Hokkaido's Dark History | Abashiri Prison, Built by Convicts at the Cost of Their Lives

That winter, I walked into Abashiri wearing my thickest down jacket — and still felt cold to the bone.

Then I stood in front of the bathhouse exhibit: wax figures recreating Meiji-era prisoners bathing. Wooden plank ceiling. No insulation. The freezing outdoors right on the other side of a thin wall.

A thought struck me: these men wore thin prison uniforms, lived in cells with no heating, and had to carve roads through winters even harsher than today.

'Once you're in, it's all over.' Here, those words have real weight.

A Road Built with Lives

In 1891, the Meiji government ordered the construction of the Central Road from Asahikawa to Abashiri — 228 kilometers in 8 months. The workforce: over a thousand convicts.

No machinery. Insufficient food. No medical care. Those who collapsed were often buried right where they fell — beneath the very road they were building.

Their Words, Preserved

The museum holds written records left by the convicts. One wrote about rice fields back home. Another about wanting to see his parents. One simply noted how many fingers he'd frostbitten today.

The shock doesn't come from anything dramatic. It comes from how ordinary these words are — so specific, so human, that for a moment you forget they were prisoners and see only people.

Two Legendary Escapes

Abashiri is also famous for two almost cinematic escape stories.

First: Shirasawa Yoshie, Japan's most prolific escapee. In 1942, while handcuffed, he allegedly used the acidity of miso soup to slowly corrode the metal, then crawled out through a ventilation shaft. No tools — just time and patience.

Second: four men escaping together in the dead of winter, chained wrist-to-wrist.

After walking the entire grounds, I stood at the entrance gate. Four characters: 網走監獄. I stood there a while. Didn't take a photo.

Abashiri Prison Museum is an open-air museum preserving prison buildings from the Meiji to Showa eras. Budget 2 to 3 hours. Winter snow makes the bleakness feel even more real.

The Story of This Place

Abashiri Prison opened in 1890 under the mouthful of a name "Kushiro Central Prison, Abashiri Convict Labor Camp." From day one it held roughly 1,392 hardened criminals, more than a third of them serving life sentences. The very next year, over a thousand convicts were marched into the mountains to cut the Central Road, the roughly 225-kilometer trunk line linking Asahikawa to Abashiri — the stretch from the Kitami Pass down to Abashiri alone was hacked open in about eight months. The cost was brutal: overwork, compounded by an edematous beriberi brought on by the lack of fish and vegetables in the mountains, killed 211 convicts and 6 guards on the job. To stop them from fleeing, the men worked with roughly four-kilogram iron balls chained to their legs. The dead were buried hastily in low earthen mounds, and when human bones were later dug up still wearing their shackles, the site earned the name \"Chain Mounds.\" Three of them still remain in Tandino, Kitami; a memorial stone and six Jizo statues were raised in 1976, and people come to pay their respects to this day.

Abashiri is also the stage for the \"escape king\" legends — and these are true stories about real men. Shirotori Yoshie broke out of four prisons in his lifetime — Aomori, Akita, Abashiri, and Sapporo. His Abashiri escape came in August 1944: by the record, he spent nearly a year blowing the salt from his miso soup onto his handcuffs and the nail of the inspection hatch, corroding the metal little by little, then dislocated his own joints to squeeze through the tiny hatch and finally headbutted his way through the skylight to freedom. Nishikawa Torakichi, nicknamed \"Five-Inch-Nail Torakichi,\" was the opposite kind of figure — he escaped from prisons in Mie, Akita, and Tsukigata a record six times, but after being transferred to Abashiri he turned his life around, became a model prisoner, and — granted parole in old age, around seventy — finally walked free. For him, Abashiri was where the running finally stopped.

As for how the name \"Abashiri\" came to be, it is said to trace back to Boshi-iwa, \"Hat Rock,\" out at the harbor mouth. According to legend, the Ainu who lived by fishing revered it as Kamuiwatara, \"the rock of the gods,\" offering it inau prayer-sticks in worship — and one leading theory holds that the place name grew from Chipashiri, \"the place of the offering-altar.\" Legend even tells that every fish in the whole world was born out of Abashiri's Lake Notoro, whose mouth to the sea, they say, opened only once every six years. Standing in the museum today, looking at that four-kilogram iron ball and the weathered chains, you finally understand how much buried grief and how many buried stories lie beneath this quiet stretch of the Okhotsk coast.

Book Hokkaido transport and experiences on Klook:

https://klook.tpx.lv/IuSKdjjt

Plan your itinerary with KKday:

https://kkday.tpx.lv/juFfN7dI