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.
eISBN: 978-0-520-95657-5
Subjects: History
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