The Bandō POW camp (板東俘虜収容所, Bandō Furyoshūyōsho) was a prisoner-of-war camp during World War I in the western suburbs of what is now Naruto, Tokushima Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, Japan. From April 1917 until January 1920, just under a thousand of the 3,900 soldiers of the Imperial German Army, Imperial German Navy, German Marine Corps and Austro-Hungarian Navy who had been captured at the Siege of Tsingtao in November 1914 were imprisoned at the camp. When the camp closed in 1920, sixty-three of the prisoners chose to remain in Japan. The site of the camp was designated a National Historic Site in 2002.
Overview
In 1914, none of the parties involved in the conflict expected it to last for long, so the German prisoners-of-war taken by the Imperial Japanese Army in China were initially temporarily housed in public buildings such as Buddhist temples, inns or army barracks. However, when it became apparent that the war would not end soon, twelve large camps were set up on the outskirts...