TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
A freedom soup and the prisoners that built Hokkaido
Remembering the prisoners: Visitors come out of the Penological Museum in the Abashiri Prison Museum complex, Hokkaido
Change Size
Remembering the prisoners: Visitors come out of the Abashiri Prison Museum, Hokkaido. (JP/Mustaqim Adamrah) (JP/Mustaqim Adamrah)
R
span class="inline inline-none">Remembering the prisoners: Visitors come out of the Penological Museum in the Abashiri Prison Museum complex, Hokkaido. (JP/Mustaqim Adamrah)
Hokkaido, the northernmost major island of Japan, was nearly a no-man's-land over a decade ago.
The island only started to develop when the Meiji government was established in the second half of the 19th century.
With a threat of invasion coming from the Russian Empire, the government felt the need to develop the island, including building roads, using inmates of a maximum-security prison in Abashiri.
The old Abashiri Prison, which was built in the 1890s by the hands of past Abashiri prisoners, has now transformed into an open-air museum for visitors to get a glimpse of how the island was developed at the expense of 211 of the prison's inmates.
The museum looked quite quiet with not many visitors around as I walked through a red brick gate built.
A cup of hot amazake ' sweet, non-alcoholic sake made of fermented rice ' welcomed me, just right at a time I needed to make myself warm from Hokkaido's early February's winter.
'We only serve amazake during the winter. It's a welcome drink,' said Takada Koji, a museum staff member, when he greeted a group of Indonesian journalists inside the prison's administration building, part of the museum's complex.
Most of the buildings at the museum's complex have been restored after a 1909 fire gutted them, including the radial five-winged prison house, which was built in 1912 and remained in use until 1984.
The radial five-winged prison house, shaped like a hand's fingers, houses 100 single and 126 shared cells with a guard post right at the center.
One single cell has a size of around 3 square meters and a shared cell about 10 square meters, with a toilet inside each of the cells.
The radial five-winged prison house seemed to recount how prisoners, some of them serving life terms and some others indefinite prison terms, spent their days in single cells, or in shared cells filled by up to seven people.
The radial five-winged prison house actually had a capacity of 600 to 700, but was used to house up to 1,200 prisoners.
Each of the corridors was quite dark and only equipped with two charcoal heaters, making me wonder how cold the prison house was during the winter.
Prisoners who were detained in Abashiri, a fishing village whose population has multiplied from only around 600 in early years to around 38,000 in present days, had to labor to build the prison and the Chuo-Doro road, which connects Abashiri to Central Hokkaido.
The government argued that it would spend much less money on building roads in Hokkaido by using prisoners, and if they died during the process, it would mean fewer expenses for the prison.
Many of them died while working on construction projects because of illnesses that were caused by the harsh natural conditions ' Hokkaido is known for its harsh winter ' the brutal working regime, lack of adequate nutrition, sleep and appalling hygiene.
Prisoners labored in building infrastructure and the prison without any help of machinery.
They were chained together and worked in pairs to prevent them from escaping while working.
To prevent them from escaping from the prison, the radial five-winged prison house ' an exact copy of a radial prison in Leuven, Belgium ' was built with thick concrete and brick floors so that they could not dig their way out.
But apparently one had failed the prison's maximum security.
If there were any life character like Michael Scofield ' who was played by Wentworth Miller in Prison Break series ' living in Japan in the 1930s-1940s, it would probably be Yoshi Shiratori.
Shiratori was known as the 'Prison Break Magician of the Showa Era' for his successful escapes from the Abashiri Prison, among others, in 1944.
He used miso soup, which contained salt, to rust, weaken and break his handcuffs and the hinges on his cell door's observation window, through which he fled.
It was his third prison break from a third Japanese prison before his fourth escape from Sapporo Prison in 1947.
Shiratori's prison breaks were infamously known that it made it to the big screen in 1965 in a movie titled Abashiri Bangaichi (A Man from the Abashiri Prison).
The movie was named after his successful attempt in escaping from Abashiri Prison during the summer of 1944.
In 1983, a novel based on Shiratori's life, Hagoku (literally, Prison Break), was published by Akira Yoshimura. And the book was adopted in 1985 into a made-for-TV movie by NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation.
Nowadays, the modernized Abashiri Prison operates at the foot of Mount Tento.
