Japan hanged Soviet spy Richard Sorge and Moscow refused to claim him; his Japanese partner moved his body to her own grave plot and tended it until she died

Richard Sorge was a German journalist in Tokyo who spied for the Soviet Union. He was arrested on 18 October 1941 with other members of his ring, convicted of espionage and hanged at Sugamo Prison on 7 November 1944. He was buried in a common plot in the prison graveyard. Japan tried several times to exchange him for Japanese prisoners held by the Soviets, and Moscow refused to acknowledge him. After the war Ishii Hanako, his partner of nearly six years, learned what had happened to him. In 1950 she had his remains moved to a plot at Tama Cemetery in western Tokyo. In 1964 the Soviet Union named him a Hero of the Soviet Union. The stone at Tama carries his name in Russian and hers in Japanese. She tended the grave until her death in 2000, aged 89, and was buried with him. Her memoirs were translated into Russian in full for the first time in 2021, and a Communist Party Central Committee file on "perpetuating the memory of Richard Sorge" was declassified in 2020. In February 2022 the grave carried fresh red flowers and a wreath the day after a Russian national holiday.