Repatriation Memorial Museum

570 documents from those who came back from Siberia, inscribed by UNESCO on 10 October 2015.

The story is not told by a panel: it is told by a person, one of the storytellers trained by the museum, and it is told every day. Among the items on display are the Shirakaba nisshi, the ‘birch diaries’: haiku and short poems that an internee carved into bark because he had no paper. From the museum, a twenty-minute walk takes you to the reconstructed pier where those people set foot on land.

Between 1945 and 1958 the port of Maizuru received about 660,000 civilians and military personnel returning from Manchuria, Korea and the Siberian prison camps: thirteen years of ships docking, from the first (the 雲仙丸, on 7 October 1945) to the last, the 白山丸, on 7 September 1958. The museum opened in April 1988 and keeps what those people carried with them. On 10 October 2015, 570 of its documents were inscribed on the UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ register.

ℹ️ ¥400 for adults and ¥150 for students; ¥600 and ¥200 for the combined ticket with the red brick museum. Closed every Wednesday (the next weekday if the Wednesday is a public holiday) and from 29 December to 1 January. ⚠️ The combined ticket with the brick museum runs into trouble right there: on Wednesdays only this one of the two is closed. Allow at least an hour, because the storytellers’ account is the reason to come. ⚠️ Access is the real limit: from JR Higashi-Maizuru it is a bus ride of about twenty minutes to the museum's bus stop, and the museum itself says that services are few and asks you to phone before setting out. Twenty minutes away on foot, or three by car, is the repatriation pier reconstructed in 1994.

🚉 引揚記念館前 · 2 min walk

Sources: m-hikiage-museum.jp · m-hikiage-museum.jp · m-hikiage-museum.jp · uminokyoto.jp · maizuru-kanko.net · city.maizuru.kyoto.jp

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