hachidosen (To the Living Homeland, 5: Death at the Thirty-eighth Parallel) (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai), 32.

11 Tessa Morris-Suzuki examines the effect of the cholera outbreak in southern Korea, in the Pusan area, that sent thousands of Koreans on ships back to Japan in her “Invisible Immigrants: Undocumented Migration and Border Control in Early Postwar Japan,” Asian Pacific Journal August 31, 2006.

12 Yokote Shinji, “Stalin no Nihonjin sōkan seisaku to Nihon no reisen e no michi, 1” (Stalin's Japanese Repatriation Policy and Japan's Road to the Cold War, 1), Hōgaku kennkyū Keio University vol.82, no. 9 (2009).