Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum, Memorial museum and public building in Maizuru, Japan
The Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum is a public building in the port city documenting the return of approximately 660,000 Japanese citizens between 1945 and 1958. The exhibits display documents, personal belongings, and accounts from people who came back from labor camps and internment sites in Siberia, Manchuria, and Korea.
Maizuru was a designated port for the return of Japanese from overseas after 1945. The first repatriation ship, Unzen Maru, arrived on 7 October 1945; the last, Hakusan Maru, on 7 September 1958. Former soldiers interned in Siberia also returned here. The museum opened in April 1988 on a hill overlooking the former repatriation pier in the Hira district.
The museum preserves personal belongings of returnees, including clothing, letters, and diaries that document their difficult journey home. These collections show the emotional and practical challenges people faced when starting over.
The building is located near the train station and is easy to reach, with plenty of free parking available for cars and buses. Visitors should allow enough time to carefully view the documents and exhibits while reading the many personal stories on display.
The Shirakaba Diary was written by Osamu Seno during his Siberian internment: he used birch bark in place of paper and soot from a chimney as ink, composing the entries in waka verse. It is one of 570 items from the museum's collection inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2015. Donors Nobuo Kiuchi and Seiichi Yasuda became Japan's first living creators represented in that register.
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