A Journey Across the World to Take Children Home : A True Story from the Russian Revolution

This book contains the English translation of Japanese Captain Kayahara's 1934 memoir, which he titled, "A Journey Across the World to Take Children Home: A True Story from the Russian Revolution." It tells a fascinating but little-known story of international humanitarian cooperation at a time of world turmoil.

A freighter refitted to become a passenger ship, the ship set sail from Vladivostok in July 1920 with an unusual cargo: more than 800 Russian children and their adult teachers and chaperones, including a number of officials from the American Red Cross. The outbreak of Russian Civil War in mid-1918 had separated these children from their families in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Unable to return the children home by land across war-torn Siberia, the American Red Cross contracted with the Japanese shipping company that owned the "Yomei-Maru" to repatriate the children. Under the leadership of Captain Motoji Kayahara, the ship sailed over 15,500 nautical miles across the Pacific and Atlantic before arriving in a Finnish port near the Russian border, from where the children were returned to their parents in Petrograd.

In addition to Captain Kayahara's memoir, the book also contains articles on the background of the voyage, on Captain Kayahara, and on Ginjiro Katsuda, the owner of the shipping company that provided the Yomei Maru to the Red Cross.

The book is a result of the collaboration of a group of historians, literature scholars and translators who worked tirelessly to document the history of the voyage of the Yomei-Maru.