The Japanese town of Narashino on Monday marked 100 years since the last group of World War I German prisoners of war (POW) left the camp, which had been the home for many of them since 1915. Julian Ryall reports.
Image: Narashino City Municipal Board of Education
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Japan's local board of education held a lecture and displayed documents relating to the lives of the prisoners during their time in Narashino, a town in Chiba Prefecture just east of Tokyo. The exhibition also included a number of the POWs' personal belongings, such as diaries.
The lecture was delivered by Masayuki Hoshi, an employee of the city government, who has devoted many years to researching the history of the POW camp and its inmates, and believes it is important that more people are reminded of what was happening more than a century ago.
"The history of war is said to be a chain of hatred and retaliation," Hoshi told DW. "Breaking that chain and coexisting on the same Earth requires that we turn hatred into friendship. I believe the German soldiers in the Narashino camp understood that."
"And in a world where wars are still being waged, it is important that we pass on to future generations the evidence of people's efforts to overcome the scars of war and to turn those experiences into friendship," Hoshi added.
The Narashino POW camp was opened in 1915 to take some of the German navy and army personnel who had been captured by Japanese forces in the early stages of World War I. Some were captured at the fall of some of Germany's possessions in the Pacific Ocean, such as the Marshall and Marianas Islands.
Camp prisoners kept themselves entertained by operating a theater and playing football, tennis and hockeyImage: Narashino City Municipal Board of Education
Others included the crew of the Austro-Hungarian cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth, which was scuttled in November 1914 in the Chinese city of Tsingtao, a German colony.
A total of 4,700 prisoners from Germany and allied nations were held at 12 POW camps across Japan, with the Narashino camp home to around 1,000 servicemen at its peak, according to Hoshi. The regime, he adds, appears to have been fairly relaxed.
"Although the camp was surrounded by barbed wire rather than fences, local residents had almost free access," Hoshi said. "One of the housewives in the neighborhood who did the laundry later remembered the melody of the folk song 'Schnadahuepfel' being sung by the POWs. Local children entered the camp, were given lemonade by the German soldiers and watched pantomimes with clowns.
"The prisoners made their own bread, sausages and sweets in the camp — things that were very rare for ordinary Japanese people," he said. "And the music of the camp orchestra resonated across the whole town. We could say that these prisoners unintentionally played the role of goodwill ambassadors."
Surviving documents show that inmates were able to take classes in bookkeeping and electrical engineering, as well as Japanese and French language classes. As well as the camp orchestra, prisoners kept themselves entertained by operating a theater and playing football, tennis and hockey.
Missing Sons: A century of grieving
The inevitability of death binds people of every culture. An exhibition has displayed how World War I shaped the culture of mourning in Germany and abroad over the past century.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Modern warfare
World War I is equated with mass destruction like no other war before it. Highly industrialized nations were able to produce large quantities of weapons, including lethal gas. The German soldiers in this picture are waiting for a poison gas attack, but the flying dove above their heads is a sign that the threat is still far away.
Image: DW
Anonymous death
The staggering power of heavy artillery meant that dead bodies were mutilated to an unrecognizable state and people simply vanished somewhere in the middle of a battlefield far from home. The exhibition shows how World War I - with its 10 million casualties - changed the way people grieved loved ones they could not bury.
Image: DW
Erasing nationality
The ossuary at the Verdun memorial site in France contains the remains of 130,000 unknown French and German soldiers. It is an irony of history: In death, the bones of the former enemies are inseparably connected forever.
Image: DW
Remembering the sons
Peter Kollwitz was 18 years old when he fell in battle in Flanders, Belgium, in October 1914. His mother, the German sculptress Käthe Kollwitz, depicted the mourning of her son in her art many times in until her own death in 1945.
Image: DW/P. Henriksen
Finding a place
The grieving parents did not have graves to visit. All they were left with were lists with the names of the fallen. That’s why military cemeteries were built as mourning sites. The picture shows Peter Kollwitz's tombstone of in Vladslo, Belgium.
Image: DW/P. Henriksen
Missing forever
Rudyard Kipling was regarded as the most famous British writer in his day and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. When World War I started, he encouraged his son to go to war - and regretted it for the rest of his life. His son John was announced missing in 1915 and his mortal remains were never found.
Image: DW/P. Henriksen
What’s left are the names
The picture shows the memorial to the victims of World War I at the Tyne Cot cemetery near Ypres in Belgium. The central memorial stones of the Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries all have the same phrase written on them: "Their name liveth for evermore." The phrase was chosen by Rudyard Kipling.
Image: Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
An era of memorials
The cult of names, which originated in World War I, became the blueprint for the mourning of millions of people whose lives have since been extinguished. The picture on the left shows the memorial at the so-called reloading point in Warsaw from which trains departed to concentration camps during the Holocaust. The picture on the right shows the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris.
Image: DW/P. Henriksen
Never forget
The names of around 58,000 US soldiers who were killed in the Vietnam War have been engraved in the smoothly polished stone of the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial. The number of Vietnamese casualties of the war, which lasted from 1964 to 1975, amounts to millions.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Mourning starts with certainty
During the Argentinean military junta, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, the people in power made tens of thousands of political enemies disappear. The mothers of the victims organized themselves and protested every Thursday in front of the presidential palace on the central Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires - until today. They still demand clarification regarding their children's destinies.
Image: picture-alliance/abaca
The massacre of Sebrenica
The picture shows an investigation team from the UN war crimes tribunal exhuming dozens of Muslim victims. In 1995, Serbs had killed around 8,000 boys and men and buried their bodies in these mass graves.
Image: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
Reclaiming the disappeared
Half of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US disappeared without a trace. Bereaved people need a site where they can mourn - just as they did 100 years ago.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
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Some 30 men died while incarcerated, 25 of them victims of the Spanish flu pandemic that swept the world from late 1918 to the early part of 1919. All were buried with full military honors at the Narashino Army Cavalry Cemetery and even today, a commemorative service is held at the spot — marked by a large memorial stone — in early November, hosted by the German-Japanese Association of Chiba and with representatives of the German Embassy in Tokyo.
With the surrender of Germany in November 1918, discussions began on the repatriation of POWs but it was not until November 1919 that the first group from Narashino was released. The last POWs were put aboard ships for Germany in January 1920, although a number of former prisoners had by that point put down roots in Japan and opted to remain here. Some opened sausage shops and others taught at universities.
"Their success completely healed the scars of the war between Japan and Germany," Hoshi said. "Most Narashino citizens — and most Japanese people in general — do not even know that Germany and Japan were at war more than 100 years ago. It is important that we remember."
Building bridges
Yoshiko Tamura, a founder of the POW Research Network Japan NGO, points out that there have been many efforts to build bridges between former POWs of both the first and second world wars, with a high degree of success.
"The music the prisoners played at Narashino and that could be heard all across the town is famous and the story was recently on a television program here, so it is good that more people are hearing about history and what happened then," she said.
"We have far more stories about prisoners held in Japan during World War II, but it is also important that we remember the men who were here in the First World War," she said. "By remembering their experiences and hardships, we can do better in the future. It's really very important for the future for all of us."
The impact World War I had on the fine arts is undeniable, and it is was the subject of an exhibition at Bonn's Bundeskunsthalle that focused in depth on the fate of modern art in the context of the war.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle (Ausschnitt)
A sense of foreboding
Artists dealt with possible implications of a war even before World War I broke out. When Emil Nolde painted ‘Soldiers’ in 1913, war was already in the air in Europe. The mood was divided: Apocalyptic sentiment and a fear of conflict had gripped some, but others were longing for the war to purge society of its ailments.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle
Anticipating the collapse
The painting 'Horrors of War’ by Ludwig Meidner can be seen as a prophetic image of the events that ensued. As early as 1911, his ‘Apocalyptic Landscapes’ showed a collapsing world that left people without protection.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle
New artistic expression
With the beginning of the war, the colors seemed to disappear from Max Beckmann’s works. His ‘Declaration of War’ from 1914 is more a sketch than a painting. Beckmann developed a new language of expression that was characterized by simplicity and minimalism.
Image: Kunsthalle Bremen - Der Kunstverein in Bremen, Kupferstichkabinett, Foto: Karen Blindow (Ausschnitt)
Artists in uniform
Paul Klee also dropped the traditional style. His ‘View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz’ is from 1915. A year later, Klee was exempted from serving on the front lines and started working in a plane construction hangar near Munich. He spent his free time sketching and painting with quills and water color pens on both paper and cardboard.
Image: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg (Ausschnitt)
Patriotic surge
In 1915, Raoul Dufy painted 'The End of the Great War’ as most of his fellow countrymen envisaged it. It was a glorified depiction of France’s victory, showing the German eagle at the feet of the Gallic rooster.
Image: Musée national d'art moderne Paris, bpk/CNAC-MNAM
Traumatizing experience
Belarusian-born artist Ossip Zadkine worked in a French army clinic on the Western Front, where he experienced the horror of battle first-hand. In 1916, he suffered from gas poison himself. He survived and translated his memories into images in a series of drawings.
Image: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013 (Ausschnitt)
Anti-war memorial
German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck created this sculpture of a naked man in 1915. He called it ‘The Fallen Man’. Like almost no other work in the exhibition ‘The Avant-Gardes at War’, it represents man’s vulnerability against the destructive forces of war.
Image: Pinakothek der Moderne München, Blauel/Gnamm/ARTOTHEK
Heralding the post-war era
Back in 1914, Russian artist Kazimir Malevich still created patriotic and folkloristic imagery. But his style changed radically from 1915 onwards. Malevich would become known as the originator of Suprematism, an art movement based on pure abstraction. His programmatic oeuvre ‘The Black Square’ is shown in the top center of this picture. It is a precursor of the post-1918 period.
