Large Souls: Portraits of Russians in Prewar Hokkaido
(This first appeared in The East, January-February 2002)
In the fall of 1932, strange vessels were drifting to the Hokkaido coast. The Hokkai Times, Kokumin Shimbun and other local newspapers devised tantalizing headlines, in which the word hyochaku, to be washed ashore, figured prominently: "Sailing ship with six aboard washes ashore at Iwao Village." "Five wash ashore at Kabuka." "Ten wash ashore at Soya."
Who were these boat people?
The Hakodate Shimbun of Oct. 31, 1932 gives the clearest headline summary: "Staunch anti-Communists. Escape foiled. Russian prisoners, washed ashore in Japan, arrive yesterday in Hakodate."
There were 21 altogether, fishermen refugees off three Siberian fishing boats. The Hakodate Shimbun managed to interview one of them, a 40-year-old named Trifon. "Before," said Trifon, "I was a fisherman and farmer in the Don Valley, doing pretty well. One morning the Reds came. It was fall, 1927. They stole our fields and our fishing grounds. Those of us they didn't slaughter they arrested. They shipped us east, to freezing Svetlaya..." The prisoners were put to work in the Sea of Japan sardine fishery operated by the GPU, the secret police. "We wanted to escape – to Japan, to America. We saw our chance when we were out fishing. But the sea was rough, and we ended up at Soya," the northernmost tip of Hokkaido.
The story is preserved in a 1998 research paper by Kurata Yuka entitled "Soviet Escapees and Castaways in Japan in the early 1930s." The 1917 Russian Revolution spawned some two million "White Russian" refugees – White as opposed to Red. Most fled west. Japan, well off the beaten track, was home to a mere 1,666 in the peak year 1930, though many more touched base here on their way elsewhere. Most settlers arrived before Japan's official recognition of the Soviet Union in 1925 froze the local welcome. Hokkaido's White Russian population was, at most, 500.
Hearing, then, of the "castaways," the Hokkaido prefectural government dispatched interpreters to ascertain the circumstances, and then, in concert with the Soviet consulate in Hakodate, made a quick decision. The 21 refugees would be forcibly returned to the USSR.
They were brought first to Hakodate and held, pending repatriation, in the offices of the water board, which became an interim prison. The Russians pleaded for permission to remain in Japan. "They'll execute us," they said, "if you send us back." Then they grew defiant. "Even if it means dying, we won't go."
The affair caused quite a stir. The Hokkaido Russian Immigrant Society, founded in Asahikawa only three years before, sprang into action. Several of its 20-odd members, led by chairman Kuzmin Zverev of Muroran – we will hear more of him – traveled to Hakodate to request permission to interview the 21. Permission denied. "They went dejectedly home, leaving behind 10 loaves of Russian bread," writes Kurata, quoting the Hakodate Shimbun.
Sympathetic Japanese also came bearing food for the prisoners, mostly bread and fruit. It was a cheerful and easygoing imprisonment, as Kurata and the newspapers describe it, quite belying the life-and-death gravity of the case. The guards were friendly, and there was plenty to eat.
The incarceration dragged on, suitable transport to Vladivostok proving elusive. In the meantime, 20 White Russian residents of Hakodate – out of a total of 47, Kurata records – drew up a petition, appealing to the "samurai spirit" of the Japanese authorities and offering to put up the money to ship the prisoners to a neutral port – Shanghai perhaps. The petitioners withheld their names. It seemed the safest course, living as they were under the watchful eyes of Soviet consular officials. Zverev and the Russian Immigrant Society contacted counterpart organizations in Tokyo, which pulled strings of their own.
In vain. The wheels had been set in motion, and when at last, on November 19, a Vladivostok-bound trawler arrived in port, the 21 were put aboard, their Japanese escort armed just in case. The precaution proved unnecessary; the men went quietly. To meet what fate? No one knows.
***
Japan's White Russians were a colorful, tragic lot. Ono Yoshio, who boarded with one as a high school boy in Hakodate in the 1930s, sums up their plight in a memoir published by the Hakodate City Office's Local Historical Research Bureau. "The Russian refugees," he writes, "had been aristocrats, high government officials and landowners back home. They had lost their country, their status and their property, and were now living among people whose culture and customs differed completely from their own. They must have suffered terribly."
Terribly, yes, but also, in the Russian manner, exuberantly, flamboyantly, theatrically. Is it mere coincidence that Semyon Nikolaevitch Smirnitsky of Otaru, a Russian tragic hero par excellence, a character Dostoevsky would have made much of, was a man of the theater? And not only on stage, though there too. Imagine his effect on people in this provincial Hokkaido city as he rode his bicycle through its hilly streets, his pet monkey clinging to his back!
Ono's own host was a pre-Revolutionary baron and naval officer named Anatoli Nikolaevitch Kaloriev. Kaloriev was born in Sevastopol in 1889. When the Revolution broke out in 1917, he was captain of a minesweeper engaged in removing German mines from the waters off New York.
His crew was eager to return home. Kaloriev, fearing for his life, insisted on staying. Abandoning his ship to the increasingly truculent crew, he took refuge in New York, where for a time he ran a transport company.
Concern for his family drove him from America to the Far East. There was cause enough for anxiety. Members of his social class were routinely being shot as enemies of the people. Precisely when he arrived in Hakodate is not known. His thinking, apparently, was that Japan was a better base from which to launch a return home, should the opportunity arise. It never did. Much later, he learned of his father's suicide following the execution of Czar Nicholas II.
We meet him briefly, in Ono's memoir, directing the Japanese operations of a sprawling Soviet government-owned Far Eastern fishing and canning conglomerate that for a time in the 1920s provided no small boost to the Hokkaido economy, both as employer of Japanese fishermen and as consumer of Japanese manufactured goods, in particular boilers and winches produced by Hakodate factories.
"I don't know what connections got him the job," Ono says; whatever they were, they eventually frayed, for when Ono came on the scene as a lodger in 1935, Kaloriev and his family – he had married in 1924 – were on a slow slide into poverty. Kaloriev's wife was Japanese, and the couple had two children, Shunichi and Shinji. Two boarders in addition to Ono completed the household. The necessity of taking in lodgers was one symptom of financial ill health. Another was the fact that their household goods were in the process of being seized.
Kaloriev's wife Kikuyo came from a rural family that made and sold bamboo baskets – a common trade at the time. When Kaloriev met her she was working as a cook in a Hakodate Russian restaurant. She was 21, he 35. The marriage took place over the strong objections of her family.
***
Ono's knowledge of this background suggests an intimacy above and beyond the lodger-landlord relationship. He lived with the Kalorievs because his own home was inconveniently far from his high school, and he seems to have become more or less part of the family. Shunichi, the elder boy, later to become a high school judo champion, was then in elementary school. Kaloriev took no nonsense from his sons. Sometimes they would run from him in terror, seeking refuge with the lodgers. On one occasion Ono made as if to surrender Shunichi to his father. "No, keep him, keep him away from me!" Kaloriev roared. "If I get my hands on him now I'll... I'll explode!"
Once Shinji, the younger boy, fell and started to cry. Ono comforted him in the manner of his own mother: "Pain, fly away!"
"That's wrong," said Kaloriev, marching up the stairs to set things right. "Is he hurt? No? Well, that's a blessing from God. We must show our gratitude to God. We will pray."
There is a larger-than-life quality about Kaloriev, as indeed about many of the Russian refugees in Japan at this time. They had survived wrenching experiences, experiences that either destroy the soul or enlarge it. Large-souled individuals are inspiring to read about but often oppressive in the flesh. Sheer physical size counted for something too. One day Kaloriev got lost while hunting, and unexpectedly found himself in the vicinity of Ono's parents' house. Ono's mother put him up for the night – and later told her son she'd had to lay two futons end to end to accommodate her guest's massive frame.
At the public bath, the comments sometimes turned sour. "These oversized foreigners," grumbled the attendant at the one Kaloriev frequented, "they use enough hot water for two!"
In the Kalorievs' neighborhood lived another mixed Russian-Japanese family, the Kondos. Mr. Kondo, a fluent Russian speaker, had graduated from a theological seminary and was serving in the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Police.
He and his White Russian wife had three children. Ono sometimes helped one of the Kondo daughters with her elementary school homework. one day he encountered tall blonde Mrs. Kondo getting off a bus. Seeing Ono, she burst into loud, pathetic, utterly unrestrained wailing. She'd been to the dentist, she moaned, and was in terrible pain. She clutched his arm convulsively. Her sobs were such as to attract general attention. But reaching her house she suddenly brightened. "'Bye, see you tomorrow," she chirped, disappearing inside. "Well, that's foreigners for you," Ono muttered to himself, utterly bewildered. "Living as strangers among us," he later reflected, "I guess they feel the need to do something to make us acknowledge their existence."
Kaloriev and Mrs. Kondo were great friends, to Kikuyo Kaloriev's disgust. The loud voices and expansive gestures of the two Russians as they conversed made Kikuyo cringe. She and the Kondo woman would get into screaming arguments, Kikuyo shouting in Japanese, Kondo shouting in Russian, neither understanding the other, until at last the squabble would degenerate into kicking and scratching, Kikuyo invariably ending up in tears. "The Russo-Japanese Family War," smirked young Ono from the sidelines.
***
Their occupations were various, these stateless White Russian émigrés. Some were entrepreneurs – some, like the Shvets family, amassing considerable fortunes. The greater number were lesser figures, primarily street peddlers whose characteristic ware was a woolen cloth known as raxa. In a book entitled Rainichi Roshiyajin no Ashiato (In the Footprints of Russians in Japan), researcher Sawada Kazuhiko cites a Hakodate Shimbun report of September 9, 1924, to the effect that of the 50 White Russians then living in the city, more than 30 were raxa peddlers.
They belonged to a central organization based in Asahikawa, which set the rules of the trade and dispatched peddlers throughout Hokkaido. A certain V.A. Proschevich (1902-1977) peddled raxa from 1924 to 1928, and left a vivid memoir of his experience.
"The cloth," Sawada quotes him as writing, "was cut into three-yard strips, and we'd head out, 15 to 18 of those strips tied up in a belt slung over our shoulders... If a strip were worth nine yen, we'd start by asking 20 or 22. The customers all knew that was outrageous, and they'd talk us down. If a customer raised one finger, that meant, 'Take 10 yen off!' Even at that, we would have made one or two yen profit. But what was the hurry? We'd haggle until our profit was three or four yen per unit. That way, selling just one unit a day would cover our lodging and cigarettes, and sometimes even food and transportation."
Kuzmin Zverev, chairman in 1932 of the Hokkaido Russian Immigrant Society, began immigrant life as a raxa peddler in Muroran. Later he moved to Hakodate, buying first a bread and cake shop, and then a clothing store. He and his wife Darya had six children, three born in Muroran, three in Hakodate.
Their daughter Galiya was the third child, the first born in Hakodate. That was in 1933, the year after her father's unsuccessful intervention on behalf of the 21 castaways. Now in her late 60s, Galiya makes her home in St. Petersburg, and there Osanai Michiko, a researcher based in Kushiro, met her in 1998, at the home of a mutual friend. At first Osanai didn't recognize the name. Then she did. Of course – Zverev! Arrested on suspicion of spying in 1944, died in prison in Sapporo; possibly, rumor had it, tortured to death!
His arrest was not unique. Wartime Japanese officials saw a potential spy in every foreigner, and human rights were not a major concern. In 1941 Kaloriev too was incarcerated, though only for three days, and not even the fact that his elder son was in the army softened the intense surveillance clamped on the family until the war ended.
Zverev, Osanai learned, was born in a small town in central Siberia. Conscripted in 1914 to fight the Germans, he was wounded, taken prisoner, and released in a prisoner exchange, returning home only to be conscripted again in 1918, this time by the White Army battling the insurgent Bolsheviks. The Whites were routed, and Zverev ended up in Harbin, a city then more Russian in character than Chinese, though situated in China. In the years after 1917 it filled to bursting with Russian refugees. Some moved on, some stayed.
Zverev stayed three, four, perhaps five years – his movements can be dated only approximately. Darya, his wife-to-be, was there too, with her first husband and their daughter. Her husband and daughter both dying of illness, she married Zverev in Muroran in 1929.
Galiya, Osanai writes in a report to the Society for the Research of Russians in Japan, started elementary school in Hakodate, but as a second grader was sent, like her brothers and sisters, to a Russian boarding school in Tokyo. Later she attended a girls' school in Dalian, some 600 km south of Harbin. She was there when her father died. When Dalian passed from Japanese to Russian occupation at war's end, Galiya lost touch with her family in Hakodate. It was to be many years before she saw her mother again.
In 1949 she was sent as an orphan to Vladivostok for "work training." She drifted through Siberia, working here, toiling there. She married, had a son, divorced. In 1957 she was reunited with her mother in Rostov, where the latter had gone to live with one of her sons. Only then did Galiya learn the scanty available facts of her father's death.
Precisely why he was suspected of spying is not known. Official suspicious were easily roused then, and quickly acted on. On January 6, 1944, Osanai heard from Galiya, Darya Zverev received a telegram informing her that her husband was dying. She rushed to the prison to find him helplessly weak. He died the next day – of a brain hemorrhage, said the official death certificate. "My sister says he was apparently tortured," Galiya told Osanai recently over the phone, "but there's no proof. What my mother thinks I don't know. I never asked her."
***
The most imposing gravestone in the Foreigners' Cemetery in Hakodate commemorates Dmitri Shvets, founder of the Shvets family fortune. The family history has been exhaustively researched by Shimizu Megumi of the Hakodate City Office's Local History Bureau. Shvets dealt primarily in furs, mostly fox and sable, buying from Siberian trappers and selling to the Japanese. What brought him to Siberia? An incautious remark about the Czar. No one today knows its substance, but it must have been acerbic, for it earned him Siberian exile from his native Ukraine. That was in the 1890s. His native talent for turning misfortune into opportunity was tested early. His base of operations was Nikolaevsk, just across the Tartarskiy Strait from northern Sakhalin. The strait at that point is so narrow you can walk across it when it freezes in winter. Sakhalin then was full of frontier-spirited Japanese. The contacts Shvets forged with them were to shape his life, and also those of his descendants, for in 1920 he was in trouble again, this time with the Communists. He fought on the side of the Whites, and fled with them, first to Japanese-occupied Sakhalin, later to Harbin. But his future, though he may not have known it then, lay in Hokkaido.
No turmoil, it seems, could quite overwhelm his business instincts. He kept trading, branching out from furs into whisky, sugar, land, real estate. In 1929 he settled in Hakodate. With his were his son Filip, Filip's wife Zoya, and the couple's two children, Valeriy and Zinaida. The house they built for themselves in Hakodate was worth 5000 yen – a considerable sum in those days. Police records, writes Shimizu, tell of parties held in that house, the guests including not only White Russians but Soviet citizens as well. Hakodate was then a hotbed of spying, Shimizu says – Whites spying on Reds, Reds spying on Whites, the Japanese police spying on all.
In 1934, on the train home from a business trip to Tokyo, Dmitri Shvets met his death. What kind of death? Murder and robbery, as the family claims? Or an accident, as the official police version has it? We'll probably never know, but the accidental fall of a wealthy man from a moving train should not affect his wallet – which, the family notes, was inexplicably found to contain a mere five yen. "Somebody," insists Lyubov Shvets, Valeriy's widow now living in Tokyo, "must have pushed him."
A year after Dmitri's death the business crashed. The seed of ruin was in a fur smuggling scheme proposed by a Japanese partner Filip Shvets took on. Filip's answer to the proposal being ambiguous ("He didn't know things like that!" says Lyubov), the partner went ahead. He was caught, and the company was fined a crippling 18,000 yen. Two years later, the family left Hakodate.
They went to Tokyo, to pursue new business opportunities and also, says Lyubov's daughter Ekaterina Shvets, to give the children a Russian education. Valeriy, Ekaterina's father, was nine at the time, a second- or third-grader at a Hakodate elementary school.
Ekaterina lately received a letter from an old Japanese classmate of Valeriy's. "He wrote," she says, "that my father was very happy-go-lucky as a child, a clown. He used to do puppet shows... The house in Hakodate still stands – all the children, his classmates, were curious to know what was inside the house, because at the time Japanese houses all had sliding doors, but this was a foreign house that had doors and windows, and all the children were always wanting to know what the inside of the house looked like, and my grandmother would welcome them –'Come in and play!' – but the children were afraid to go into a gaijin house, and so they never got to see what was inside."
***
Everyone remembered Semyon Nikolaevitch Smirnitsky, though few knew him. He taught Russian at Otaru Commercial High School, today's Otaru Commercial College. Fortunately, some of his former students committed their recollections to paper, leaving posterity a rich source of information – impressions, rather, for few facts emerge clear and uncontested – on this captivating, elusive, now alas all but forgotten individual.
Like Kaloriev he was a pre-Revolutionary nobleman and officer; like Zverev, he endured imprisonment in his adopted homeland as a suspected spy. Unlike Zverev he lived to be released, but, sadly debilitated by the ordeal, he died three years later, in 1948, at the age of 69.
He was born in St. Petersburg in 1879. Nothing is known of his early years. He fled to Japan via China in 1919. To his students he was the typical happy-go-lucky bachelor professor, inviting them to his home and cooking them superb Russian dinners, a thick cookbook open on the counter. It was not that they didn't know him better than that – better than to suppose that was all there was to him. Most were aware of a well of sadness beneath the effervescent exterior. Some knew something of his wife and two sons. But when Semyon Smirnitsky played a part, he played it to the hilt, and when he acted everybody's favorite uncle with not a care in the world, he swept his audience along with him.
What follows draws on the reminiscences of two former students, Takasaki Toru and Egawa Yuichiro, published in 1968 in the Otaru Commercial College Alumni Association magazine Rokkyu.
Egawa first met him – he doesn't mention the year, but the context suggests the mid-1930s – at a party given by the school's English Speaking Society. Smirnitsky sat beside him and, in fluent Japanese, struck up a conversation. "Russian's easy and interesting, he said; why didn't I enroll in his class? Actually there's no foreign language in the world more difficult than Russian, and I never reached the level where it gets interesting. I think he was just drumming up interest in his department...
"He had monkeys, and sometimes he'd bring one to class. He had snakes too, at home. I saw them when I went to his house to rehearse for the foreign language theater production. They scared me. I suppose that, being single, he had no one else to love, besides his students...
"I heard he'd been a White Russian army officer who escaped to Japan, but in those days politics was taboo. You didn't raise political questions..."
Smirnitsky himself was not above raising them, however, in the newspapers if not in class. When the Otaru Shimbun interviewed him in 1925 – a freer time, of course, than the 1930s – he blamed Jewish money for being behind the spread of revolutionary ideas in Russia, and expressed other views as well, among them that Japan should buy cheaply from the USSR instead of at high cost from America, and that the USSR should voluntarily surrender Sakhalin to Japan, Sakhalin's coal and oil deposits being a reasonable sacrifice to make for Japan's eternal good will.
"When I got back from northern China in 1946," Egawa continues, "I lived in Otaru for a time, but I never asked anyone what happened to Professor Smirnitsky. To this day I regret it."
Takasaki knew Smirnitsky earlier and, it seems, rather better than Egawa. Their first encounter was in 1922 in Tokyo, where Smirnitsky – "Smir Sensei, as we students called him" – was substitute teaching at the Foreign Languages Institute. Later Takasaki studied under him again in Otaru. "An unforgettable teacher!" he sums up.
He must have been that. There was no division, in Smirnitsky's scheme of things, between school and life. He strode into his classroom as though into a room in his own house, and as for his house, it was open to the world. His house harbored no secrets, though his heart did.
The monkeys (an Otaru Shimbun piece of 1934 mentions four of them) had the run of the place. Snakes, big ones and little ones, squirmed in glass cases in the drawing room. Goldfish and turtles inhabited the study. In the garden were dogs, cats, rabbits.
The main event on Smirnitsky's academic calendar, the occasion he lived for, was the annual class play. Students would pile into his house and rehearse among the menagerie. Takasaki marvels at Smirnitsky's virtuosity. "He was too good for an amateur." he acted, directed, designed the costumes, built the props, applied the makeup.
He sang too, and Takasaki recalls him on stage at a local charity concert. "At that time, Otaru people were not accustomed to seeing singers make such extravagant gestures. Sensei knew this and, I think, deliberately exaggerated them."
It is through Takasaki we glimpse Smirnitsky cycling around Otaru with one of his monkeys on his back. He had a car, too, a little white Datsun, at a time when car ownership set you apart from the crowd. Otaru's streets are uncommonly steep, and once, going down a hill, he had an accident. No one was hurt, but the psychological impact was shattering. Apparently he never drove again.
***
In April 1931, Smirnitsky paid a brief visit to Hakodate. Takasaki makes no mention of it, but the Hakodate Shimbun covered it at some length. Why is the visit important? Because Smirnitsky went to meet his son. And because the meeting never took place.
Even Takasaki, who presents Smir Sensei as an avuncular bachelor quite content with single life, knew that somewhere in the deep background were a wife and children. "I'd heard," he wrote, "that his wife had once come to Otaru, but didn't stay long; she went back to the Soviet Union. Sensei never mentioned her. I also heard that his younger son Alexei, who had been to school in Otaru, later, with his father's blessing, left to be with his mother."
Word filtered back that Alexei, thanks to his education, had secured an administrative post in a village in the Russian Far east. A subsequent report – Takasaki does not situate his recollections in time – was to the effect that Alexei had been arrested on suspicion of spying for the Japanese. "I can still see Sensei's dark, sad face when he heard. There was nothing I could say to comfort him."
That seems to exhaust Takasaki's knowledge of the subject. A story in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun of November 4, 1932, adds a few wispy details. The family, it says, was broken up in "the great whirlwind of chaos" accompanying the Revolution. "About 10 years ago" – sometime around 1922 – Smirnitsky, then in Japan, was overjoyed to learn that his wife and child (the newspaper apparently knew nothing of Alexei's elder brother) were in Irkutsk. They came to Otaru, but the wife, "due to an irreconcilable rift with her husband," soon returned to Russia. Alexei, nicknamed Shura, missed his mother terribly, or perhaps he disliked his father. Three times he tried to run away to his mother in Vladivostok, a hopeless undertaking without passport or visa. In 1926, notes a police report studied by Shimizu Megumi, Smirnitsky – was he perhaps resigned to his failure to win his son's affection? – managed to obtain Soviet citizenship for the boy. How? We don't know. It made possible Alexei's reunion with his mother. Did it also, by casting doubt on his anti-Soviet credentials, contribute to the elder Smirnitsky's arrest 18 years later? Shimizu suspects it may have.
It was this son, then, that Smirnitsky went to Hakodate to meet in April 1931, having received a letter from him in February. By this time Alexei was working as a Japanese interpreter aboard a Soviet fishing boat, which was to touch at Hakodate en route from Vladivostok to Kamchatka. A Hakodate Shimbun reporter found Smirnitsky in a room at the Goshimaken Hotel, four or five of his students in attendance. The reporter was impressed by Smirnitsky's fluent Japanese. On April 16 the ship arrived, and Smirnitsky, laden with warm clothes and other provisions, went to the port to meet it. The crew disembarked, Alexei not among them. "Like one possessed," Shimizu writes, citing the Hakodate Shimbun, Smirnitsky approached the captain, only to be told that his son "had quit the company."
Quit the company? One can only guess at Smirnitsky's state of mind as he returned to Otaru on the night train.
Alexei Smirnitsky was never heard from again. His ghostly elder brother Nikolay surfaces, briefly and vaguely, in Takasaki's memoir. Nikolay seems to have traveled a good deal in Japan – to what purpose is not known. After the war, he returned to his father's house, remaining after his father's death in 1948, until one day he vanished again. "Unfortunately," Takasaki winds up, "I never knew him. I would like to meet him."
***
Apart from the 21 castaways forcefully repatriated, few of the Russians figuring in this story ever returned home. Anatoli Kaloriev wanted to, very badly. Ono, his former lodger, tells us he applied for a visa but was turned down. After the war he worked as NHK's Russian program director. He died in 1975 at the age of 86. Perestroika came too late for him, his son Shunichi told the Asahi Shimbun in 1992.
The Shvets family also dreamed of going back someday. "They saw the Revolution as a temporary disturbance," says Dmitri Shvets' great-granddaughter Ekaterina. So it was, in a very long-term sense – too long-term for them.
Ekaterina herself, Tokyo-born and a lifelong Japanese resident, longs for a Russia she scarcely knows. "Two years ago, I went back by myself, with my broken Russian... I stepped into a Russian Orthodox church, and felt my father's presence... I belong there. I'm a Russian."