A monument honoring Japanese who died while in Soviet captivity after World War II has been erected in Mongolia, according to officials of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
Stored inside the monument are letters, photographs and other items belonging to the deceased, the officials said.
The monument, which takes the form of a gate and stands about 10 meters tall and 6 meters wide, has been erected on the site of a former cemetery in Ulan Bator.
The remains of some 800 Japanese, including members of the Imperial Japanese Army, were buried at the cemetery at one stage.
After World War II, the Soviet army detained around 575,000 prisoners in various locations, including Manchuria in northeastern China.
Some 14,000 of these were sent to Mongolia, with an estimated 2,000 dying while being subjected to forced labor, the ministry said.
Their bodies were then buried at 16 locations across Mongolia.
Between 1994 and 1999, Tokyo initiated a program to gather these remains.
Ahead of the monument's erection, a group of surviving former prisoners and relatives campaigned to raise public awareness of the issue.
Group member Fusae Kobayashi said she wrote a letter to her father, who died in a prison camp, in which she promised she would visit him again.
"I would also want the young generation to visit the monument and tell the next generation about these detentions," said Kobayashi, a 65-year-old resident of Kanagawa Prefecture.