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Full Description
At the time of Japan's surrender to Allied forces on August 15, 1945, some six million Japanese were left stranded across the vast expanse of a vanquished Asian empire. Half civilian and half military, they faced the prospect of returning somehow to a Japan that lay prostrate, its cities destroyed, after years of warfare and Allied bombing campaigns. Among them were more than 600,000 soldiers of Japan's army in Manchuria, who had surrendered to the Red Army only to be transported to Soviet labor camps, mainly in Siberia. Held for between two and four years, and some far longer, amid forced labor and reeducation campaigns, they waited for return, never knowing when or if it would come. Drawing on a wide range of memoirs, art, poetry, and contemporary records, The Gods Left First reconstructs their experience of captivity, return, and encounter with a postwar Japan that now seemed as alien as it had once been familiar. In a broader sense, this study is a meditation on the meaning of survival for Japan's continental repatriates, showing that their memories of involvement in Japan's imperial project were both a burden and the basis for a new way of life.
Contents
List of Maps and Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Names and Terms I. Prologue The Gods Left First Sources and Method II. The Siberian Internment in History The Prince's Tale The Soviet-Japanese War Hot War to Cold The Soviet-Japanese Conflict: Prehistory into History Toward Internment The Internment Remembered III. Kazuki Yasuo and the Profane World of the Gulag Icons of the Profane The Red Corpse "My Vision Broadened Tenfold" The "Siberia Style" From Image to Text The Responsibility of the Artist "The Beauty only I Can Grasp" IV. Knowledge Painfully Acquired: Takasugi Ichiro and the "Democratic Movement" in Siberia Thank You, Iosif Vissarionovich! A Humanist Interprets the Gulag Siberia, School of Democracy Ogawa Goro Becomes Takasugi Ichiro In the Shadow of the Northern Lights The Gate of Hell Toward Epiphany Toward Return Knowledge Painfully Acquired V. Ishihara Yoshiro: "My Best Self Did Not Return" Prologue: Ishihara Yoshiro and Viktor Frankl The Survivor's Question The Primitive Accumulation of Memory The Life before the Death Into the Gulag At Lowest Ebb, Stirrings Kano Buichi, Enigma Was this Domoi? VI. Coda The People Stalin Didn't Care About "A War to Live": Fujiwara Tei's The Shooting Stars Are Alive The Meaning and Message of Survival Appendix: How Many? Bibliography Index
