The Holodomor in the Light of Japanese Documents

Japan was one of the few foreign countries that had a consular presence in Soviet Ukraine at the time of the Holodomor, 1932–33. Foreign diplomats communicated with each other and shared information on the Soviet Union, including the Holodomor. Japanese diplomats were in close contact with their Polish counterparts. Although Tokyo must have collected a vast amount of information on the Holodomor, many documents were lost or destroyed during World War II. Extant Japanese diplomatic documents and accounts of Japanese journalists and travelers afford new insights into the Holodomor and the politics behind it, even if they are less explicit than those of other, better-known foreign sources. In general, the Japanese observers understood the underlying features of the Holodomor quite accurately: the sacrifice of non-Russian ethnic groups to Russian primacy and the blatant indifference to human life for the sake of national defense. In fact, the inhumanity of Stalin’s policy was so striking that they reacted with both awe and fear, perceiving the Soviet Union to be a formidable adversary. At the time of the Holodomor, however, Japan, like Poland and the United States, was constrained by political considerations and raised no public outcry over the mass deaths in Ukraine.