Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The Gulag Memoirs of a Japanese Humanist, 1945–49

Over 600,000 soldiers of Japan's Kwantung Army were interned in the Soviet gulag following Japan's defeat in 1945. Their experiences are recounted in some 2,000 memoirs, of which Takasugi Ichirō's Kyokkō no kage ni (In the shadow of the northern lights, 1950) was among the first and most significant. In it, Takasugi interpreted both the phenomenon of Stalinism and his own role as a Japanese, and a Japanese soldier, in the history of his time. For Takasugi, the rival claims of ethnic versus class solidarity merely displaced one collectivism onto another: the point, he learned, was to transcend both.