At the end of World War II, Soviet troops imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians in Asia, sending them to labor camps in Siberia. Tens of thousands subsequently died in brutal conditions.
Although that dark historical episode has been written about in Japan, in Russia it has received little attention.
Last year, however, Russian scholar Sergey I. Kuznetsov published a book in Japanese that covers the subject in detail and condemns the Soviet authorities for the mass internment.