[Under the Twinkling Great Bear: Drawings of Internment in Siberia] きらめく北斗星の下に

Tokyo: シベリア抑留画集出版委員会, 1989. In Japanese, with a short foreword in English.
4to. 229, [3] pp., ill. Errata sheet inserted.

Forty-six artists who drew the Gulag from inside it.

In September 1945, despite the Potsdam Declaration, some 575,000 disarmed Japanese servicemen in Manchuria, northern Korea, Sakhalin and the Kuriles were sent to Soviet labour camps rather than home. Around 55,000 died there. For the unluckiest the return took eleven years, and the subject only reached a wide Japanese audience in the 1980s.

Among the prisoners were artists, professional and amateur, who were unexpectedly permitted to draw — occasionally commissioned by the camp authorities. This album accompanied a ten-day exhibition in Shinjuku in 1988, the first of its kind, and gathers Kazuki Yasuo, Satō Chūryō, Yokoyama Misao, Onosato Toshinobu and Kiuchi Nobuo among others, with their recollections, biographies and maps of the camps.

Prisoners were generally not allowed to carry work home, but watercolours made in captivity by Murata Seizo, Furuta Takuzo and Satō Takeo are reproduced here, alongside photographs of a wooden Buddha carved at Yelabuga in 1947 and a violin built by one of the prisoners.

Binding & condition

Original dark blue cloth with silver staples to the front board, in the original pictorial slipcase illustrated with artwork by Kazuki Yasuo. Good: slipcase spine lightly bumped, light curling to the upper corner of the first leaves.

Rarity

OCLC locates five copies outside Japan.