Bandō prisoner-of-war campBandō prisoner-of-war camp

The Bandō POW camp 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.