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There was an article in the evening edition of the Hokkaido Shinbun newspaper of 1 September 2000 about former Japanese soldiers who had been imprisoned in work camps in Siberia at the end of World War Two. |
| Approximately nine thousand people were held in camps in the Khakassia Republic in south-central Siberia alone. Seven hundred and seven of them died and were buried there. So about one prisoner in thirteen died miserably in that foreign land, after suffering extreme cold, starvation and forced labour. I could not help but feel outraged. | |
| However we should also recall that one hundred and nine years ago conditions of forced labour just as horrific were inflicted on prisoners in our own Kitami region. | |
| Between April and December 1891, convicts from the Abashiri branch of Kushiro Prison - 1393 recorded as at 16 August that year - were set to work on the construction of the Kitami Trunk Road (Central Trunk Road), which was to link Asahikawa with Abashiri. There were 240 deaths during that period - indicating an appalling rate of almost one prisoner in six. | |
| Many died from diseases such as beriberi, caused by inadequate food and poor living conditions in the convict barracks. These were in addition to deaths directly resulting from the long hours of forced labour. The work often continued late into the night under lamplight. Prisoners who escaped were at times killed by guards while resisting capture. | |
| Such hellish forced labour practices had an indirect connection with the expansion of imperial Russian influence into eastern Asia. Construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad began there after Russia had seized control of the coastal regions around Vladivostok from Ching Dynasty China. Convicts, some sent from Sakhalin, were set to work at a feverish pace. | |
| The authorities in Meiji Japan felt extremely threatened by such developments. As a countermeasure, they determined to settle soldier-pioneers in areas of Hokkaido inland from the Sea of Okhotsk and to open up a road through the centre of the island that would enable the rapid deployment of troops. The government at that time did not have sufficient finance and manpower available for such a project, so it came up with the idea of using forced prison labour as a cost-saving expedient. Ito Hirobumi first proposed this measure in Hokkaido but his subordinate Kaneko Kentaro was responsible for its harsh implementation. | |
| In Kaneko's words: "To start with, these people are violent criminals so even if they die from hard labour their deaths will not be a great tragedy - unlike the deaths of ordinary labourers, who would leave behind wives and children if they should die and be buried in the mountains." Inflicting extreme working conditions on the convicts would keep construction costs to the absolute minimum. If some died, that would serve to eliminate the cost of keeping them in prison, so there would be a double benefit. In effect he proposed working prisoners to death in order to keep expenditure to a minimum. | |
| Kawahara Tsuruzo was a soldier pioneer who landed in Abashiri in June 1897, six years after the road had been completed, and travelled along it to Nokkeushi (Kitami). He recalled shuddering as he passed a succession of grave mounds by the roadside, hidden in the shade of butter-burr leaves, drooping after a late frost. There were no graves dug to bury those convicts who had died. Their bodies were just covered over with earth on the spot where they had fallen. Pieces of the iron chains which had been used to bind prisoners together were later found in some of these mounds. | |
| Members of the Rubeshibe Local Historic Society exhumed the bodies of two convicts from graves in Aza Hanazono 55 Go in that town in 1984, ninety-three years after the road had been built. Both were males, one aged about nineteen the other about thirty. On examining the bodies, Doctor Kajiura Toshikazu of Onneyu noticed that one had a large opening on the top of the skull. His immediate response was to murmur that this had probably been caused by a blow from a blunt instrument. | |
| The present-day prosperity of the Kitami region has been built upon the foundation of horrendous sacrifices made by convicts, for which we should express sorrow and gratitude. As we move into the twenty-first century, it is perhaps worth reconsidering whether states should pursue policies which give absolute priority to national interests alone. I think instead we should aim to create a society, irrespective of political differences, which grants universal recognition to the value of the lives of individuals and their human rights. | |
| (October 2000) | |