Paper short abstract:

Of the multiple strands to repatriate narratives, this paper focuses on how memories of 'heading further north' became entangled with repatriate leaders and Hokkaido politicians' attempts to 'weaponize the loss' to achieve various political objectives.

Paper long abstract:

If the literature on the Japanese colonial empire has failed to include Hokkaido, Chishima and Karafuto, this research gap is more pronounced for the post-war period. Recent research on repatriates from the former Japanese empire has focused on Manchurian repatriation. Nevertheless, as Yamamoto and Ivings' papers emphasise, migration during the days of empire was a complex phenomenon. After 1945 the appearance of the repatriate figure seemingly erased this complexity. Using government documents, repatriate newsletters, memoirs and local newspapers the aim of this paper is to disentangle Karafuto repatriate narratives from those of the generalized story of the "figure of the repatriate" (Watt 2009).

An analysis of Hokkaido should be fundamental to any explanation of repatriation (by 1950 Hokkaido has the largest number of repatriates of any prefecture in Japan). Furthermore, although the 'loss' of the 'Northern Territories' (the disputed islands of Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan and Habomai located to the north-east of Hokkaido) is today widely 'remembered' and Karafuto is not, mid-1950s public opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the 'return' of Karafuto as well as the disputed islands. These two points suggest we need to analyse the construction of repatriate narratives more in the context of understandings of flows of people within particular geographical regions. Of the multiple strands to repatriate narratives, this paper focuses on how memories of 'heading further north' became entangled with repatriate leaders and Hokkaido politicians' attempts to 'weaponize the loss' to achieve various political objectives. The exact nature of 'the loss' being written and spoken about in repatriate narratives changed over time. It went from being primarily a narrative about loss of 'settler identity' to one about loss of 'a homeplace'. In sum, I question the periodization that frames repatriate narratives as beginning with repatriation in the late-1940s. Although the repatriate figure emerged in the early post-war, the usefulness of memories of 'heading further north' to Karafuto repatriates indicates how narratives had origins reaching back into the pre-war period.