The Hakkoda snow march disaster

On 23 January 1902, 210 soldiers of an Imperial Japanese Army regiment set out on a snow march in the Hakkoda Mountains. 199 died. Ghost stories about the dead soldiers were told in the barracks soon after.

On 23 January 1902, 210 soldiers of the Fifth Infantry Regiment of the Army's Eighth Division left their garrison at Aomori at half past six in the morning. Their destination was the Tashiro hot spring in the Hakkoda Mountains, and the march was snow training. The writer Asazato Itsuki, in Gendai Media, says the weather was calm at the start. It worsened until the soldiers' rice balls froze too hard to eat. Some had already urged going back, but the regiment chose to go on. The National Diet Library of Japan says a severe cold wave struck and that 199 of the 210 died. Wikipedia counts 193 deaths during the incident and six in the two months after the rescue.

The ghost reports come from Gendai Media. It says ghost stories about the dead soldiers were told in the barracks from soon after the march began. A Tokyo daily newspaper, it says, ran an article headed with the ghosts of the frozen troops on 6 February 1902.

According to Gendai Media's account, from the night of 24 January the lights in the barracks of the regiment's Second Battalion went out and came back on almost every night. People heard the tramp of a dozen or more pairs of boots in the corridor, and a voice saying that the soldiers had just come back. Anyone who went outside to look found no sound and no one there.