HoKkaido POW Camps

Hakodate Main Camp

On the 1st of December 1942, the decision to establish a POW camp in Hokkaido was made. The first site of this was to be in the port city of Hakodate. The site was selected to be at the old quarantine station on the western base of Mount Hakodate. The facility had been established in the 1890’s and functioned as the main station until it was discontinued in the 1930’s. The camp was open on the 15th of January 1943, and soon after Allied POW’s began to arrive.

In total 396 prisoners were interned here. 283 British, 53 Dutch, 50 Americans, 8 Australians, a Canadian and an Estonian. Of this total, 114 of the prisoners died before the war was over. The main function of the camp was to provide manual Labor for the local shipyards where inmates worked under brutal conditions, often in the bitter cold. The camp was remarkably close the construction docks where the men were put to work repairing large craft and fishing boats.

In 1945, Allied aircraft began the occasional bombing of the city. Concerned that the camp might be damaged, leading to the escape of POWs, the Japanese moved the remaining inmates to a new camp North of Sapporo at the town of Bibai in June 1945. The move took place in the second week of the month, and the men remained at the new camp until the wars end. Due to its location inland, there was relatively little work for the men to part take in.