Sending the Japanese home after World War II

most of the stories about population transfers and repatriation of enemy soldiers and millions of displaced civilians from enemy countries who surrendered at the end of WWII is not covered in a lot of the history books, even in Europe.

But what happened to all the Japanese soldiers and civilians in Manchuria after Japanese surrendered?

Global Voices has The little known story.

In August 1945, an estimated 6.6 million Japanese soldiers, colonial administrators, colonists and other members of the military and occupying forces — about 9 per cent of the total population of Japan — were located all over Asia and Oceania.

At war's end, all of these people were faced with the challenge of somehow making their way back to Japan.

Not everyone would return to Japan immediately, if at all. For example, following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, 456,000 soldiers and civilians employed by the Japanese wartime occupying regime were transported by Russian forces to labour camps across the Soviet Union. For the next decade, internees were engaged in forced labour including constructing power plants, mining coal and building bridges and roads as a form of war reparations to the Soviet Union.

most of the article is about this last group who were made slave laborers in the USSR.

more HERE. about Japanese museum about that remembers the repatriation.

and it wasn't just from Manchuria: LINK.

At the end of the war over six million Japanese were scattered throughout the islands in the Western Pacific and on the Asiatic mainland. Their repatriation became one of the major problems confronting General MacArthur. Their early return to Japan was desirable for purely humanitarian reasons as well as for the purpose of easing the economic burden of the liberated countries. (Plate No. 48) In addition, there were approximately 1,170,000 aliens in Japan, many of whom had been forcibly removed from their homelands.

the article goes into details: How the repatriation was done in four phases, and how ships, including merchant marine ships and Japanese ships, were used to transport people,  and then, to complicate matters, a cholera epidemic occurred and some people had to be placed in quarantine to stop the spread of the disease to their home countries. 

the part about the USSR keeping some of their prisoners is found lower down in the chapter:

From June 1948 on, the Soviets did not fulfill their 50,000 monthly quota as specified in the agreement of 19 December 1947, in spite of General MacArthur's repeated protests; they suspended repatriation for periods of several months without any apparent justification.

The repatriation of Japanese nationals still detained in Soviet areas thus evolved into a perplexing situation, involving difficulties of an entirely different type than those encountered in repatriation from other areas.

Heretofore, the problems of repatriation consisted of tremendous distances, limited shipping, epidemics inherent in mass movements under crowded conditions, and integration of millions of returnees into the economic and political life of Japan; repatriation from Soviet areas, however, posed a problem in the uncompromising attitude of the Soviets.

Their repatriation policy was probably predicated on the prolonged use of inexpensive Japanese labor. Interrogation of repatriates also revealed calculated indoctrination in political camps.

italics mine. 

The Soviets completely disregarded the individual rights of approximately 469,000 Japanese who, as of 31 December 1948, were still held by them under conditions of slave labor, and made no attempt to justify their actions in the eyes of the world.

sigh. 

the article also goes on to discuss the geopolitical complications of repatriating Koreans citizens.

There are so many similar stories of the USSR using European POWs and enemy civilians as cheap labor for years after the war ended.
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related story from Rappler: 
the program to send bodies of the Japanese war dead from the Philippines.

Since 1958, the remains of only 100,000 out of 518,000 Japanese soldiers who died in the Philippines have been returned to Japan

part of the problem is that many were killed in the jungle or mountains and the bodies never found or identified. Indeed it would be difficult to identify if these bodies were locals or Japanese unless you did forensic analysis of the bones.

and then, of course, some locals decided to rob graves for profit. LINK