80 Years On: Japanese Lecturer Digitally Recreates Siberian Detention Camp

80 Years On: Japanese Lecturer Digitally Recreates Siberian Detention Camp

Daiki Hama, a lecturer at Tama University, speaks in an interview at the school in Tama, Tokyo, on April 18, discussing his experience of creating, as a teaching material, a digital Siberian internment camp using a virtual reality technology.
Daiki Hama, a lecturer at Tama University, speaks in an interview at the school in Tama, Tokyo, on April 18, discussing his experience of creating, as a teaching material, a digital Siberian internment camp using a virtual reality technology.

   Tokyo, Aug. 25 (Jiji Press)--A 25-year-old Japanese university lecturer has created a virtual Siberian internment camp to help young people better understand the reality of forced labor in the extreme cold and other harsh events experienced by Japanese troops detained by the Soviet Union after World War II.
   "I want to contribute to the efforts to prevent the history (of the war) from fading away," Daiki Hama, who lectures at Tama University in Tokyo, said.
   In November 2021, Hama, who was studying digital technology at the time, participated in an initiative to hold an online school festival amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
   He recreated a building of the university's Tama campus online. Akina Kobayashi, researcher on internment and then associate professor at the university, who saw the digitally recreated structure, asked him to recreate a detention camp as a teaching material.
   Kobayashi, now an associate professor at Kanto Gakuin University, located in Kanagawa Prefecture, next to Tokyo, was facing difficulties teaching students about a history she had never experienced. "I thought a virtual space would allow (students) to experience Siberian internment," Kobayashi recalled.

(2025/08/25-17:31)

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