The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956 / Edition 1

by Andrew E. Barshay

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520276154
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/16/2013
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 6.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Andrew E. Barshay is Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions.

Table of 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

Editorial Reviews

The Gods Left First is so well written that there were times I found myself engrossed as if reading a novel or viewing a film.

Monumenta Nipponica

"Barshay provides a chilling account of the coercive power of the state of individuals who nonetheless mature sufficiently to speak for themselves. The Gods Left First is a rich and deeply moving book."

International Affairs - Shu Cao

"An intensely personal book."

Journal of Japanese Studies 41, no. 1 - Laura Hein