The capital construction and Japanese internees in Mongolia

AOKI Masahiro

In 1945-1947 many Japanese were interned in Mongolian People’s Republic and forced to labor for the materials production and the city construction. Previous research has shown that the capital of Mongolia-Ulan-Bator was constructed by the labor of Japanese internees. However, we already illuminated that the management of the capital construction of MPR was not well-planned. The aim of this article is to investigate problems of the capital construction in Mongolia before 1945 and to illuminate their influence to the capital construction executed by Japanese internees.

In the first half of 1940’s in Mongolia there were the shortages of the labor power, construction materials and the transportation capacity and leaders of MPR had drawn the unrealizable construction project and forced their administrative agencies to execute it. When leaders of MPR had acquired enormous labor power-Japanese internees in 1945, they suddenly had to launch the massive project of their capital construction and their construction project had been pushed through with the same shortages of the labor power, construction materials and the transportation capacity. In Mongolia Japanese internees were regarded as the labor power which was insufficient in Mongolia and they had played a role to promote unrealizable project for the capital construction of MPR.