After Japan's August 1945 surrender, roughly 6.6 million Japanese civilians and demobilized soldiers stranded across its former empire were repatriated to the home islands over the following decade, mostly by 1949 but continuing into the late 1950s. The largest flows came from Manchuria, colonial Korea, Taiwan, and southern Sakhalin, with additional large groups of soldiers held in Soviet internment in Siberia. Tens of thousands died from disease, violence, or in Soviet labor camps before they could return, and an unknown number of Japanese children were left behind or separated from parents amid the chaos, particularly in Manchuria. The process was organized primarily by the US-led Allied occupation of Japan in cooperation with local Chinese, Korean, and Soviet authorities.
Allied Occupation authorities and Japan repatriated Japanese civilians and soldiers from former colonies/occupied territories; Soviet, Chinese and Korean authorities controlled departures
Japanese and Allied Occupation figures put roughly 6.9 million Japanese abroad in August 1945, about 3.5 million of them military personnel and 3.3 million civilians, in Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Kurils, China proper and the Pacific. The repatriation programme returned about 6.6 million of them by 1950, with smaller returns continuing from Soviet custody to 1958.
Japanese government and Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum figures, summarised by Nippon.com, record that about 55,000 of roughly 575,000 Japanese held in Soviet 'Siberian internment' died in captivity, that some 245,000 died in Manchuria including in the fighting with Soviet forces and during flight, disease and mass suicide, and that about 400 died of cholera aboard quarantined repatriation ships in 1946. The low end counts internment deaths alone; the high end adds Manchurian civilian deaths during the collapse and flight, which some accounts attribute to the end of the war rather than to the repatriation itself.
Japanese government repatriation records and the Maizuru and Siberian internment memorial museums document the use of interned Japanese soldiers as forced labour in the Soviet Union, and historians of the Soviet occupation of Manchuria have documented widespread sexual violence against Japanese settlers during the 1945 collapse.
North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Russia