The government will check and then release a list of Japanese detainees the Soviets sent to what is now North Korea in the aftermath of World War II, Japan's top government spokesman said Thursday. The list was received from the Russian government in 2006.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government decided to post the list on its website after media reported that the names of 869 Japanese detainees had come to light in Russia's national archives.
The detainees include soldiers and civilians who died in a camp set up by the Soviet Union in present-day North Korea.
The government decided to release the data in part because of the 70th anniversary this year of the end of the war and the fact that surviving relatives of the detainees are now elderly.
Japan's health ministry "has the list, and the list should be released to the public," Suga told a press conference.
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has been working on translating the contents of the list which includes the detainees' names, ranks and hometowns.
To date, the ministry had been providing information about the list only at the request of detainees' relatives.
It says 575,000 Japanese were detained in the former Soviet Union and 47,000 of them were transferred to Manchuria in northeastern China and North Korea.