August 24, 2026

A memorial service for former Japanese prisoner-of-war internees, including Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese designated as “Japanese soldiers”, who had died in Siberia and Mongolia after WWII took place on August 23 in Tokyo’s Chitorigafuchi National Cemetery.

This annual event takes place on the day when Stalin, commander in chief of the former Soviet Union, in 1945 just after the war’s end issued a secret order to transfer Japanese POWs to Siberia.

Along with representatives of ruling and opposition parties, Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Koike Akira spoke as a guest speaker. Koike stressed, “Stalin’s order violated both international humanitarian law and the Potsdam Declaration, which guaranteed the repatriation of disarmed soldiers, and constituted a state-sponsored crime.” Noting that the remains of more than 30,000 individuals have yet to be recovered, Koike said that the Japanese government should commit to the effort to recover the remains and clarify the actual conditions of the internment in Siberia and Mongolia as stipulated by the “Siberia Special Measures Law”.

Former POW Nisikura Masaru, 101 years old, gave a speech and mentioned that bereaved families of Koreans detained in Siberia attended the ceremony for the first time in 15 years, and pointed out that the total number of people from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan who had been detained in Siberia and Mongolia remains unknown. He demanded that the Japanese government conduct investigations to find out the actual situation regarding this issue.

Moon Young-sik, 65, spoke on behalf of bereaved family members from South Korea. Moon’s father, who had been mobilized by the Japanese military, was detained by the Soviet forces in Shenyang, China, on August 18, 1945, and was not returned to his hometown until April 1949.