| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,200,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 1996: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 1995: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In the 1920s and 1930s, there were about 100 Japanese who dreamed of living in "the paradise of the working class" and went to the USSR.These people were mainly communists, who were oppressed by the imperial police in Japan. There were also ordinary workers, intellectuals and artists who were not communist. They were organized and led by the Japanese Communist Party (the Japanese section of Comintern, the JCP), whose representatives in Moscow in the 1930s were Sen Katayama, Sanzo Nosaka (alias Susumu Okano) and Kenzo Yamamoto (alias Tanaka).
After the death of Sen Katayama in November 1933, Sanzo Nosaka was sent to the USA in early 1934 and Kenzo Yamamoto became the top leader of the Japanese Communist group in the USSR.But Yamamoto was suddenly arrested as an "agent of Japanese Imperialism" by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in November 1937 and was shot in March 1939. Almost all Japanese living in the USSR at the time faced the same destiny. Theexact number of victims is not yet known
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, but I now estimate there to have been about 86 Japanese. This study tried to trace this tragic history, based on newly found Russian documents. I summarize here the number of Japanese victims of the Stalinist purges in the 1920s and 1930s as presently known.
(1) 32 Japanese victims are confirmed both by Russian documents and Japanese materials.
(2) 15 Japanese were supposedly killed or oppressed according to Soviet documents.
(3) 12 Japanese were definitely in the USSR,but went missing in the 1930s.
(4) Over 20 Japanese were supposedly in the USSR according to Japanese police records, but we have no information on them thereafter.
This list of about 80 Japanese is not yet complete. There might have been more Japanese particularly in the Sakhalin and Vladivostok area as the s Stalinist purge reached its peak in 1937-39. We can find new names when we find new secret documents in Russia, because most Japanese were arrested based on the confessions of other Japanese. They dreamed of a paradise for working people, but their emigration there resulted in death or internment in the gulag. Their history resurfaced only 60 years after their tragic lives ended. Less
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