By MASAMI ONO/ Staff Writer
June 2, 2021 at 07:10 JST
Igor Samarin and a colleague inspect a pillbox gun port at an underground fortress near Toshiruri (Sentyabrskaya Bay) on Etorofu island in September 2020. (Provided by Sakhalin.info)
A Russian team discovered a sprawling bunker complex apparently built by imperial Japanese forces on Etorofu, one of the four islands off the eastern coast of Hokkaido seized by Soviet forces at the end of World War II.
The expedition leader likened the ruined fortification to “a complete underground city.”
The survey covered the remains of imperial Japanese military facilities such as airfields and pillboxes. The findings were outlined in Sakhalin.info, an online media outlet based in Russia’s Sakhalin region.
They offer a precious peek into the state of wartime structures in the disputed Northern Territories, which remain largely off-limits to Japanese researchers.
The expedition, carried out from September through October last year, was led by Igor Samarin, a historian based at the Sakhalin Regional Museum of Local Lore.
He is known for his studies of Japanese-related sites on the Chishima islands, which Russia refers to as the Kurils.
His team explored remnants of structures in the central and northern parts of Etorofu island, called Iturup by Russia. They include the former Tennei airfield at Hitokappu Bay (Kasatka Bay), where Imperial Japanese Navy warships assembled ahead of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
The expedition discovered the remains of the wartime runway side by side with the one at the Burevestnik airfield used by the Russian Armed Forces.
Pillboxes line the coastal zone near the airfield at intervals of several tens of meters. The wall thickness of one pillbox was 4 meters.
Most of these compact guard posts were presumably constructed by the Japanese military, but some may date to the Soviet era, the article says.
The party also studied the site of an Imperial Japanese Army airfield on the Okhotsk Sea coast to the north of Bettobu (Reidovo) in the north of the island.
The runway, which lies not far from Lake Toro-numa (Lake Sopochnoe), was covered with concrete slabs measuring 5 meters by 10 meters.
Team members also found artifacts used by Japanese troops, such as shards of 1.8-liter sake bottles and part of a broken dish.
A large-scale underground fortress apparently used by the imperial Japanese military lay on the Pacific coast near Toshiruri (Sentyabrskaya Bay) in the northernmost strip of the island, with a view of Mount Iodake (Mount Kudryavyi), an active volcano, in the distance.
Labyrinthine passageways connect a range of underground facilities, including pillboxes, a firing command post and warehouses. Similar pillboxes were built during the Pacific War, mostly to prepare against an assault of U.S. Forces by way of the Aleutian Islands.
“I have traveled around 110 fortifications on the Kurils, but I have never seen anything quite like this,” Samarin was quoted as saying. “Here is a complete underground city!”
The remains of an old bathing complex were found in Seseki-Onsen (Goryachie Klyuchi), a village in central Etorofu island, which now hosts a camp of the 18th Machine Gun-Artillery Division of the Russian Armed Forces.
A round bathtub and other underground facilities remained beneath an above-ground structure, but the expedition could not determine whether the complex was built by Japanese or by postwar Soviets.
A hand ablution basin for use at a Shinto shrine lay nearby.
Many wartime Japanese military sites in the Northern Territories are located in areas where foreigners are strictly restricted from entering, such as around Russian military facilities and coastal and other border zones. Japanese researchers have seldom had an opportunity to visit and study them.
The findings by Samarin’s team are considered to be of importance, but the absence of experts on the imperial Japanese military means that the role and nature of the structures discovered have not been sufficiently understood.
Japanese experts are calling for joint Japan-Russia studies on the sites through flexible use of existing exchange frameworks, such as scientific interactions as part of via-free visits to the islands.
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