Postwar Repatriation of Japanese from Overseas (Hikiage)

At the surrender in August 1945 about 6.6 million Japanese were overseas, roughly half of them military personnel and half civilians, in Manchuria, China, Korea, Taiwan, Sakhalin, South-East Asia and the Pacific. Under Occupation direction the Japanese government set up Regional Repatriation Centres at designated ports and used surviving Japanese ships together with US-provided Liberty ships and landing ships.

Most people returned quickly: about five million were back by the end of 1946, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare later recorded a total of roughly 6.29 million repatriates. The largest numbers landed at Uragashira in Sasebo (about 1.4 million) and Hakata (about 1.39 million), followed by Maizuru (about 660,000), Senzaki and Otake (each a little over 410,000) and other ports. The same ports were used to send home Koreans, Chinese and others who had been in Japan.

Repatriation from Soviet-controlled areas was slower and harsher. Japanese civilians in Manchuria were left without protection after the Soviet invasion and suffered heavy losses from violence, hunger and disease; about 1.05 million were eventually evacuated through the port of Huludao between May 1946 and 1948 under arrangements involving the United States, the Chinese Nationalist government and Communist forces. Some 575,000 servicemen and others were held in the Soviet Union and Mongolia for forced labour, and about 55,000 of them died, according to the Japanese government.

Maizuru was the last repatriation port in operation, receiving ships from the Soviet Union and China until 1958, along with more than 16,000 sets of remains. In 2015 a collection of 570 items held by the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.