The Sole Japanese POW in the Korean War: Battlefield Survival and Postwar Oblivion in 20th-Century East Asia

This paper examines Matsushita Kazutoshi, the only Japanese soldier serving in the Chinese People's Volunteer Army captured by UN forces during the Korean War, situating his experiences within broader patterns of war and memory in twentieth-century Asia. Building on Tessa Morris-Suzuki's analysis of the International Committee of Red Cross archives, it integrates UN interrogation reports, Chinese and Japanese documents, and interviews to trace his decade-long odyssey across battle fields. First, it reconstructs his trajectory from Japanese Imperial Army service in China, through KMT and Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War, to the Chinese People's Volunteers in Korea. Second, it analyzes his survival amid harsh conditions—despite minimal formal training—via metalworking expertise in iron casting and horseshoeing. Third, it probes his capture: deserting the Japanese Army in Operation Ichigo, adopting a Korean pseudonym, fighting against Japanese troops as a KMT soldier, and his postwar reticence, hypothesized as "guilty conscience" unfit for neither heroic or anti-war narratives, leading to his oblivion in Japan.