The cemetery for Russian prisoners of war in the Kasugacho district of Izumiotsu, Osaka Prefecture. Photo taken on March 13. (Yasufumi Kado)

IZUMIOTSU, Osaka Prefecture--In a corner of a public cemetery here, tombstones boast a horizontally long shape measuring 50 centimeters tall and 90 cm wide, unlike vertically long gravestones for Japanese around them.

The tombs are for Russian prisoners of war from the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War who are buried in the northern zone of the Kasuga public cemetery in the Kasugacho district.

The soldiers’ names are engraved on their surface both in Russian and Japanese.

A study conducted by the Izumiotsu city educational board revealed that 89 Russian soldiers who were taken prisoner and died in Osaka Prefecture are buried in the graveyard.

The cemetery has maintained its original appearance for more than a century to commemorate the Russian POWs.

“The cemetery has historic importance because it appears to be the only graveyard for Russian soldiers in Japan (that has changed little since it was built),” said a representative of the education board.

Situated 300 meters north of the cemetery, the Hamadera prisoner-of-war camp confined up to 28,000 Russian soldiers during the war.

As local residents offered to honor POWs who passed away due to illness and other reasons by the end of the warfare, their remains are said to have been buried on the grounds of the Kasuga graveyard.

An image taken around that time shows the Russian soldiers’ tombstones neatly arranged along the seashore with only a fence seen around them.

No fences currently can be found at the site, and the gravestones are now surrounded by those for Japanese, so the cemetery for POWs was long believed to have been redeveloped or relocated at a certain time in history.

In the hopes of finding how the cemetery was constructed and refurbished in detail, Miwa Okuno, head of the educational board’s cultural property division, started a survey.

During the research, Okuno discovered a document submitted by the Imperial Japanese Army’s No. 4 division stationed in Osaka Prefecture to the Army Ministry in 1909.

Based on an illustration appended to the document, Okuno found that the gravestones for 80 of all the 89 Russian POWs have never been transferred from where they were initially installed.

The remaining nine tombstones on the northern side of the cemetery, however, were relocated from their original positions to near the 80 soldiers’ ones in the redevelopment project in 1928, because they had been at a distance from the other graves.

The fence was removed around the time, and tombstones for Japanese have seemingly since been erected around the Russian graves.

Another document dating from 1906 depicts how the wooden grave markers were replaced with granite monuments by the No. 4 division at a cost of “58.45 yen.”

While most of them featured a horizontally long shape designed in Christian style, vertically long Jewish tombstones were specially prepared for two Judaists out of careful consideration to the war dead.

According to Okuno, cemeteries for POWs captured during the Russo-Japanese War also remain in Nagasaki, Matsuyama, Nagoya and elsewhere across the nation.

However, the one in Izumiotsu is likely the only such graveyard that has undergone little changes through relocation and other processes in the postwar period.

The Russian POWs’ cemetery in Izumiotsu is still kept clean by residents and spirit-consoling services are held regularly.

“Local people have been treating deceased Russian soldiers fairly and delicately as the same human beings as Japanese in that way,” said Okuno.