Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. xiii, 370 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 9780674986435.
Following the offense of the Soviet Army on August 9, 1945 in Manchuria the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo fell. In a matter of a few days the famed Kwantung Army surrendered. In a surprise secret decree, Stalin ordered to transport some 600,000 defeated Kwantung soldiers and officers to Soviet camps in Siberia, the Russian Far East, Central Asia, and other parts of the Soviet Union. Sherzod Muminov’s new book Eleven Winters of Discontent examines in painstaking detail what is known in Japanese as the Siberian Internment, utilizing vast Japanese, English, and Russian archival materials and memoir literature. The collapse of the Japanese empire has long attracted the attention of those who are interested in how modern empires end and how their defeated soldiers and civilians grapple with the gravity of their new situation and past responsibilities. Unlike most of the literature on civilian repatriates and war memory, less attention has been directed to the Japanese imperial soldiers and their experiences in Soviet captivity. One notable exception is Andrew Barshay’s The Gods Left First. The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), which deals with the same topic as Muminov’s book, but raises different questions and answers. Muminov joins a small but growing scholarship on internment and repatriation by situating these issues within three commonly separated fields: studies of the Japanese empire, Cold War studies, and postwar Japanese nation-building. The Siberian Internment is a central and unifying issue in all three fields, and Muminov proves it well by providing us with a “political and social history of Japan’s transition from empire to nation-state, told through the lesson of the Siberian Internment” (43).
Muminov examines the social and political implications of the internment in postwar Japan, how a “new Japan” was conceived and promoted through a certain interpretation of the Soviet-Japanese war and captivity, and how representations of Japanese suffering shaped Japanese memory of war and its Cold War alliances. Muminov situates the Siberian Internment in three contexts: “Japan’s imperial project on the Northeast Asian mainland, the USSR’s system of POW labor camps, and the global division of the Cold War.” (45) Muminov also wants to go beyond “victim mind-sets” and return the Siberian internees’ agency by not portraying them as “pitiful victim” but as “active participants in world-changing events” (46).
In chapter 1 Muminov helpfully explains how the Siberian Internment was written in Japanese postwar national history by historians, popular commentators, and former internees themselves. Muminov puts a heavy blame on Japanese postwar historians for prioritizing Japanese victimhood and instrumentalizing or muting the internees’ experience for the politics of the Cold War, in effect diverting attention from Japan’s problematic imperial legacies (36–37). After narrating the quick collapse of the empire in Manchuria, chapter 2 describes how in postwar public memory the Siberian Internment was severed from the Japanese expansion history in Manchuria. The two developments became separate events, whereas the latter has continued to be idealized and romanticized and the former has been portrayed as illegal and murderous. Chapters 3 and 4 reconstruct the internees’ experience in Siberia from their memoirs, in which what Muminov classifies as the Siberian trinity of suffering—cold, hunger, and hard labour—occupies a central place. Here he delves into the Soviet archives to reveal that the Japanese captives in fact enjoyed more lenient treatment than the European soldiers of the Nazi coalition, contrary to their recollections. Chapter 5 concerns the Soviet systematic attempts to reeducate the internees into socialist thinking. Even though the most persuasive incentive to join reeducation programs in camps was the promise of early repatriation, there was considerable interest among the internees to learn about socialism and the Soviet interpretation of world order, imperialism, and capitalism. Muminov unearthed 80 applications from Japanese internees for permission to stay in the USSR and become Soviet citizens, although all were denied. Muminov suggests that in this instance the Japanese internees exercised agency and some modicum of freedom to resist or accept socialist thought. Unfortunately, he does not delve deeper into this subject to ask how their values might have changed or inquire into what the internment experience really mean to them or how they went on to reconsider empire and war responsibility.
Chapter 6 documents the internees’ role in the Tokyo Trial, the emergence of a negative public image of the Soviet Union in Japan, and consequently the growing suspicions of the returned POWs as a fifth column. Chapter 7 details the former internees’ fight for state compensation, which resulted in failure, only proving the point of how marginal the Siberian internment became in postwar memory.
Eleven Winters of Discontent is a welcome addition to the literature about the end of the Japanese empire, repatriation, and the postwar rebuilding of Japan. Muminov convincingly demonstrates how the Siberian Internment played a significant role in crafting Japanese images of their northeastern expansion, the war, and finally the USSR and socialism in the postwar period.
New York University, New York