Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan by Sherzod Muminov

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan by Sherzod Muminov James D. J. Brown Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan. By Sherzod Muminov. Harvard University Press, 2022. 384 pages. ISBN: 9780674986435 (hardcover; also available as e-book). The history of Japanese imperialism and the end of World War II in East Asia can seem like a competition between victimhood narratives. Within this contest, the [End Page 355] Siberian internment usually loses out to other tales of woe. Even when not neglected, the story of the 600,000 Japanese former soldiers and civilians interned within the Soviet Union after 1945 is too often told with trite uniformity. Some accounts give the impression that every Japanese internee was an innocent victim, slaving away in a frigid Siberian wilderness, where temperatures fell to minus fifty degrees Celsius, and surviving on a diet of three potatoes a day. Sherzod Muminov's Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan is a welcome corrective to this literature of wailing melancholy as the author sets out to "challenge the popular perception that the internment was only about suffering, injustices, and deprivation" (p. 80). Muminov highlights nuance at every turn and takes an international rather than a national perspective. He also makes use of internees' memoirs in Japanese, as well as Russian-language files from the Soviet archives. The result is an excellent account that enables the reader not only to understand the details of the Siberian internment but to reflect on its significance to the Cold War and the development of postwar Japan. The book's particular merit is in treating the internees as participants in their predicament rather than mere victims. However, it also covers the basics well. The story begins with Joseph Stalin's secret decree of 23 August 1945. This ordered the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del, or NKVD) to select up to half a million Japanese "physically fit to work in the conditions of the Far East" and to transport them to the Soviet Union (p. 2). This position was a reversal of the one from 16 August, when the Soviets had expressed their intention not to intern Japanese on Soviet territory. Stalin's decree also ignored Article 9 of the Potsdam Declaration, which, in setting the terms of Japan's surrender, promised: "The Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed, shall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives" (p. 26). In assessing the reasons for Stalin's decision, Muminov considers economic motivations, including the need for labor to make use of the enormous quantities of "trophy equipment"—primarily industrial machinery—that Soviet forces expropriated in Manchuria and used to equip their own factories. He also takes account of the internees' value as political bargaining chips, which is indeed how they were used during the talks that led to official Japan-Soviet ties being restored in October 1956. Muminov even draws readers' attention to the conspiracy theory that Japan's Kwantung Army offered Japanese soldiers to the Soviet Union as a workforce during a meeting held at Zharikovo on 19 August 1945. However, ultimately the author concludes that the decision to intern the Japanese soldiers was not a premeditated move. Instead, it was Stalin's instinctive response to US president Harry Truman's rejection of the Soviet request for an occupation zone on Hokkaido. Denied the chance to occupy any of the Japanese main islands, Stalin chose to occupy Japanese personnel instead. In addition to clearly charting the origins of the Siberian internment, the book does a fine job of communicating its scale. Soviet documents reveal that 639,776 [End Page 356] Japanese army service personnel were taken prisoner. These included humble farmhands but also Konoe Fumitaka, the Princeton-educated eldest son of former prime minister Konoe Fumimaro. Uno Sōsuke, who briefly served as prime minister in 1989 before resigning because of an affair with a geisha, was also among those interned. There were also more than 30,000 Koreans, Chinese, and Mongols, as...