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10.1057/9780230106369 - Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria, Mayumi Itoh
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
Previous publications
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Feng Chia University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-03
Globalization of Japan: Japanese Sakoku Mentality and U.S. Efforts to Open Japan (St. Martin’s Press, 1998). The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership Through the Generations (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003).
10.1057/9780230106369 - Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria, Mayumi Itoh
Forgotten Victims of World War II Mayumi Itoh
10.1057/9780230106369 - Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria, Mayumi Itoh
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
JAPANESE WAR ORPHANS IN MANCHURIA
Copyright © Mayumi Itoh, 2010. All rights reserved.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62281–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Itoh, Mayumi, 1954– Japanese war orphans in Manchuria : forgotten victims of World War II / Mayumi Itoh. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–62281–4 (alk. paper) 1. Abandoned children—China—Manchuria. 2. Orphans—China— Manchuria. 3. Japanese—China—Manchuria. 4. World War, 1939–1945— Children—China—Manchuria. I. Title. HV887.C552M3645 2010 305.23086′94509518—dc22
2009031045
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
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First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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For the voiceless people who perished in the frozen earth of Manchuria
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List of Photographs and Tables
ix
Preface
xi
Acknowledgments
xiii
Notes on the Text
xv
List of Abbreviations
xvii
1. Introduction
1
2. Background: Illusory Empire and Great Migration Campaign
11
3. Ill-Fated Diaspora of Japanese Farmer-Settlers
27
4. Early Postwar Era: Repatriation of Japanese and International Politics
39
5. Plight of Orphans During Postwar Era
61
6. Initial Search for Orphans: Volunteer Groups and Official Missions
73
7.
Barriers to Repatriation: Reestablishing Identity and Domicile
85
8. Barriers to Repatriation: Guarantor/Receiver Requirement
101
9. Japanese Women Left Behind in China
115
10. Orphans’ Struggles for Settlement
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129
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CON T E N T S
11.
Contents Struggles of Orphans’ Spouses and Offspring
145
12. New Obstacles: Retirement and Pensions
159
13. Class-Action Lawsuits
173
14.
185
Verdicts
15. Conclusion: Orphan Issue and Sino-Japanese Relations
205
Appendix
219
Notes
225
Bibliography I
241
Bibliography II
249
Index
255
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viii
A N D
TA BL E S
Photographs 1. Coronation of Pu Yi, March 1934 2. Armed Farmer-Settlers, 1933–1934 3. First and Second Dispatch Members of Yasuoka Branch Village Settlement in 1938 4. Farmer-Settlers Sail to Manchuria aboard the Saiberia-maru 5. Yasuoka Branch Village Settlers Work in the Field 6. Young Women’s Volunteer Corps for Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement 7. Shinoda Kinji’s Family (Kinji, second from left; the sole survivor in the family) 8. Repatriated Orphans at Shinagawa Station, Tokyo, December 5, 1946 (the white cloth hanging from a girl’s neck contains a wooden box with her family’s bones)
xix xix xx xx xxi xxi xxii
xxiii
Tables (in appendix) 1.1 Sino-Japanese Relations and Orphan Issue (1946–2009) 6.1 Official Missions to Search for Orphans’ Kin in Japan (1981–1987) 6.2 Supplementary Search Missions (1987–1999) 13.1 Orphans’ Class-Action Lawsuits (2002–2006) 15.1 Japanese Permanent Repatriation from China (1972–2008)
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219 221 222 222 224
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PHOTOGR A PH S
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It is a little known fact that the highest death toll of Japanese civilians in World War II occurred in Manchuria. Out of 1,550,000 Japanese civilians in Manchuria, 245,000 died. In comparison, 140,000 fell to the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and 74,000 in Nagasaki. In addition, 84,000 people died in the massive air strikes in Tokyo, and 94,000 civilians died in the Battle of Okinawa. The tragedy in Manchuria was that the civilian victims were concentrated among the farmer-settlers. The Kwantung Army took all healthy male settlers in the last minute nekosogi doin (“uprooting conscription”) as late as August 9, 1945, the day the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria. It was also the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and three days after the U.S. atomic bombing on Hiroshima. This “uprooting conscription” left women, children, and the elderly defenseless in the settlements. Consequently, out of 270,000 farmer-settlers in Manchuria, 78,500 died.1 At the end of World War II, about 6.6 million Japanese residing or stationed overseas were awaiting repatriation. About half of them were military personnel, while the other half were farmer-settlers as well as civilian employees in the administration of Japanese-held territories (gaichi), including Manchuria and Southeast Asia. The inf lux of these Japanese repatriates was such that the population in Japan increased by 8 percent between 1945 and 1948. It was the largest mass migration in the nation’s history, and one of the most “expansive” collective population transfers in world history.2 About 1,235,000 Japanese civilians in Manchuria, who survived the Soviet Army invasion, were repatriated between 1946 and 1948. However, more than 60,000 were left out from this collective repatriation. Then, 30,000 to 35,000 were repatriated between 1953 and 1958.3 Nevertheless, the rest were left behind in China for four decades until
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PR E FAC E
Preface
their repatriation resumed in 1981. Some are still seeking repatriation as of the writing of this book, sixty-four years after the end of the war. Why were they not repatriated earlier? Why were they obliged to live in a hostile country for decades that had waged brutal political liquidation campaigns unparalleled in world history? This book analyzes the reasons why the Japanese civilians were left behind in China, and how they were forgotten for decades in the light of Sino-Japanese relations. Recently, there has been a rise in literature in Europe and the United States on the Holocaust, such as Irène Nèmirovsky’s Suite Française, Elie Wiesel’s Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day, and H. G. Adler’s The Journey, just to mention three.4 The same phenomenon is taking place in Asia. The victims of Japanese imperialism during the Asia-Pacific War have broken their silence and spoken out in the final stages of their lives. The so-called “comfort women” of various nationalities have spoken the unspeakable. The Chinese and Korean forced laborers and war veterans who were conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) have also stood up and told their stories. In addition, Japanese children and women left behind in Manchuria have spoken out and recounted the “living hell” that they had gone through. These were the survivors’ last efforts to leave accurate accounts of the part of history that they lived through and its aftermath. Thus, this study constitutes an integral part of the literature on World War II, which passes down the true record of the war to future generations.
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xii
Among the many people to whom I am indebted in writing this manuscript, I would first like to thank Tsuneo Akaha, Kent E. and Toshiko Calder, Chalmers Johnson, David Leheny, Barbara Mori, Stephen Roddy, Richard J. Samuels, and Donald S. Zagoria for insightful comments on the manuscript and continuous encouragement. I thank Kanazawa Takeshi of Kokusai zenrin-kyokai, Ikeda Mariko of Manshu Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai, and Saruta Itsuo of Asahi shimbun for the loan of valuable photographs and a map. I also thank Editorial Director Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Editorial Assistant Robyn Curtis, as well as Gregory Rewoldt, my parents, Ito Shigeru and Asako, and my daughter Megumi for generous support.
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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S
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ON
T H E
T E X T
This book uses the modern system of Romanization for Chinese names, with the exception of historical figures, which are given in the WadeGiles system, with their modern spellings shown in parentheses—for example, Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin). This work uses the traditional Hepburn system for Japanese, with macron; however, macrons are not used for names known in English without macrons, as in Ichiro and Tokyo. The McCune-Reischauer system is used for names in Korean, with the Revised Romanization of Korean spellings shown in parentheses—for example, Pusan (Busan). Chinese and Japanese names are given with the surname first, except for those who use the reversed order in English. The ages and titles of individuals in the text were as of the time of the occurrence of the event in the passage, unless specified otherwise. The exchange rate for Japanese currency is calculated at US$1 = ¥110 and that for the Chinese currency is at US$1 = 7.29 yuan RMB, as of January 2008, unless specified otherwise. All translations were made by the author in the form of paraphrases, not as direct translations or direct quotations.
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NOT E S
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CCP DP DPJ GHQ HC HR IGH IJA IRC KMT LDP MOFA PLA POWs PRC ROC SCAP UNHCR UNRRA
Chinese Communist Party displaced persons Democratic Party of Japan General Headquarters House of Councillors House of Representatives Imperial General Headquarters Imperial Japanese Army International Red Cross Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) Liberal Democratic Party Ministry of Foreign Affairs People’s Liberation Army Prisoners of War People’s Republic of China Republic of China Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
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A BBR E V I AT ION S
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Source: Constructed by the author from official Japanese map, courtesy of Kokusai zenrinkyokai.
Source: Courtesy of the Kokusai zenrin-kyokaiiinkai.
2.
Armed Farmer-Settlers, 1933–1934
Source: Courtesy of the Kokusai zenrin-kyokaiiinkai.
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1. Coronation of Pu Yi, March 1934
First and Second Dispatch Members of Yasuoka Branch Village Settlement in 1938
Source: Courtesy of the Manshu Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai.
4.
Farmer-Settlers Sail to Manchuria aboard the Saiberia-maru
Source: Courtesy of the Manshu Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai.
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3.
Yasuoka Branch Village Settlers Work in the Field
Source: Courtesy of the Manshu Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai.
6.
Young Women’s Volunteer Corps for Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement
Source: Courtesy of the Manshu Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai.
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5.
Source: Courtesy of the Manshu Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai.
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7. Shinoda Kinji’s Family (Kinji, second from left; the sole survivor in the family)
Source: Courtesy of the Asahi shimbun.
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8. Repatriated Orphans at Shinagawa Station, Tokyo, December 5, 1946 (the white cloth hanging from a girl’s neck contains a wooden box with her family’s bones)
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ON E
Introduction
Ama no hara furisake mireba kasuga naru Mikasa no yama ni ideshi tsuki kamo (Looking back in the eastern sky far away, the moon rises over Mount Mikasa in Nara) —Abe no Nakamaro (born in Nara in 698, died in Chang’an, current Xian, in 770)1 There was a strange scene in Tokyo in March 1981. Forty-seven people who appeared to be Chinese, in their forties, wearing Chinese people’s uniforms, were interviewed at the Yoyogi Olympic Memorial Youth Center. Although they spoke Chinese, they were not Chinese. They were members of the first official mission, sponsored by the Japanese government, for the “Japanese orphans left behind in China,” to search for their kin in Japan. They were children of Japanese farmer- settlers in Manchukuo, a Japanese colony in Northeast China. They were abandoned, orphaned, or separated from their parents in the aftermath of the Soviet Army invasion in Manchuria on August 9, 1945. While some of their parents were repatriated, these children were left behind and had grown up in China. Their existence was buried in the strained relations between China and Japan and was forgotten. Four decades later, they visited Japan in an attempt to discover their own identities and locate their kin, so that they could be finally repatriated to their homeland.2 These Japanese are the forgotten victims of World War II. The Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare (Koseisho, reorganized as the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, or Koseirodosho, in 2001, and referred to as the “Ministry of Health,” hereafter) called them the
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CH A P T E R
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
“Japanese orphans left behind in China.” The Ministry identified them as the children who were under thirteen years old at the end of the war and did not know their Japanese identities. The Ministry thereby excluded all the minors who were thirteen years or older from the definition of such orphans. These minors were mostly girls, because young males were conscripted, or were in the Youth Volunteer Corps, and died in action or were taken to Siberia. The Ministry categorized these girls as “Japanese women left behind in China,” together with the adult women left behind. The Ministry alleged that these “women” had remained in China of their own will, and barred them from participating in the search missions that began in 1981. Under this “narrow” definition, there were 3,000–5,000 Japanese orphans left behind in China.3 Buried in Deadlocked Sino-Japanese Relations These war orphans are the tragic byproduct of Sino-Japanese relations in the post-World War II period. Their existence has been ignored because China and Japan did not normalize their diplomatic relations after the war. The communist regime was established in China, whereas Japan was incorporated into the alliance system of the United States in the wake of the Korean War, and Japan resumed diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. This Cold War framework shaped Sino-Japanese relations during the 1950s and 1960s. In the absence of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), no official efforts were made by the Japanese government to repatriate the orphans left behind in China (for the chronological correlations between Sino-Japanese relations and the orphan issue, see table 1.1 in the appendix).4 The diplomatic breakthrough came when the United Nations (UN) recognized the PRC as the legitimate China in 1971, replacing the ROC. President Richard Nixon then visited Beijing in February 1972, opening up the “bamboo curtain.” Japan wasted no time and normalized its relations with the PRC (“China,” hereafter) in September 1972. However, the road to reconciliation between China and Japan was far from smooth. Complicated by the newly formed U.S.- China-Soviet strategic triangle, the process for concluding a peace treaty between China and Japan stumbled over the “hegemonic clause” issue. China demanded that Japan acknowledge the Soviet Union as a “hegemonic power” in their peace treaty. After six years of delays in negotiations, China and Japan signed a peace treaty in August 1978.5
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2
3
It took three more years after the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty for the Japanese government to begin the missions to search for the orphans’ kin in Japan. Four decades had passed since the children were left behind in China, and the “orphans” had become middle-aged by then. The search missions continued at an interval of about a half year until 1987. Supplementary missions were organized thereafter (see tables 6.1 and 6.2 in appendix). As of January 2009, a total of 2,529 orphans had been repatriated to Japan permanently.6 However, hundreds of orphans still live in China without any knowledge of their real identities. It has become even more difficult to discover their identities in recent years because many of their aged kin have died. For those who had been repatriated to Japan, they struggled to settle in Japan. They neither spoke Japanese nor knew the code of conduct to live in Japanese society. The orphans, who in China were bullied as “little Japanese demons” and endured persecution as “Japanese spies,” were in turn despised as “Chinese” and discriminated against in their homeland, where they hoped they could finally live in peace. Nevertheless, the Japanese government did not take adequate measures to help their resettlement. Unable to find stable jobs, they lived on welfare. As the orphans had reached the retirement age of sixty years, they could no longer support themselves financially. Many of them were ineligible for public pensions because they did not meet the required years of premium payments. As a last resort, the aged orphans filed class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government in 2002, requesting national compensation. Paralyzed Relations between China and Japan: “History Issues” There is a close link between the plight of the Japanese orphans left behind in China and Sino-Japanese relations. Even after the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty, relations between China and Japan remained paralyzed for political reasons. The so-called “history issues” have been a cause for strained bilateral relations, which was exemplified by the Yasukuni Shrine issue. This concerns the Japanese political leaders’ visits to the Shrine that honored the convicted Class-A Japanese war criminals. Each time conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians made their annual pilgrimages to the Shrine, it angered not only China, but also other Japanese
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Introduction
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
neighbors, including the two Koreas. Sino-Japanese relations have also been marred by the “comfort women” issue, involving the “comfort facilities” created by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) for the military personnel overseas (examined below).7 The bilateral relations between China and Japan were further jeopardized by the textbook issue. The Ministry of Education (reorganized as the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology in 2001; the “Ministry of Education,” hereafter) approved the revisionist high school history textbooks that whitewashed the Japanese acts of aggression during the Asia-Pacific War. For instance, the Ministry authorized the textbook that replaced the phrase “invasion of China” by the ambiguous “advance in China.” The textbook issue in 1982 actually resulted in the cancellation of the orphans’ search missions in Japan, at the Chinese government’s request. The Chinese government also complained about the way the Japanese government handled the orphans’ repatriation and settlement, as well as their Chinese foster parents’ care after the repatriation, adding to the strains on their relations (see chapter 8).8 “History Issues” Revisited This book avoids reiterating the details of the “history issues.” Studies of these issues have already been made in English, as exemplified by Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988; George Hicks, The Comfort Women; and Allen S. Whiting, China Eyes Japan, just to mention three. To illustrate one of the latest developments in the “history issues,” the internal documents of the Yasukuni Shrine, declassified in March 2007, revealed that the Ministry of Health took the initiative in adding the names of Class-A war criminals to the Shrine (that had already honored the Class-B · C war criminals). Thus goshi (joint honoring) of the Class-A war criminals and the “ordinary” war dead began in 1969.9 The documents also revealed that the Ministry and the Shrine had decided in 1967 to honor a Class-B · C war criminal at the Shrine, who was the manager of a “comfort facility” in Batavia (present Jakarta, Indonesia). He was tried by the Dutch Army War Crime Tribunal and was serving a ten-year sentence in the Netherlands for forcing European women to work in the “comfort facility.” He died in prison in December 1946. The scholar Hayashi Hiroshi stated that, since the Yasukuni Shrine’s role was to honor the people who had contributed to
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4
5
Japanese war efforts, this case indicated that the Japanese government publicly acknowledged the “comfort facility” manager’s contribution to the war. The Ministry was in effect thanking him for managing the “comfort facility.”10 In addition, in late June 2007, a ninety-year-old blind Chinese woman came forward and identified herself as a former “comfort woman.” She was a favorite among the Japanese officers, and was called “No. 1.” Her lower body was permanently damaged by the abuse she suffered. She later lost her eyesight because she kept crying. She was at first scared of the Japanese reporter who interviewed her in 2007, because she thought that he was a Japanese soldier. Meanwhile, the majority of the former “comfort women” in South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia refused to receive the compensation offered by the Asia Peace Fund for Women, because it was a private fund established by the Japan Red Cross, rather than payment made by the Japanese government. The Japanese government had not unequivocally acknowledged the IJA’s responsibility for creating “comfort facilities,” exasperating the victims and their governments. These “history issues” have haunted Sino-Japanese relations to this day (see chapter 14).11 In addition, in March 2007, the Ministry of Education authorized the revision of high school textbooks, which whitewashed accounts on the mass suicide during the Battle of Okinawa. These textbooks deleted statements, such as “the IJA coerced civilians to commit mass suicide” and “the IJA accused them of being spies and executed them.” Survivors remember that army officers distributed hand grenades to local residents and ordered them to commit suicide. Civilian mass suicides did not take place on the islands where the IJA was not stationed. In addition, the IJA recruited Koreans, and mobilized and sacrificed them in the Battle of Okinawa. An outraged Okinawa-prefecture Assembly passed a resolution in June 2007 calling for the retraction of the revision of the textbooks. The Okinawa-prefecture Action Council and civic groups organized a massive rally against the Ministry’s move in September. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took up the issue in the Japanese parliament in October 2007 (see chapter 14).12 Orphan Issue and Sino-Japanese Relations Issues at bilateral levels are often manifestations of the systemic constraints at the international level. In the case of Soviet/Russo-Japanese relations, the “Northern Territories issue” has stalled the improvement
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Introduction
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
of their relations since the end of World War II. This issue is an unfortunate byproduct of the Cold War. As the territorial issue was deadlocked, however, it also became a bilateral issue between Russia and Japan in its own right. Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War, the territorial issue has confronted their relations. Russia and Japan have not yet concluded a peace treaty to end World War II because of this unresolved territorial issue.13 Similarly, for Sino-Japanese relations, while the Yasukuni Shrine issue and the other “history issues” might have been “red herrings” for the systemic constraint in their mutual relations initially, they became the real bilateral issues. The collapse of the Cold War structure did not spill over to East Asia. Sino-Japanese relations have been “cool” at best. Despite the “China fever” in Japan and the “Japan fever” in China in terms of their economic relations, their political relations have remained strained. Consequently, Sino-Japanese relations are referred to as seirei keinetsu (politically cold, economically hot) relations. This term symbolizes the asymmetrical relations between China and Japan. The Japanese orphans left behind in China have become lost in the asymmetrical relations between these two nations (see table 1.1 in appendix and chapter 4).14 Idiosyncrasies of Individual Leaders In addition, the “individual” personality factors of the leaders have contributed to the standstill in Sino-Japanese relations. The rigid stance of President Jiang Zemin, who launched an anti-Japanese patriotic education campaign, stressing the “history issues,” did not help improve mutual perceptions. He even demanded formal apologies from Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo during his state visit to Tokyo in November 1998. His behavior was in violation of diplomatic protocols. In turn, the high-handed style of Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro angered the Chinese government and people. For instance, he made a “surprise visit” to the Yasukuni Shrine in August 2001 (two days prior to the anniversary of the end of World War II), despite the warnings of the Chinese and South Korean governments not to visit the Shrine.15 In October 2001, Prime Minister Koizumi f lew to Beijing and met with President Jiang and Premier Zhu Rongi to assuage the Chinese anger over his visit to the Shrine. Prime Minister Koizumi was obliged to visit the Anti-Japanese Resistance War Memorial Museum at Marco
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6
7
Polo Bridge near Beijing, the site that started the second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937. Despite the condemnation of the Chinese government, Prime Minister Koizumi repeated his pilgrimage to the Yasukuni Shrine for six consecutive years. The accumulated tension between the two countries erupted, triggered by the publication of a revisionist high school textbook. This culminated in massive demonstrations and sporadic violence against Japanese businesses, the embassy, and consulatesgeneral in major cities across China in April 2005. There were no summit visits by the Chinese or Japanese leaders until October 2006, when Koizumi’s successor Abe Shinzo visited China.16 Prime Minister Abe Betrays Himself Prime Minister Abe first tried to allay Chinese concerns over his assertive brand of nationalism. He took a cautious stance on the Yasukuni Shrine issue by keeping his visits to the Shrine discrete. Later, it was found that he had donated a sacred masakaki tree to the Shrine, as an offering to its annual spring ritual in April 2007. Prime Minister Abe initially appeared to have succeeded in ameliorating Sino-Japanese relations by choosing Beijing as his first overseas destination, instead of the customary pilgrimage to Washington D.C. His visit to China broke the five-year hiatus in the summit visits between China and Japan.17 However, Prime Minister Abe betrayed himself by denying the IJA’s responsibility for creating the “comfort facilities” overseas. Prime Minister Abe stated in March 2007 that the IJA did not “coerce” women into working there, in a narrow sense of the word. He stated that the “comfort facilities” were not part of the IJA, because they were managed privately. This is the same as saying that a parent corporation is not responsible for its outsourced operations overseas. Prime Minister Abe’s toying with the definition of the term to def lect the Japanese government’s responsibility infuriated the victims and their governments. Instead of apologizing to the victims, Prime Minister Abe was concerned with face-saving rhetoric on behalf of the Japanese military. It revealed his real attitude toward the “history issues” with Japan’s neighbors (see chapter 14).18 Prime Minister Fukuda’s Moderate Approach Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo, who succeeded Prime Minister Abe in September 2007, pledged that he would not visit the Yasukuni Shrine,
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Introduction
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
and pursued a more moderate foreign policy toward East Asia. This new foreign policy stance marked a stark contrast to that of his predecessors. Prime Minister Fukuda also tried to soften his predecessor’s policy of linking the “abduction issue” with aid to North Korea: no aid to North Korea unless North Korea returns the remaining victims (see chapter 12). Prime Minister Abe had gained popularity at home by this hardline policy, which appealed to Japanese sentiment, while it isolated Japan from the six-nation negotiations to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear programs. Prime Minister Fukuda’s new foreign policy stance relieved the officials at the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), who saw in the approach of the new leader the possibility of formulating a more balanced and rational foreign policy toward East Asia.19 Prime Minister Fukuda’s moderate diplomatic approach was derived from his consensus-building decision-making style. In addition, he is the son of Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo (1976–1978), who engaged in the negotiations for the Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty and signed the treaty himself in Tokyo in 1978, with Deng Xiaoping. In addition to relations with China, Fukuda’s father also strove to improve Japan’s relations with the Southeast Asian nations by providing economic aid and promoting cultural understanding (the Fukuda Doctrine). His father’s legacy weighed heavily on him, and he had an individual stake in carrying on his father’s legacy. Prime Minister Fukuda visited Beijing in December 2007 and met with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who stated that their bilateral relations had entered a “spring season.” Prime Minister Fukuda’s new approach suggests that the individual leader’s personal interests and priorities could significantly affect foreign policy choices that override domestic constraints.20 Ref lecting a more amicable stance from Japan, President Hu visited Tokyo in April 2008, a decade after his predecessor’s state visit to Japan. However, Prime Minister Fukuda resigned abruptly, just as his predecessor had done, and the more nationalist-leaning Aso Taro succeeded him in September 2008. Based on the Sino-Japanese agreement concluded during the Fukuda cabinet, Prime Minister Aso visited China in October 2008 and April 2009, for summit talks with President Hu and Premier Wen. Nevertheless, it was revealed in April 2009 that he had donated a sacred masakaki tree to the Yasukuni Shrine as an offering for its annual fall and spring rituals, in October 2008 and in April 2009, respectively, irking the Chinese leaders yet again.21 Under these circumstances, the orphan issue was entangled in the strained Sino-Japanese relations and has been ignored by Japanese
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9
policy-makers. In summary, the orphan issue is an unfortunate byproduct of the Cold War in East Asia. It is also an integral part of Japan’s war responsibility and compensation issues for the Asia-Pacific War. Nevertheless, no book on the orphan issue has been published in English. There is a rich literature on the history of Manchuria, such as Sadako Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931–1932; three books on the Japanese Empire in China by Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie; and Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. However, there is no literature on events in Manchuria in the post-World War II era in the discipline of history, because this issue goes beyond its chronological boundary. Two books in the discipline of anthropology have touched on the orphan issue: Mariko Asano Tamanoi, ed., Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire; and Nobuko Adachi, ed., Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents and Uncertain Futures. Their focus, however, was on the cultural- social aspects. They did not examine foreign policy issues or the international relations behind the orphan issue, because they were studies in anthropology. In turn, there is a plethora of books in the discipline of political science that examine contemporary Sino-Japanese relations, from the perspectives of regional security and economic relations in Northeast Asia, or in association with Sino-U.S. relations and U.S.-Japan relations. However, there are by far fewer books that engage contemporary Sino-Japanese relations exclusively. The latest works on this bilateral relationship include Michael Heazle and Nick Knight, eds., ChinaJapan Relations in the Twenty-first Century: Creating a Future Past? (gives perspectives of nationalism in both countries); Caroline Rose, SinoJapanese Relations: Facing the Past, Looking to the Future? (focuses on the “history issues” and war compensation issues); and Ming Wan, SinoJapanese Relations: Interaction, Logic, and Transformation (renders a systematic analysis of the relations). Nevertheless, no books in the discipline of political science, including those specifically on Sino-Japanese relations, have mentioned the orphan issue. This is so because the issue was deadlocked in the stalemate of Sino-Japanese relations after the war, and was buried in the abyss of their relations in the early postwar years. The issue began to surface only after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations; however, it was again compromised and stalemated due to the “triangular” relations among China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Despite all these circumstances, the orphan issue is an integral part of
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Introduction
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
Sino-Japanese relations in general, and of the war compensation issues between Japan and the victims of the Asia-Pacific War in particular. This work is the first on the orphan issue from the perspectives of international relations and policymaking, and is the first comprehensive study of the subject to date. It makes a useful complement to the existing literature on the history of Manchuria. This book also compares the orphan issue with Japanese emigration to Latin America, as well as with European emigration and Southeast Asian refugees, where appropriate, providing comparative perspectives.
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T WO
Background: Illusory Empire and Great Migration Campaign
The first big question is: Why did the Japanese farmers settle in Manchuria? This project began in March 1932 when Japan created a puppet state, Manchukuo, in Northeast China. Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty (deposed in 1912), became Manchukuo’s emperor in March 1934; however, he remained its nominal ruler (see photograph 1). Manchukuo was de facto a Japanese colony in Manchuria, controlled by the Kwantung Army. This Japanese military apparatus in charge of the region was the most celebrated Japanese colonial garrison force, and exercised considerable autonomy from the Imperial General Headquarters (IGH) in Tokyo. Considering Manchuria to be Japan’s lifeline, the Kwantung Army wanted a more aggressive expansion policy than the IGH and the civilian cabinet of Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijiro (his first cabinet, January 1926–April 1927; his second cabinet, April 1931–December 1931). The Kwantung Army bombed the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden (present Shenyang) in September 1931, without authorization from Tokyo. It alleged that Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang), the heir to the inf luential Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin), was the culprit. This conspiracy gave the Kwantung Army an excuse to expand its military control over the entire region of Northeast China, ignoring the second Wakatsuki cabinet’s decision not to expand. This was known as the “Manchurian Incident” or the “September 18 Incident.” The Japanese public did not know that the Incident was the Kwantung Army’s plot and supported the move, forcing the Wakatsuki cabinet to resign en masse.1
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CH A P T E R
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
Then, Kwantung Army Staff Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) Infantry Regiment Captain Tomiya Kaneo, and the Ministry of Colonial Affairs’ (Takumusho, a precursor of the Ministry of Greater East Asian Affairs) Agricultural Training School Director Kato Kanji came up with a plan to immigrate Japanese farmers in the Manchurian hinterland in order to solve the domestic problems with overpopulation and the lack of food self-sufficiency. It seemed to them an ideal solution “to get two birds with one stone.” This immigration plan was likely to involve violence, since Tomiya was one of the personnel who carried out the assassination of Chang Tso-lin in June 1928, while Ishiwara was the main conspirator of the Manchurian Incident. Kato submitted the Manchuria immigration plan to the Ministry of Colonial Affairs in February 1932.2 Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (a civilian; December 1931–May 1932) was reluctant to recognize Manchukuo. Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo (a civilian; prime minister, 1921–1922) of the Inukai cabinet tried to reduce the military budget and was not in favor of the immigration plan. Then, Prime Minister Inukai was assassinated in what became known as the “May 15 Incident” of 1932. Takahashi was demoted in the aftermath of the Incident. Four years later, Takahashi himself was assassinated by the rebelling young army officers in the “February 26 Incident” of 1936. In March 1936, the agricultural imperialist Kato told Ministry of Colonial Affairs officials that Japanese capitalists did not want to send settlers to Manchuria, because they wanted to use local coolies with lower wages. Kato said, “Takahashi was the champion of these capitalists. The army officers killed Takahashi because he was the spokesman for the capitalists. The Ministry should not wait for an investigation of the local situation, but should send farmers in hundreds of thousands before momentum is lost. Anyone who will obstruct this goal will be dead.”3 Creation of Manchukuo In February 1932, with the strong lobbying of Kato, the Imperial Japanese Parliament approved the immigration plan as it was, and appropriated its budget as requested. Subsequently, the Kwantung Army declared the creation of Manchukuo and launched a grandiose immigration campaign, which led to the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. Tomiya
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Origin of Grandiose Immigration Campaign
13
became an advisor to the Military-Political Department of Manchukuo and was referred to as the “Father of the Manchurian Settlement.” As Peter Duus has noted, the absence of any strong authority in China, in the aftermath of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, provided an opportunity and inducement for the Kwantung Army to seize control of Northeast China, and Manchukuo served as a northern foothold of Japanese expansion into China. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, in which the Chinese and Japanese Armies clashed with each other in the suburb of Beijing in July 1937, ushered in the second Sino-Japanese War (The first Sino-Japanese War occurred in 1894–1895). Despite the non-expansion policy declared by the first Konoe cabinet ( June 1937– January 1939), the IJA expanded the war front into the entire territory of China. The war lasted until Japan’s surrender in August 1945.4 Japanese Overseas Emigration The creation of Manchukuo ref lected the changes in Japan’s domestic political economy and in the international trade regime. Japan suffered from overpopulation and shortages of agricultural land and food. Farmers did not have enough land to partition to their second and third sons. The Japanese government tried to alleviate the problem of overpopulation in the small island-nation, specifically in the povertystricken rural areas, through overseas settlement. Earlier, the Japanese government encouraged farmers to emigrate to South America, notably to Brazil and Peru. The first Japanese collective immigration to Latin America occurred in 1899 when 790 men aboard the Sakuramaru sailed to Peru. Japanese collective immigration to Brazil began in 1908, with 781 people sailing there aboard the Kasado-maru, in order to work on coffee plantations. As the United States shut the door to Japanese immigrants through the Immigration Act of 1924 (including the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act), as well as through the California Alien Land Acts (1913 and 1920), Brazil replaced the United States as the most popular overseas immigration destination.5 Some scholars argue that these expulsion measures caused the Japanese government to look at Manchuria as an alternative destination, leading to the Manchurian Incident. These measures also made the most prominent pro-U.S. Japanese, including Nitobe Inazo (League of Nations Under-Secretary- General, 1862–1933) and Asakawa Kan’ichi (Yale University history professor, 1873–1948),
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Background
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
gravely concerned about the “yellow peril” hysteria in the United States. In turn, Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s Sobo (Weed People), which portrayed the settlers’ arduous voyage to Brazil in 1930 via Cape Town, as well as their realization that Brazil was a far cry from a paradise, won the inaugural Akutagawa Literature Award (named after Akutagawa Ryunosuke, 1892–1927) in 1935.6 These Japanese immigrants in Latin America were the first group of overseas kimin (people abandoned by the government) (see chapter 14). In 1932, the Japanese government tried to solve these problems of overpopulation and food shortage through the acquisition of overseas territory for settlement and agricultural development: “to get two birds with one stone.” The international trade bloc, instilled by the economic nationalism and protectionism on the part of the Western powers, as exemplified by the U.S. embargoes on its export to Japan of key strategic materials, intensified Japan’s desire to create its own freetrade regime in East Asia. The perceived need for Lebensraum justified the territorial expansion into Manchuria. As a result, Japan launched a grand campaign to send farmers to Manchuria under banners such as “creation of odo-rakudo” (a royal paradise), “gozoku kyowa” (cooperation among five races: Hans, Japanese, Koreans, Manchurians, and Mongolians), and “Toyo heiwa” (peace in the Orient). These slogans portrayed a utopian picture of an uncultivated land of opportunity in Manchuria, but they were essentially Pan-Asian rhetoric in the name of national self-determination.7 While both Japanese immigration to Latin America and that to Manchuria were part of the deliberately planned Japanese government’s kimin policy (to exile its unwanted people) for the sake of “population adjustment,” a critical difference existed between the two. The former was settlement in foreign countries with a real international “coexistence and co-prosperity” spirit. In contrast, the latter was settlement in a Japanese colony, or what Japan called gaichi (exterior territory), promoted by the powerful “government-military-industry complex.”8 Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement Missions The Ministry of Colonial Affairs recruited Japanese farmers from the infertile and mountainous landlocked regions. For instance, farmers in the Nagano prefecture were living below subsistence level, as sericulture went bankrupt during the Great Depression in 1929. They earned their livelihood by selling their daughters to brothels in Tokyo. To
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15
ensure that the immigration program would succeed, the Ministry imposed a quota of immigrants on each local government. Those who hesitated were treated as “traitors.” In order to lure the farmers, the Ministry also used the propaganda that they could become big landlords if they immigrated in Manchuria. The Ministry succeeded in recruiting thousands of farmers to join the “Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement Missions,” with the Nagano prefecture having recruited the largest number of about 34,000 immigrants.9 The first settlement mission, consisting of 423 armed farmer-settlers, left Kobe port in October 1932 and settled near Jiamusi in Sanjiang province (see map and photograph 4). Manchukuo was divided into nineteen provinces in April 1934, which were reorganized into the current three provinces (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) by the Chinese government in September 1945. The Japanese immigrants built the first settlements in Manchuria in an area where local brigands’ hideouts had existed. The Kwantung Army attacked them in advance, driving them out before the settlement missions arrived. However, the area was still dangerous to settle in. Therefore, the farmer-settlers who built the initial “experimental settlements,” such as the Iyasaka village (1932), the Chiburi village (1933), and the Mizuho village (1934), were all armed (see photograph 2).10 The nature of the settlement mission was inevitably very much military, as well as agricultural. In fact, each settlement was given a specific military mandate, such as border defense and security maintenance. As many as 50 percent of the settlement villages were assigned to the Soviet border. In turn, 40 percent were located in the areas where anti-Japanese armed resistance by the Chinese occurred, and 10 percent were placed at transportation hubs. The Kwantung Army forcibly bought land from the Chinese farmers at one-third the market price. For example, 33 percent of the land secured for the first settlement mission, and as much as 71 percent of the land for the second settlement mission, were already under cultivation by local farmers. As a result, the Chinese farmers were driven out of their villages into less fertile land. Some became tenants of the Japanese farmer-settlers and others became coolies. The Kwantung Army also forcibly procured food from the Chinese farmers and engaged them in forced labor. Not surprisingly, the Kwantung Army’s actions brought reprisals from the local Chinese upon the Japanese settlers during the war and the postwar era. Yet, the “migration machine” in Tokyo campaigned that the Japanese were going to settle on uncultivated land in Manchuria. The Japanese were not informed of the truth.11
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Background
16
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
In August 1936, the Hirota cabinet (March 1936–January 1937) adopted a great migration policy to Manchuria as part of its seven-point national policy. It outlined its overall plan to send one million households (five million settlers) to Manchuria in twenty years, from 1937 to 1957. This meant that 10 percent of the whole population of Manchuria would be Japanese. The plan attempted to send out nearly half of the povertystricken farmers in Japan to Manchuria. It was a grand-scale ethnic migration plan. The cabinet decided to send 100,000 households in its first five-year plan, and planned to send 6,000 households in 1937 and 15,000 households in 1938. With the outbreak of the second SinoJapanese War in July 1937, however, many farmers were conscripted and were sent to the southern part of China. Consequently, only 600 households immigrated into Manchuria in 1937.12 In addition, the first Konoe cabinet, controlled by the military, approved the dispatch of the “Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement Youth Volunteer Corps” (ages ranging from fifteen to eighteen years) in 1937. The name was originally Youth Volunteer “Army.” The cabinet changed the name to soften the image. The agricultural imperialist Kato created the Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement Youth Volunteer Corps Training School in February 1938 and trained the youth with the slogan, “a hoe on the right hand, a rif le on the left hand.” Then, in December 1941, the Tojo cabinet (October 1941–July 1944) passed the second fiveyear plan for the Manchurian settlement to send 220,000 households (1,100,000 settlers) to Manchuria. It carried out the plan up until August 8, 1945, when the Soviet Union declared war against Japan. As late as August 15 (the day the war ended), the fourteenth settlement mission, comprising 100 settlement groups, arrived in Manchuria. The Japanese government also sent Taiwanese (Taiwan had been ceded to Japan as a result of the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895) to Manchukuo and employed them as bureaucrats, including the post of mayor of Xinjing (Manchukuo’s capital, present Changchun).13 By May 1945, a total of 225,585 persons (including farmer-settler household heads and family members) had settled in Manchuria, and almost 800 Japanese settlement villages dotted the rural landscape of Manchuria. Expansion of the empire created employment opportunities for bureaucrats and shopkeepers, as the South Manchuria Railway Company and other government-run corporations were established. By August 1945, the Japanese civilian population in the land of opportunity swelled to an estimated 1,550,000, excluding the military personnel.
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Great Migration Policy to Manchuria
Background
17
Among them, about 270,000 were settlers, out of which 240,000 were farmer-settlers, 23,000 were Youth Volunteer Corps members, and 5,000 were Youth Volunteer Reserve Corps members.14
The IGH determined by the end of 1943 that it had completed the deployment of the Japanese armed settlers and Youth Volunteer Corps members on the anticipated routes of the Soviet Army invasion. However, as Duus noted, Japanese wartime expansion proceeded too far and too fast on a relatively limited material base. Japan’s hegemony over the huge territory was more of an illusion than reality. Japan was waging fatal battles on the southern front, such as in Guam and the Philippines (the Battle of Leyte and the Battle of Luzon). The IGH transferred thirteen divisions of the Kwantung Army to the south. It also transferred seven divisions back to Japan in March 1945 in anticipation of attacks on its territory proper. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, which had been fighting with Japan for the spheres of interest in Northeast Asia, took advantage of the power vacuum created by the overexpansion and overcommitment on the part of the Japanese military. It notified Japan in April 1945 that it would not renew their neutrality pact. Legally speaking, the treaty was to expire a year later from the date of the notification of nonrenewal by either party, and therefore was still effective until April 1946.15 According to writer Ide Magoroku’s interview with former IGH Operations Staff Lieutenant Colonel Asaeda Shigeharu in 1985, Asaeda was recalled from the Philippines in January 1945 and was charged with the operations against the Soviet Union. Asaeda sensed that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria was inevitable, when it notified Japan of its intention of not extending the neutrality pact in April. Asaeda felt that Manchuria would fall to the Soviet Union unless Japan could deter Soviet invasion by grand diplomatic maneuvers, such as surrendering Japan’s rights to the oil in Northern Sakhalin or fishing rights in the Okhotsk Sea, before the neutrality pact expired in a year. However, General Staff War Council Division Head Tanemura Sako did not listen to this rooky Operations Staff member. He did not believe that a Soviet invasion was imminent.16 When Asaeda f lew to Xinjing in April 1945, he was astonished to be received with an elaborate banquet from the Kwangtung Army Commander in Chief General Yamada Otozo in his official residence,
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Kwantung Army Decides to Abandon Farmer-Settlers
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
which was under renovation for expansion. The scene of the banquet, full of delicacies from the mountains and the seas, was that of odo rakudo (the royal paradise). Asaeda, who had just left the tragic battlefields of the Philippines, mustered his courage. He told the general that a Soviet invasion was imminent, and that General . . . sky (i.e., some Russian general) might be living in this gorgeous residence in a few months. Asaeda told General Yamada that unless the Kwantung Army could repatriate the Japanese residents secretly group by group, it was not feasible to undertake military operations against the Soviet Union. However, actually it was too late. It would have taken at least a year to repatriate 1,550,000 Japanese civilians from Manchuria safely. It was especially difficult to repatriate the farmer-settlers in remote regions near the Soviet border. The withdrawal of these settlers in itself would trigger a Soviet invasion. Fearing such a possibility, the idea to repatriate the Japanese farmer-settlers was dropped. At that point in time, the IGH abandoned the farmer-settlers in Manchuria.17 By that time, it was obvious to the IGH that the Kwantung Army was no match for the Soviet Army. Consequently, the IGH adopted in May a new operation plan against the Soviet Union, shifting the focus of defense from Manchuria to the Japanese territory proper. The plan limited the defended area in Manchuria to southern Manchuria adjacent to the Korean peninsula, leaving the remaining three quarters of Manchuria defenseless. It withdrew the major forces of the Kwantung Army from Manchuria prior to the Soviet Army invasion and moved its headquarters to Tonghua in the south. The IGH at that point in time abandoned the civilians in Manchuria. The Kwantung Army personnel told the bureaucrat of Manchukuo that the farmer-settlers would have no choice but to commit suicide (akin to the fate of the civilians in the Battle of Okinawa).18 Soviet Army Invasion of Manchuria In order to fill the power vacuum created by the relocation of the major contingents of the Kwantung Army and in anticipation of the imminent Soviet Army attack, the Kwantung Army conscripted all the available males, ranging from seventeen to forty-four years in the so-called nekosogi doin (“uprooting conscription”) in July 1945. These 250,000 untrained new conscripts were positioned at the anticipated war fronts near the Soviet border, facing almost certain death. With this conscription, the nominal size of the Kwantung Army increased
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19
to 700,000; however, even the army staff admitted that they were mere “papier-mârché tiger” forces. The settlement villages were left defenseless, with women, children, and elderly people. However, as late as August 2, after having completed its withdrawal to the south, the Kwantung Army press in Xinjing broadcast that the Army was in good shape and that the northern front was quiet. The press specifically told the farmer-settlers in the border settlements to engage in their work without worry. The Kwantung Army thus deceived the settlers. They were considered expendable.19 On August 8, two days after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war against Japan in violation of their neutrality pact that was still in effect. Asaeda drafted the directive to the Kwantung Army Commander in Chief on that day. It did not mention the defense of Manchukuo. It only mentioned the defense of Japanese territory proper and that of the Korean peninsula. The Soviet Army invaded Manchuria the next day. Asaeda issued Directive 1378, dated August 10. Then, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) official asked Asaeda whether Japan should declare war against the Soviet Union, since the latter had declared war in violation of international law (the neutrality pact). Asaeda told him that the Soviet Union had invaded Japan (Manchukuo), and that there was no need for the invaded country to declare war against the invader. Asaeda thought that Japan could accuse the Soviet Union of violation of international law after the war ended.20 In retrospect, it is curious that Asaeda regarded Manchukuo as a part of Japan, while the Japanese government later refused to recognize it as such, denying any responsibility for it. Meanwhile, Asaeda stated, “I feel vindicated because, had Japan declared war against the Soviet Union then, it would have given the Soviet Union a pretext to invade Japanese territories proper. Then, Japan might have been divided and have suffered the same fate as Korea and Germany.”21 Japan’s Surrender On August 10, 1945, Asaeda f lew to Xinjing, but then he was ordered to return to Tokyo, instead of f lying to Nanjing. The unspoken message was clear. Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers by accepting the Potsdam Declaration on August 14. After hearing the radio broadcast at noon on August 15 (Emperor Hirohito’s speech accepting unconditional surrender), Asaeda f lew back to Tokyo and arrived at the IGH.
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Background
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
There he told his subordinates not to commit suicide. Nevertheless, one of his staff committed harakiri at a shrine, taking responsibility for the fall of Saipan in the Philippines. After burying his comrade, Asaeda felt a sense of duty to deliver in person the final directive of the Supreme War Council addressed to the Kwantung Army Commander in Chief (see chapter 4). In order to deliver the directive, Asaeda wrote a directive ordering him to f ly back to Xinjing as a special envoy of the IGH. He also wrote papers to give himself diplomatic immunity in case the Soviet Army captured him.22 On his way out from the IGH on August 19, Asaeda met War Council Division Head Major General Nishimura Toshio, who was a first-rate expert on Russian affairs. Nishimura warned him not to f ly to Xinjing, but Asaeda could not disobey the order he wrote himself. There was no response to radio messages sent to Xinjing airport. When he forcibly landed at the airport, the Soviet Air Force captured him. As Nishimura predicted, the diplomatic immunity Asaeda carried and international laws did not mean anything. Asaeda was taken to Khabarovsk on September 7, along with Kwantung Army officers, including Commander in Chief General Yamada and Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Hata Hikosaburo. Asaeda was detained there for four years until August 1949, while Yamada and Hata were detained until 1956.23 “Hundreds- of-Miles Death March” to Harbin August 9, 1945 was a fatal day for the Japanese farmer-settlers in Manchuria. Their “royal paradise” turned into a “living hell.” The Soviet Army rampaged through Manchuria, as Japan had rampaged through China. The Soviet Army attack continued even after the Japanese surrender on August 15. The Japanese farmer- settlers abandoned their remote settlement villages in a hurry and began their evacuation journey to the provincial capital Harbin and elsewhere. They wandered in the wilderness for weeks and became displaced persons. The farmer-settlers were not only attacked by the Soviet Army, but also by the local Chinese who turned into armed mobs. It was their turn for revenge on the Japanese settlers who had taken their land away. This took a heavy toll on the Japanese farmer-settlers. The settlers’ evacuation journey was literally a “hundreds-of-miles death march” to Harbin. In August 1945 alone, countless Japanese settlers were massacred, or committed mass suicide, during their evacuation journeys.
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20
Background
21
The most tragic cases included the Mashan Incident (August 12) and the Abandoned Sado Settlement Incident (August 25–27).24
The Kwantung Army had abandoned the Hataho settlement village in Jining prefecture in Dongan province, twenty-five miles from the Soviet border. The Soviet Army crossed the border at dawn on August 9. All the railroad stations were already closed by the Kwantung Army’s order. About 1,000 settlers began their evacuation journey on foot at night. However, more than 460 members committed mass suicide in the Mashan Valley, which is known as the “Mashan Incident.”25 The Hataho settlers were divided into three groups. They loaded their belongings onto horse wagons and headed to Linkou prefecture, sixty miles away, in torrential rain. They could barely move on the muddy road. With the leader’s order to stop, women collapsed on the ground, while children slept with their faces down in the mud, in the heavy rain. They kept trudging along toward Linkou. The unfed horses became weak and the settlers threw their belongings away from the wagons. Kainuma Yoji, the head of the Hataho settlement, was leading the central evacuation group of 465 members. Each time he encountered the Japanese soldiers, he requested them for a small army unit to escort the settlers to a safe zone. However, the request was rejected each time.26 Then Kainuma sent out a young student, Nofu Yoshizo, as a messenger for help. Nofu rode on a horse in the mud, dragging another horse. He found Japanese soldiers and asked for help. He was told that guarding settlers was not in their mandate. When he persisted, he was called a traitor and was almost shot. Meanwhile, the group arrived at the Mashan Valley. Two surviving members in the front group of his party reported to the central group that the Soviet Army had attacked them and that the survivors have committed suicide. Kainuma went up a hill and saw his group surrounded by the Soviet Army. He asked the members whether they would continue their evacuation together. Most of the members were in favor of mass suicide, whereas thirty-six stronger men decided to form a suicide attack unit. Kainuma decided to lead the women and children. Upon returning, Nofu saw Kainuma’s body on top of the hill, surrounded by about 400 bodies of women and children, with each group lying stately and according to their village unit. It was the last of the central evacuation group of the Hataho settlement.27
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In late August, after two weeks of evacuation journey, a number of settlement groups in Dongan province arrived at the already abandoned Sado settlement in Boli prefecture. Other settlement groups had already taken refuge there, making the total number of evacuees over 3,000. The Soviet Army attacked the Sado settlement and killed about 2,000–2,500 farmer-settlers, which is known as the “Abandoned Sado Settlement Incident.”28 The Hanishina village settlement group in Baoqing prefecture began its evacuation journey on August 9 in torrential rain. They arrived at Baoqing on August 10. The city was already seized by the Soviet Army. The Kwantung Army had already gone. The settlers then decided to head to Boli, more than 100 miles away. When the group reached the outskirt of Boli on August 16, the number swelled to 3,000 people, with other settlement groups joining in. Boli was already occupied by the Soviet Army. On August 23, a Soviet reconnaissance plane landed near the abandoned Sado settlement in Boli, where the evacuees had taken refugee. A Russian soldier shot one of the refugees. In retaliation, some members of the Kosha village burned the airplane and killed eight Russian soldiers aboard it the next day, without consulting with other evacuee groups. In fear of Russian retaliation, the Kosha village group committed mass suicide on August 25. The registry of the Kosha village settlement recorded that 556 died (mostly by suicide), fifty-six were repatriated, eleven remained un-repatriated, and nine were declared missing.29 In turn, the leader of the Hanishina settlement, Ikeda Kentaro, a Christian and a school principal from Nagano prefecture, told his members that he would not allow them to commit suicide. Ikeda set twenty-one Young Women’s Volunteer Corps members free, because he believed that they were different from permanent settlers, so that they should return home alive (see photograph 6). Because of this, most of the female volunteers of the Hanishina settlement escaped the tragic incident and were repatriated to Japan. The following day, the leaders of the settlement groups met and agreed to fight to the death. The eve of the ensuing tragic incident was eerily quiet. Around 6 a.m. on August 27, the Soviet Army surrounded the settlement and began summary shootings of the evacuees.30 Between 2,000 and 2,500 farmer- settlers from a dozen settlements died at the abandoned Sado settlement on August 27. The Hanishina village settlement group suffered most. Out of 229 members who
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left their settlement, 199 died, ten were repatriated, and twenty children became orphans. In contrast, the larger Kosha village settlement group had only seven orphans out of the total 716 members. The comparison shows that the Kosha group “disposed of ” their infants by their own hands, whereas the Hanishina group did not. As a result, twenty children survived in this group. Moreover, none of the groups from the Hanishina settlement was registered as having committed suicide in the record, except one. This exceptional outcome was owed to their leader Ikeda. The irony was that only Ikeda committed harakiri, taking responsibility for failing to save the lives of his group. 31 Kwantung Army Abandons Farmer-Settlers The Mashan Incident and the Abandoned Sado Settlement Incident are only two of the countless cases of massacre by the Soviet Army and mass suicides by the Japanese farmer-settlers in Manchuria. The Kwantung Army ordered them to commit mass suicide, similar to the situation in the Battle of Okinawa of March-June 1945. Civilian mass suicide in Manchuria continued even after Japan’s surrender. The farmer-settlers were neither informed of the Soviet Army invasion nor of the end of the war. Dongan Station Incident What is most striking among the tragedies of the Japanese farmersettlers in Manchuria is the fact that the Kwantung Army withdrew in advance and abandoned them. While withdrawing to the Korean border, the Army positioned male farmers at the Soviet border through the last minute “uprooting conscription,” leaving the female settlers to fend for themselves. The Army did not even inform them of its withdrawal nor of the Soviet Army invasion. Moreover, the Army destroyed major bridges as it retreated, so that the Soviet Army could not cross them. The Kwantung Army thereby closed the escape routes for the Japanese evacuees. The Kwantung Army also bombed the Dongan station on August 10. The Army set fire to the explosives at the station, so that the Soviet Army could not use them. The explosives destroyed the evacuation train that had halted there carrying a full load of Japanese farmer- settlers. About 700–1,000 settlers aboard the train were killed.32
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Meanwhile, in Xinjing, the “official evacuation” to Tonghua (where the Kwantung Army headquarters was relocated), leading to Pyongyang, began on August 11, in the order of the military families first, and the South Manchuria Railway personnel families next. For instance, seven military police officers in Xinjing were charged, by a special order of the Kwantung Army, to escort a repatriation train to Japan. Most of the 2,000 passengers were families of high-ranking officers of the Kwantung Army. The army officer in charge had an enormous amount of money. Upon arriving at Pusan (Busan) they purchased five fishing boats, and reached a port in Yamaguchi prefecture in early September. Meanwhile, the number of refugees in Xinjing reached 120,000. More than 31,000 died of malnutrition, typhoid fever, and then of extreme cold there during the winter.33 Death Toll at End of War The farmer-settlers had complete confidence in the Kwantung Army. They never imagined that it would abandon them and retreat. The mobilization of the farmer-settlers to the Soviet border deprived the settlements of self-defense capabilities, thereby increasing the settlers’ death toll. The oppressive Japanese rule in Manchuria, such as the imposition of forced labor service and compulsory supply of food, deepened the animosity of local Chinese toward the Kwantung Army. The Soviet Army invasion became a catalyst for the explosion of their hatred and reprisals against the Japanese. The Soviet Army, which did not hesitate to plunder, rape women, and kill infants, aroused the local Chinese. The anti-Japanese local factions, in collaboration with communists as well as rebels in the Manchukuo Army (examined below), also stirred up the local Chinese farmers and incited them into plundering the Japanese settlers. The Japanese women and children left behind in the settlements ended up being the prey of the Japanese policy to forcibly build up Manchukuo.34 According to official data, the total death toll of the Japanese civilians in Manchuria at the end of the war was estimated to be 176,000, out of which 78,500 were farmer-settlers. The farmer-settlers, who constituted 17.4 percent of the total Japanese population in Manchuria (270,000 farmer-settlers out of the total 1,550,000 civilians), accounted for 45 percent of the total death toll. It is also estimated that 11,520
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civilians died in action or committed suicide, most of whom were farmer-settlers. Another data estimated that the total death toll of the farmer-settlers and Youth Volunteer Corps members in the settlement villages was over 80,000, out of a total 270,000 population. Thus, combined with the death toll in the refugee camps, 30 percent of the total 270,000 farmer-settlers in Manchuria died.35 In contrast, it is estimated that about 46,700 Kwantung Army soldiers died in actions during the war, including the Nomonhan Incident, an armed conf lict between Japan and the Soviet Union over a disputed section at the Manchuria-Mongolian border in 1939. The Incident caused many casualties for the defeated Japanese. Actually, the lesserknown Manchukuo Army, created by Japan for the internal security of Manchukuo, fought the Battle of Nomonhan. The tragic fact remains that the death toll of the farmer-settlers in Manchuria was nearly twice that of the servicemen.36 Illusory Empire Created by Conspiracy The accounts above demonstrate how the Kwantung Army considered the Japanese farmer-settlers expendable. Noting that the Kwantung Army commander in chief also assumed the position of Japanese ambassador in Manchukuo, Ide stresses the fact that the Kwantung Army Commander in Chief General Yamada was absent from the capital Xinjing on the day the Soviet Army invaded, under the pretext of attending a military ceremony in Dalian. The absence of the person who was in charge of both defense and internal affairs in Manchukuo inevitably delayed necessary decisions and responses, leaving the 270,000 farmer-settlers vulnerable. The absence of the Kwantung Army commander in chief from the capital on the fateful day epitomized the decadent and hollow nature of the illusory empire created by conspiracy. Manchukuo had existed for only thirteen years. It then disappeared from the map for ever.37
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Background
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T H R E E
Ill-Fated Diaspora of Japanese Farmer-Settlers
The next major question is: How were the orphans created during the Soviet Army invasion of Manchuria in the final stage of the second Sino-Japanese War? This chapter documents what the Japanese farmersettlers had gone through when the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria, from the perspective of mothers, girls, and boys, thereby illustrating how the children were separated from their mothers and became “orphans.” Compelling stories have already been told by exceptionally courageous repatriates who “confessed” their unspeakable experiences, whereas most of the repatriates did not wish to recount the horrible past, and remained silent. Some of those who told their stories passed out during the interview, recalling the “living hell” they suffered. Most of them concealed their pasts also because repatriates from China were despised as “Chinese” in Japan. Those with whom this author sought interviews were suspicious of this researcher from the United States and were taken aback at the request. Many did not respond to the letters of request, possibly out of fear or suspicion (they had lived under one-party rule in China for four decades). Even volunteer groups for the orphans, let alone government officials, were suspicious of this researcher. In addition, the majority of the orphans were septuagenarians and some had already passed away, and most of the repatriated mothers and adult women were long gone. On the other hand, the younger orphans in their mid-sixties did not remember their evacuation journey, because they were babies or infants at that time. They also did not speak Japanese well. In comparison, their offspring spoke better Japanese, but their stories about their deceased parents were not as credible. None of those
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
who agreed to an interview responded to follow-up questions after this researcher’s return to the United States, either by mail or e-mail. For this reason, the following accounts are summaries of the narratives available in the Japanese literature, such as academic and commercially published books, memoirs, monthly journals, and newspaper articles, augmented by one interview by this author. They are introduced here for the first time in a book written in English. Inomata Masaru’s Mother Inomata Masaru was born in Kashiwazaki, Niigata prefecture, in 1935. His family settled in the northeastern hinterland, 125 miles from Jiamusi in Sanjiang province, in April 1945. They were charged with creating the Kashiwazaki branch village of 200 households. His father was recruited into the “uprooting conscription.” With the Soviet Army invasion, his mother joined the “hundreds- of-miles death march” to Harbin, with eight children. They wandered around in the wilderness for weeks. Having no food to feed her children, she decided to sell the underwear shirt she was wearing, though winter was fast approaching. She stopped each Chinese passerby and shouted “trade, trade.” She told a Chinese farmer that the shirt was pure cotton, and tried to trade it for twenty eggs. The Chinese grabbed her shirt and left thirteen eggs. The weak children could not digest eggs. In desperation, she called her husband’s name to the sky. She lost three of her younger children (ages two, four, and six) in October. She felt that they would have survived had she fed them eggs earlier. She could not keep crying at her loss, because she still had five children to feed. She took the clothes off from her dead children, and traded them for food: Shinishi ko no koromo hagitori kuri to kau Sanzu no kawa no kijo kamo ware wa (Taking the clothes off of my dead children, and trading them for chestnuts, am I a demon at the Gate of Hell?).1 With the arrival of winter, other settlers’ children died one by one, and mothers were in a state of shock. The Chinese approached these “mentally-lost” mothers to buy children. The market price was ¥30 per child. In late December, Inomata’s mother fell ill, but the family survived the winter. The following spring, they still had to walk 200 miles from Tonghe to Harbin on melting ice. They had to walk twenty miles
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a day. The settlers were fighting hunger and cold, as well as egotism and jealousy of fellow settlers. Thinking that her two younger children could not make the journey to Harbin, Inomata’s mother asked a Chinese woman to take care of Inomata (ten years old), who had been shot in the left leg by the Soviet Army, and his younger sister (eight years old) at Tonghe. His mother and his older siblings managed to reach a refugee camp in Harbin in May 1946, only to die there, except for the eldest brother. Inomata and his sister were thus orphaned.2 Endo Mitsuo’s Mother Endo Mitsuo was born in the northern Heihe province near the Amur River in May 1944. His father, a solider, was stationed with the border defense. He was being transferred to the Philippines in May 1945 (it was a military secret and he did not tell his wife where he was going). He fell ill on the way and was sent to Cheju ( Jeju) Island at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, instead. The dispatch of the Kwantung Army to the southern front created a “vacuum” in the northern border defense and left the Kwantung Army’s families, such as Endo’s, defenseless. These army families were transferred to Harbin in May and stayed at government housing vacated by the Army. On August 9, the Soviet Army crossed the Amur River and occupied Harbin within days. The Japanese military families were taken to a refugee camp. Endo’s mother was pregnant at the time. Before leaving, Endo’s father had asked his wife to name their baby Mutsuko if it was a girl. Mutsuko was born in December 1945. She was very weak. Endo’s mother went out to sell sweet cakes on the street in the subzero temperature to earn the day’s food, carrying her baby on her back and pulling Endo’s hand. Although the baby survived the winter, she suffered from the intense heat the following summer and was in a critical condition.3 Then the rumor spread that a repatriation train would run from Harbin. It was to depart in August 1946. People told Endo’s mother that the baby would die during the journey. If she wanted to get on the train, she should “dispose of ” the baby. Endo’s mother decided to give up the train and stay in Harbin until the baby gets better. As if she understood her mother’s decision, Mutsuko died that night. His mother sold her last kimono ( Japanese traditional clothes) and cremated the baby. Endo and his mother then were repatriated, with the baby’s remains. This was the story Endo’s mother told him when he grew up.
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
He did not even know that he had a younger sister who died in Harbin. There was not a single picture of her. The only proof that she had ever existed was her bones and ashes. His father had never met his daughter. His father and his sister rest in the same graveyard in his hometown. His mother told him that Mutsuko died to save their lives. She could not have made the journey back to Japan with two infants. Endo realized that he could easily have been one of the orphans left behind in China.4 Takayama Sumiko Takayama Sumiko settled in the Kosha village in Baoqing prefecture in Dongan province. On the morning of August 9, she noticed that more than the usual number of bombers were f lying low in the sky. She did not know what it meant. The Kwantung Army did not issue evacuation orders to the settlers. Uninformed settlers did not anticipate the Soviet Army’s attack. They thought that the bombers were the American Army’s. All the men had been conscripted, and the 500 remaining settlers were left defenseless. They began an evacuation journey that night. Takayama had two children, and was also pregnant. The local Chinese attacked her group many times during the journey. When they rested, she noticed that her sister-in-law’s baby was dead, hanging down from the neck. Another woman suddenly went into labor out of fear and had a baby. She immediately cut the baby’s throat, because the baby’s cry would interfere with their evacuation. When they arrived at a military post, it was empty. Takayama found caramel candies left by the Japanese soldiers, and gave them to her children. They had never eaten caramel candies before. As there were no soldiers to protect them, the leader suggested to them to commit mass suicide. Those who wished to continue evacuation could do so on their own. The leader shot his child and wife, and took the lead in the mass suicide. Looking at the happy faces of her children eating the caramels, Takayama decided to continue the evacuation journey.5 Takayama’s group arrived at the abandoned Sado settlement in Boli prefecture on August 25. The village was already surrounded by the Soviet Army, and was also crowded with evacuees from other settlements. Takayama’s children were starved and exhausted. They had eaten only plant buds for half a month. She made up her mind and asked a fellow male settler to assist her in committing suicide. She took her children into an empty stable and sat down. She told her children to pray,
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so that they could become Nono-sama (meaning Buddha in Shinshu dialect, present Nagano), and then they could eat white rice. Her children asked if they could eat caramels, too, if they become Nono-sama. She answered that they could eat anything they liked as much as they liked. They closed their eyes and prayed. She heard two gunshots. Next was her turn, but she did not hear the third shot. When she turned back, her fellow settler had just been shot by a Soviet Army tank from a distance. She missed the chance to die with her children.6 Escaping the frenzy of mass suicide, Takayama continued the evacuation journey in the darkness with fewer members. They heard that Mudanjiang was to the southwest. They hid in a maize field in the day, memorized the direction of the sunset, and walked in the night toward that direction. She had a miscarriage on the way. One of her fellow settlers had one bullet left with him. He told her that he could shoot her to relieve her of her misery, if she wanted. She declined. She was not afraid of dying, but she decided to live in order to pray for her dead children. Afterward, whenever she saw Russian soldiers, she pretended to be dead in the field or hid in a sewer tank. Her soles were ripped, but she continued to walk to Mudanjiang. She survived and returned to Japan in 1947. She was then twenty-two years old. She became one of the few survivors from the Kosha village. Her life of mourning for her dead children and of atoning for her guilt feelings began.7 Eight-Year- Old Girl Yamada Yoshimi Yamada Yoshimi was eight years old when the Soviet Army invaded Heihe across Blagoveshchensk (the capital of Amur oblast). Her father was a police officer there. He made sure that his wife and four children evacuated after hearing about the invasion. However, the Soviet Army attacked their evacuation train and plundered everything. Yamada’s group then walked toward the capital Xinjing, more than 600 hundred miles away. They walked in the wilderness, so they would not to be found by the Soviet Army or the Manchurians. The number of the evacuees from all groups mushroomed to several thousands. All the evacuees were women, children, and elderly people. Some had no clothes, as they were looted by the local mobs. Yamada’s mother carried a baby on her back and pulled along a younger sister by her hand. Yamada walked with her younger brother. Every morning she saw children and elderly people who did not wake up from their sleep. She also saw many mothers leaving the line quietly, putting down infants
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from their backs and strangling them. While watching these scenes, she thought that her mother also might kill her some day. Yet, she was not scared at the thought, because it seemed a natural thing to happen. Yamada’s family arrived at Xinjing more than a month later. There, her mother and two sisters died. Yamada and her brother were orphaned. Child trade and abduction occurred daily in the capital. Chinese brokers came to her many times to buy her brother. She held her brother’s hand tightly even while they were asleep. They survived the winter of 1945 and were repatriated in 1946 (see photograph 8. Yamada and her brother might have looked like the children in the picture).8 Five-Year- Old Girl Tanaka Toshiko Tanaka Toshiko, age five, witnessed her mother, her younger siblings, and the rest of her fellow settlers shot by Japanese soldiers in front of her eyes just before the Soviet Army invasion. Her mother and the children had left Baichengzi in Longjiang province, near Mongolia. They slept in the fields with other evacuees. The Japanese soldiers escorted the settlers and were at the front of the evacuation line. However, at night, the soldiers suddenly began summary shooting of the evacuees. The rest of her memories have faded away over a period of six decades, but Tanaka still vividly recalled the scene of the shooting. She remained alive among the piles of dead bodies. Thinking that all the settlers were dead, the Japanese soldiers left in a hurry. She lay on the ground unconscious. When she regained consciousness, she could not understand why the Japanese soldiers shot the Japanese settlers. Only decades later did she figure out that the soldiers shot them because the women and children were in the way of their repatriation. The Russian soldiers came by while she was crying by her mother’s body. They took her in a truck, stopped at a nearby village, and asked a Chinese villager to look after her, in sign language. The Chinese man became her foster father.9 Sixteen-Year- Old Girl Suzuki Noriko Suzuki Noriko’s family from Tokyo settled in the wilderness in western Xingannan province, near Mongolia, in July 1943, when she was fourteen years old. Suzuki became a substitute teacher at a local Japanese school. Her father died of overwork in December 1943. Her mother followed him in October 1944. Her two elder sisters were married in
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Manchuria, and Suzuki lived with her two younger sisters. One day, Suzuki visited the Chinese boy Wang, who worked at the Japanese school, to bring medicine to his sick mother. She was shocked to see their living conditions. His mother was tucked into a blanket in a room exposed to the cold wind. There was only one blanket in the house. Wang told her that the Japanese had taken their land and house. His father was taken to a forced labor camp and died there. That was why he had to work. Suzuki could not believe what he said. She had been told that gozoku kyowa (cooperation among five races) was the foundation of Manchukuo. She had believed that she had to work hard to build Manchukuo for the sake of peace in Asia.10 When the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria, Wang warned Suzuki that she would be killed if she f led with the settlers and that she would be safe if she stayed at Wang’s house. Nevertheless, Suzuki left the village with 600 settlers on August 12. They walked a whole day to the local Kwantung Army command post, but it was vacated. As the settlers entered into a building to rest, armed Chinese surrounded it, and began summary shooting and looting. About 200 people were killed on the spot. Without the protection of the Kwantung Army, they could go nowhere. Out of desperation, they decided to try to go to the capital Xinjing, several hundreds miles away. The elderly settlers wanted to go back to their settlement and die there. The young settlers’ unit, including Suzuki, took the elder members back to their village. There they found that the settlement had been burned down. The sick settlers who had remained had all been killed. Suzuki recalled Wang’s warning. The Japanese were uninvited guests in Manchuria.11 The young group caught up with the main group and headed for Xinjing. Enroute, Suzuki was shot by the Soviet Army and lost consciousness. When she became conscious, she realized she could only limp, and not walk. Many settlers fell down in the intense heat and torrential showers. It was a “march of the dead.” The Chinese attacks continued, and some settlers took cyanide and died. Some others killed each other with swords. Some mothers left their children in the maize field, praying that they would live. Suzuki’s group was separated from the main group during the attacks. Later, she learned that the Soviet Army attacked the main group, and all of them died on August 25. Her group became lost each time they were attacked by the Chinese. One day she was beaten by the local Chinese, and she passed out. Her two elder sisters died. She collected food as soon as she was able to get up, in order to feed her younger siblings. When she was picking up corn, she smelled blood in the air. There was a bloodbath in the fields. Then she
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saw the Soviet Army trucks coming with a load of soldiers. As they got off the trucks, they stabbed their bayonets into the bodies in the fields to confirm that they were really dead. She covered her face with blood and crawled under the corpses. She simply could not tell what she saw to her fellow evacuees when she returned. Later, she learned that what she witnessed was the scene of the “Gegenmiao Incident,” in which the Soviet Army massacred 1,800 women and children who had taken refugee in the lamasery on August 14.12 Suzuki’s clothes and food were looted subsequently. She then covered herself with corn leaves. During the repeated attacks that went on, she was separated from the group again. As she hid in the maize field alone, a Soviet Army truck stopped by. Then Russian soldiers took a young Japanese woman into the truck and took her clothes off. Then she heard the woman’s screams. She was being subjected to gang rape. Then they threw her away on the road. Suzuki heard Russian female soldiers laughing in high-pitched tones at the woman. The truck then drove over her body and left. Suzuki continued to wander around the maize field until she lost consciousness. When she woke up, she was in the house of an old Chinese woman. Suzuki’s face was cleaned and her head was shaved. All the Chinese women in the village had their heads shaved and hid themselves at home. The old woman fed her and gave her clothes. Several days later, Suzuki was sold to a Chinese man.13 Five-Year- Old Boy Utsumi Tadashi Utsumi Tadashi was one of the survivors of the Hataho settlement group, which was involved in the Mashan Incident. He was five years old at the time, but the hellish scene had been deeply imprinted in his mind. When the central group decided to commit mass suicide, he was with his mother and his siblings. His mother was shot first. He and all his siblings were stabbed with a bayonet. He saw his two brothers die, splashing blood from their bodies. He was stabbed twice on his head, but he did not die (he still carries the scar from that stabbing on his head). His elder sister was stabbed in her belly, but she too did not die. Utsumi and his sister survived by stealing and eating vegetables from the fields. They slept hugging their mother’s body at night. His injured head began to suppurate, and all parts of his body were swollen due to mosquito bites. The buzzing sound of mosquitos haunts him to this day, reminding him of that mountain. He still has marks of the mosquito bites all over his body. His mother’s body began to decay and
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Seven-Year- Old Boy Beniya Torao Beniya Torao was one of the survivors of the Hanishina village settlement that was involved in the Abandoned Sado Settlement Incident. His settlement group had 395 people, but was reduced to 230 people after the “uprooting conscription.” There were less than twenty men left in the village. During the evacuation, the group reached the fallen bridge destroyed by the Kwantung Army. The water level in the river was rising due to the record rain of the summer of 1945. The only lifeline during crossing was a rope that they tied on both sides of the riverbank. They swam across one by one, holding on to the rope. Children rode on horseback. Those adults who could not swim waded across the river hanging on to the horse’s tail. When they arrived at the abandoned Sado settlement, Beniya was only seven years old, but the scenes of August 27 that he witnessed remained deeply engraved in his mind. He narrated his story in broken Japanese. He was with his mother and elder sister, hiding in a school classroom, while his father and two brothers were outside. The glass windows of the school shattered with explosions. He ran outside the building. There he saw two women asking a young man to shoot them before the Russians captured and raped them. The young man shot them both and then shot himself to death. Russian soldiers were shooting at everything alive. One soldier stabbed a bayonet onto Beniya’s shirt, and he fainted. When Beniya regained consciousness, the soldiers were burning all the settlement houses with evacuees inside them. The soldiers were barbecuing the horses, drinking, singing, and dancing. It was a “banquet of hell.”15 After the Russian soldiers left, Beniya searched for his mother in the pitch darkness. Then he noticed two girls from his village. One of the girl’s right arm was shot. They huddled together tightly to avoid the torrential rain, and spent a sleepless night. Four Chinese farmers came to collect the things from the site of the carnage early in the morning. They found the three children and took them to a village ten miles away. Beniya was taken to a farmer called Li, who had no children, but
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smell in the field. One day a Chinese man came by to take the things left in the Japanese Army’s dormitory, and found the children there. The Chinese man left and then came back and took Utsumi while his sister was out in the mountains. She has been missing since then. The Chinese man’s elder sister had only daughters and wanted to adopt him. She thus became his foster mother.14
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
he escaped from there the next morning. When he returned to the settlement two days later, the dying victims left lying there asked him for water; however, the well there was filled with children thrown in by Russian soldiers and women who threw themselves in. On the ground, burned bodies were lying everywhere. Then Beniya saw a young mother with a baby on her back. Three Russian soldiers caught her. She begged them to save her life for the sake of the baby. The soldiers raped her right beside the crying baby. Afterward, the soldiers cut her belly with a bayonet and left. Her eyes were wide open and her guts were splashed out. Beniya brought the baby to her bosom. That was the only thing he could do for the baby. Then he was captured by the Russian soldiers and taken to a house with other evacuees. He, however, managed to run away from there. Then he met one of the Chinese farmers who had rescued him earlier. Beniya was thus taken back to Li.16 Four-Year- Old Boy Tanaka Bunji Tanaka Bunji’s family was part of the Kurodai settlement in Mishan prefecture in Dongan province. With the Soviet Army invasion, about 500 settlers, out of a total of 790, died between August 9 and September 10. The settlers f led in the frenzy of the aftermath of the Dongan Station Incident. His father was carrying him, and his mother was carrying his sister, heading to Qitaihe, Boli prefecture, when the Soviet Army attacked them. Tanaka and his father were separated from his mother and sister. They have been missing ever since. His father walked into the mountains, carrying him, for days. They ate wild grasses, raw corn, and potatoes. When they arrived at a local station, a Chinese militia group found them. A Chinese farmer asked the group leader to spare Tanaka’s life, saying that the child was innocent. The leader agreed. Then Tanaka saw his father being stabbed to death with bayonets and sticks by many Chinese. He was orphaned. The scene of his father’s death haunted Tanaka. In addition to suffering from malnutrition and gastroenteritis, he became so deranged that he could not even clean up after himself. The Chinese farmer became his foster father.17 Eleven-Year- Old Boy Shima Kiyoshi Shima Kiyoshi’s family had settled in Yilan prefecture in Sanjiang province in October 1943, excluding his seventeen-year-old brother. His
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brother was conscripted in June 1943 when the government lowered the conscription age to seventeen. Neither the Kwantung Army nor the Manchuria Settlement Corporation had informed the settlers of the Soviet Army invasion. When his group arrived at the town of Yilan, a Kwantung Army engineer unit was stationed there to demolish the bridge, which was the sole route to Jiamusi. The head of the unit summoned the settlement leader and ordered him to have the settlers commit mass suicide. However, Shima’s father and his supporters told the leader that they did not mind dying themselves, but they should repatriate their children to Japan alive. The leader agreed, and the group continued their evacuation journey deep into the mountains. Then, they were caught by the Soviet Army in Fangzheng prefecture.18 Fangzheng was the point the refugees had to pass on their way to Harbin. The Soviet Army captured the evacuees there and took them to the abandoned settlement villages. The evacuees spent the winter there, and many of them died of starvation and extreme cold. The local Chinese looted the dead people’s clothes, and the frozen naked bodies looked like wax dolls. The survivors buried the dead bodies. As they buried them, more people died, so that they could no longer bury the dead bodies. More than 3,000 bodies were left exposed to the weather in Northeast China. Shima’s father died in February 1946 and his mother died in March.19 A Seventeen-Year- Old Boy There was a seventeen-year-old boy who moved to Mudanjiang, where his father was stationed. He was conscripted on the spot when the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria on August 9, 1945. He then was shot and lost consciousness, and later woke up in the house of a local Chinese who used to work for his father. The Chinese gave him medicine and food. However, the Soviet Army began to search for all Japanese who were in hiding. The boy did not want to be a cause of trouble for the Chinese family, so he surrendered to the Soviet Army. Because the boy was a minor, he was not taken to Siberia. He was instead taken to a refugee camp in Xinjing in September. There he witnessed Japanese mothers and children dying one by one because of hunger, typhoid fever, and then of severe cold in the winter. Older children were taking care of their younger siblings and helping out sick mothers. When mothers died, the surviving children became orphans. He felt helpless watching this tragedy everyday. He too was suffering from malnutrition and
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could not do anything for them. He spent five months in the refugee camp and was then repatriated to Japan in January 1946.20
Nagano prefecture had the largest number of farmer-settlers. Out of a total of 270,000 farmer-settlers (including the Youth Volunteer Corps members and the Young Women’s Volunteer Corps members), 33,741 settlers (12.5 percent) were from Nagano. This was more than 2.4 times the number from Yamagata prefecture, which was in second place. The number of victims was accordingly large among the settlers from Nagano. By 1983, a total of 17,698 had been repatriated (52 percent), 14,939 had died (44 percent), 884 had remained in China (2.6 percent), and 220 (0.7 percent) were missing. Thus, for Nagano prefecture alone, 884 settlers still remained in China in 1983. For the sake of estimating the total number of Japanese still remaining in China, in the absence of other credible data, it could be estimated that as many as 7,000 Japanese still remained in China in 1983 (based on the ratio of 12.5 percent of the Nagano prefecture settlers to the total Japanese settlers). This number includes the orphans and the women left behind in China.21 In summary, the Kwantung Army abandoned the Japanese farmersettlers. The Japanese Army’s mission was to defend Japan as a nation, not the Japanese civilians. While the male farmer- settlers were stationed at the Soviet border, facing certain death, their families went through a “living hell” during their monthlong evacuation journey. Some children survived because their mothers covered them with their bodies when they were shot. Some of the others survived because their mothers asked the local Chinese to look after them when they could no longer feed them, or left them out in the open fields, hoping that the local Chinese would adopt them. These were the extraordinary circumstances in which the Japanese children became separated from their mothers and became “orphans.”
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Farmer- Settlers from Nagano Prefecture
FOU R
Early Postwar Era: Repatriation of Japanese and International Politics
Considering the situation in Europe after the end of World War II, the repatriation of the Holocaust survivors was not as straightforward as the Allied Powers had hoped. Many of them could not go back because their erstwhile communities had been destroyed, while others were afraid to go back for fear of persecution (pogroms). In October 1945, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) took over from the military forces the task of administering displaced persons in Europe. It transferred 250,000 Holocaust survivors, along with non-Jewish refugees, into “displaced persons (DP) camps” in what was to become West Germany, Austria, Italy, and elsewhere. While they were unable or unwilling to return to their countries of origin, many western countries put restrictions on immigration. For instance, a 1945 poll showed that 72 percent of Americans disapproved of President Harry Truman’s proposal to allow more refugees from Europe into the United States. Letters written by Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, which were discovered in 2005, revealed his failed attempts to emigrate to the United States in 1941. They also indicate the American sentiment and stance toward the victims of the Nazis in Europe at that time. Children today would not read Anne’s diary had the U.S. government issued a visa to the family.1 As an update on the fate of Anne Frank, who would have been 79 years old, turning 80 in 2009, the Anne Frank Center USA planned to distribute saplings from the horse chestnut tree standing behind the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Anne described the tree in her diary as late as in May 1944, three months before she
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CH A P T E R
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was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The “Anne Frank Tree” has then been attacked by fungi. The Amsterdam city authorities planned to fell the ailing tree in 2007, which was met with international protests. Subsequently, the Anne Frank Center USA launched a campaign to distribute and plant ten saplings of the tree throughout the United States, including at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. The group hopes that the tree by which Anne measured the seasons of life during her two years of hiding will be passed down to future generations, as a “symbol of the growth of tolerance.”2 Plight of European Refugees in Early Postwar Years Going back to the situation in 1945, as a result of the restrictions on immigration in many western countries, the “British Mandate of Palestine” became the primary destination for the exodus of Jewish refugees. However, local Arabs opposed their immigration into the “British Mandate of Palestine,” and the British government rejected their immigration there. Also, many countries in the Soviet bloc did not allow the Jewish refugees to leave. Thus, former Jewish partisans in Poland organized an extensive underground movement to transfer Jews to the Mandate. It succeeded in emigrating 250,000 Jews to the region. By 1952, an additional 136,000 Jewish refugees had immigrated to the newly established Israel. In addition, the United States eventually allowed 400,000 displaced persons to enter, through patchwork legislation, and nearly 68,000 Holocaust survivors emigrated to the United States. Further, about 20,000 Jewish refugees moved to other places, including Canada and Australia. Consequently, the DP camps were closed by 1952, except for one that operated until 1957.3 Meanwhile, from 1945 to 1950 the Soviet Union expelled German nationals from the former German territories it had annexed. In addition, the East European countries that had been held by Nazi Germany, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, expelled ethnic Germans from areas east of the Oder Neisse Line and the Sudetenland. This massive “transfers” of German populations was undertaken for the purpose of “ethnic cleansing.” The western Allied Powers had sanctioned these transfers in the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. It is estimated that 12 to 16 million Germans were expelled or f led from these territories. The authorities forbade local people from feeding the expellees, notwithstanding the fact that the Potsdam Agreement stipulated that
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any transfers should be conducted in an “orderly and humane manner.” About two million of these expellees died of hunger, as well as of typhoid fever, violent plunder, and extreme cold during the expulsion. The Soviet Union also expelled several million Poles and Ukrainians from the Polish territories it had occupied.4 These expellees went through hellish conditions, similar to those the Japanese evacuees in Manchuria experienced in 1945 after the Soviet Army invasion. The discovery of documents at the Center for Jewish History in New York in 2008 indicates that the Holocaust survivors encountered another set of hardships, after what they had gone through in Europe, when they immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s. The U.S. government dealt with them with distrust. The welfare agency scrutinized their financial status. Those who did not have the desired level of self-sufficiency or political correctness faced deportation. However, there was also the case of a young family whose public assistance was cut when the agency discovered a “secret bank account,” which was actually a $138 loan from friends. When a nineteen-yearold immigrant told the agency staff that he wished to go to school because he had missed schooling during the war, he was told to forget such a dream. He was sent to work in a factory.5 The degree of scrutiny by the American government was no less rigorous than what the Japanese orphans were subjected to by their social welfare offices upon repatriation to Japan (see chapter 10). Afterward, the Jewish immigrants’ children in the United States concealed their origins, learned to speak English, and assimilated into the American way of life quickly. Meanwhile, their parents had a difficult time learning English and adjusting to a new society while working hard to make both ends meet. These children considered themselves to be genuine Americans and felt embarrassed about their parents, who could not speak English and did not behave like Americans. One boy avoided dating Jewish girls and married a blond Swedish woman. Another boy wanted to study law or art history, but his father would not pay for him to study such subjects. He instead studied medicine, because his father believed that a doctor’s job was “transferrable” anywhere.6 These young refugees’ lives in the United States had uncanny resemblances to those of the Japanese orphans in China. They concealed their Japanese origins, learned to speak Chinese, assimilated into Chinese society, and grew up as Chinese (see chapter 5). Then, between 1975 and 2000, the U.S. government accepted over 656,000 Vietnamese and 145,000 Cambodian refugees, who were the unfortunate byproducts of the Vietnam War. Survivors of the Vietnam
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War f led the war-ravaged country and became the “boat people.” Fortunate ones settled in third countries, including Canada and the United States. Cambodian refugees, who survived the series of civil wars involving the country’s entanglement in the Vietnam War, the systemic genocide by the Khmer Rouge, and the Vietnamese invasion, escaped the “killing fields” and crossed the Thai border. They were taken to refugee camps in Thailand organized by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Some of them were then admitted to third countries, such as Canada, France, and the United States. In contrast, the Bush administration in 2008 rejected Iraqi citizens who had risked their lives to help the U.S. war effort when they tried to move to the United States for fear of their lives.7 These records indicate, among many things, that the United States has employed a “half open door” policy at best. However, there is a crucial difference between the immigration of these displaced persons into the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, and the repatriation of Japanese from China. The countries that accepted the refugees in the former case were not their homelands. These governments had no obligation to receive refugees from other continents. In contrast, the orphans and adult women left behind in China were Japanese. The Japanese government had legal, political, and moral obligations to repatriate them expeditiously and assist their resettlement in Japan. Japanese Repatriation after World War II Shifting the focus to East Asia in 1945, Japan officially surrendered to the Allied Powers on September 2, and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) U.S. General Douglas MacArthur occupied Japan. In October 1945, the SCAP General Headquarters (GHQ) mandated the Ministry of Health with the task of expediting the repatriation of about 6.6 million Japanese (civilians and military) from the formerly Japanese-held territories, which had been done thus far by various ministries and agencies, without any central coordination. Accordingly, the Ministry created the Institute to Assist Repatriation in March 1946. As a result, repatriation of 1,010,000 Japanese from mainland China, Korea below the 38th parallel (416,000), Taiwan (322,000), Southeast Asia (655,000), and South Pacific Islands (104,000) was completed by the end of 1946.8 The repatriation of the Japanese from the Soviet-occupied territories, such as Korea above the 38th parallel and Sakhalin Island, was not as
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smooth. The Soviet Union planned to use the Japanese left in “North Korea” for construction of the Siberian railroad, and forcibly sent them to Siberia. Their repatriation (297,000) was, however, completed in July 1948. About 560,000–760,000 Japanese soldiers captured by the Soviet Army continued to be detained in Siberia (examined below). About 87,600 Japanese on Sakhalin Island evacuated to Hokkaido soon after the Soviet declaration of war against Japan. The Soviet Union then deported the remaining 278,000 Japanese civilians from Sakhalin Island by July 1949. Nevertheless, some Japanese and 43,000 Koreans were stranded there (see chapter 15).9 With these repatriations, the Ministry of Health considered its mandate for repatriation of Japanese overseas mostly complete. Accordingly, the Ministry integrated the Institute to Assist Repatriation with the Agency to Repatriate Veterans, creating the Agency to Assist Repatriation in May 1948. Thereafter, the Ministry abolished the Agency in March 1954 and replaced it with a smaller Repatriation Assistance Bureau. Nonetheless, as late as April 1959, the Ministry reported that a total of 31,132 (11,889 Army personnel, 604 Navy personnel, and 18,639 civilians) remained un-repatriated: 20,798 (6,363 Army personnel, 24 Navy personnel, and 14, 411 civilians) from China; 4,561 (4,103 Army personnel, 47 Navy personnel, and 411 civilians) from the Soviet Union; 2,802 (425 Army personnel, 492 Navy personnel, and 1,885 civilians) from Asia-Pacific Islands; 1,757 (914 Army personnel, 31 Navy personnel, and 812 civilians) from North Korea; and 1,214 (84 Army personnel, and 10 Navy personnel, and 1,120 civilians) from Sakhalin and Kuril Islands.10 Delayed Repatriation in Manchuria Meanwhile, repatriation of the Japanese civilians in Manchuria was delayed. Settlers in remote villages walked hundreds of miles to major cities, such as Harbin, Xinjing (Changchun), and Mukden (Shenyang), where they hoped to catch a train to Dalian at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula to sail to Japan. Those who made it to such cities were, however, taken into refugee camps controlled by the Soviet Army or the Chinese authorities. Looting and raping by the Soviet soldiers occurred daily in these cities. There the evacuees awaited news about the repatriation trains. Nevertheless, trains were not available for ordinary civilians. Many died of hunger, typhoid fever, and the extreme cold. Piles of dead bodies accumulated in the streets. These were unnecessary deaths
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that could have been avoided had the repatriation trains been made available before the winter. The survivors had to wait until May 1946 when the first evacuation trains became available for ordinary civilians. As the winter of 1945 was approaching, it was a common belief that infants younger than four years would not survive. Malnourished mothers could not nurse them. There was no food to feed them either. Abduction and trade in children were commonplace. In these refugee camps, more orphans were created.11 A question arises as to why the repatriation trains were not available to ordinary civilians until May 1946. The quick answer is that the Soviet Army had continued to occupy Manchuria until March 1946. Then, a full-scale civil war broke out in July 1946 between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Army and the Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) Army, putting the whole of China into turmoil. The Soviet Army also closed the Dalian port. There is however another reason for the delay in civilians’ repatriation. Greater East Asia Minister Togo Shigenori’s Directive On the same day that Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration (August 14, 1945), Greater East Asia Minister Togo Shigenori (who was also foreign minister), sent a secret directive to the consuls general in China and Southeast Asia. The directive informed them of the Japanese government decision to abandon early repatriation of residents in gaichi ( Japanese-held territories), and have civilians remain and settle in their locales after the war. The Japanese Home Ministry (Naimusho) that had jurisdiction over Korea, Taiwan, and Sakhalin also sent similar directives to those areas on August 19. The Potsdam Declaration only stipulated demobilization of the Japanese military and early repatriation of the military personnel. It did not mention civilians at all. Therefore, the Allied Powers did not have to assume any responsibility toward Japanese civilians, whereas the Japanese government was only concerned with preserving Japan as a nation.12 The Japanese government made this decision because of a serious food shortage in Japan, a shortage of housing due to destruction by U.S. air strikes, a shortage of ships, and the unavailability of ports due to the mines planted by the U.S. forces. The Japanese government even considered using these civilians as war reparations toward China and other Allied Powers, by offering their labor service to these countries. The government tried to negotiate the terms of war reparations
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and collective reparations of civilians with Chiang Kai-shek in strict secrecy.13
Subsequently, on August 19, 1945, Imperial General Headquarters (IGH) Operations Staff Lieutenant Colonel Asaeda Shigeharu f lew to Xinjing, as a special envoy of the IGH, and wrote a report on August 26. The Soviet Army seized the document, and the Japan National Detainees Association President Saito Rokuro found it in the Russia Archives in July 1993. The “Asaeda report” stipulated that the Kwantung Army should ensure that as many Japanese settlers as possible remain in Manchuria in anticipation of the restoration and reconstruction of the Japanese empire. It stated that the Japanese soldiers and civilians who would remain there could change their citizenship to Chinese or Russian. The report proposed that, except for the sick and those who wished to be repatriated, the Japanese residents in Manchuria should engage in steady jobs under the directives of the Soviet authorities. The report strangely estimated that only 300,000 residents wished to be repatriated to Japan, while there were 1,550,000 Japanese civilian residents in Manchuria.14 One of the Japanese who examined the “Asaeda report” noted that the number 300,000 conveniently corresponded to the number of the families of the military personnel and of the bureaucrats of the Kwantung Army, who the report declared had “no means of living in Manchuria.” In contrast, the report stated that 406,000 evacuees had arrived at the “safe area” in larger cities, and that they could continue to reside in Manchuria. The report ignored the fact that these refugees were dying of hunger and epidemics, and longed to be repatriated to Japan as soon as possible. Nevertheless, the Kwantung Army Chief of Staff Hata Hikosaburo approved the report.15 The writer Ide Magoroku considers that the IGH’s decision to abandon the farmer-settlers in Manchuria, as stipulated in the Asaeda report, was a primary cause for the delay of the civilians’ repatriation from Manchuria. It even did not care if they were naturalized as Chinese or Russians. Given the limited capacity of transportation (the Japanese government had to depend on the Allied Powers for arrangement of rail transport and ships), it appears that the Asaeda report arbitrarily limited the number of the repatriates to the families of the military and of the bureaucrats, coercing the farmer-settlers to remain in Manchuria.
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“The Asaeda Report”
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
Looking back after forty years, Asaeda, the author of the secret report, told Ide, “What the Japanese did in Manchuria was an act of burglary. The Chinese raised the children of the burglars who had robbed them. I feel guilty about the orphans left behind in China. Prime Minister Nakasone [Yasuhiro] must make every effort to help their repatriation and settlement.”16 In turn, the scholar Kato Kiyofumi argues that the Japanese policy toward Manchuria, envisioned in the Asaeda report, significantly affected international politics in Northeast Asia in the postwar period, as well as the repatriation of Koreans, Taiwanese, and Russians in the region. For instance, the division of Korea at the 38th parallel derived from the fact that the IGH changed the mandate of the Kwantung Army, directing it to abandon the defense of three quarters of Manchuria and charging it with the defense of Korea above the 38th parallel. Therefore, the repatriation trains of the Kwantung Army and their families headed to Pyongyang. As noted above, the repatriation of Korean residents from Soviet-held territories was delayed further because their homeland was divided.17 In addition, local officials of Manchukuo, including Emperor Pu Yi, were taken by the Soviet Army to Siberia, along with Japanese prisoners of war (POWs). They were later handed over to the CCP, and spent another period in prison in China. Some of them died in prison. The repatriation of the Taiwanese in Manchuria was also complicated because of the civil war between the CCP and the KMT. In addition, repatriation of Caucasian Russians and Chinese who had remained in Manchuria was also entangled with the complex international politics in the region.18 Farmer- Settlers in Aftermath of Soviet Invasion During evacuation, countless Japanese farmer- settlers were massacred or committed mass suicide. For instance, just the day after Asaeda wrote the report, more than 2,000 women and children were massacred by the Soviet Army in the Abandoned Sado Settlement Incident. Other settlements in remote regions were attacked by the non-Japanese members of the Manchukuo Army that turned against them, as well as by the Soviet Army and local Chinese mobs. The acts of retaliation on the part of the local Chinese mushroomed with the Soviet Army invasion. These were not the conditions under which the Japanese farmer-settlers could be naturalized, as envisaged in the Asaeda report.
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As late as September 17, about 500 settlers of the Mizuho settlement committed mass suicide, known as the “Mizuho Settlement Incident.” Nevertheless, the Kwantung Army adhered to the naturalization policy of the farmer-settlers, considering their repatriation impossible. It even requested Tokyo to borrow money for the naturalization expenses from the Soviet Union.19 Two days after Japan officially surrendered to the Soviet Union on September 3, Asaeda sent a secret telegram to the IGH. It reported that the gravity of the damage to the Japanese civilians was unspeakable, that most of them would starve or freeze to death in the near future, and that they should be repatriated expeditiously. However, it was too late. The Soviet Army had already demobilized the Kwantung Army. It detained the Kwantung Army’s high echelon staffs and sent them to Siberia. Asaeda was also captured on September 7. The Soviet Army requisitioned communication facilities in addition. Manchukuo lost its telecommunication means with Tokyo. In fact, Manchukuo did not exit any longer. Its capital Xinjing was renamed back to the original Changchun on September 1.20 In this void, the Japanese civilians in various parts of Manchuria created self-help organizations. The association to coordinate these selfhelp groups, the Northeast Region Liaison General Meeting to Save the Japanese (with Takasaki Tatsunosuke as president), sent a secret letter for help to the Japanese government on September 22. The letter arrived in Tokyo on October 10. It was too late. Japan had lost its sovereignty. It had no power to negotiate with foreign governments. Consequently, the surviving Japanese civilians in Manchuria were left in the “hellish environment,” as portrayed in Takasaki’s letter. Dressed in summer clothes, they faced death in the harsh winter that was approaching.21 International Politics and Repatriation of Japanese The Allied Powers’ priority was to demobilize the Japanese military and repatriate its soldiers. Both the Soviet Union and the United States were indifferent to repatriating Japanese civilians from Manchuria. In turn, both the KMT and the CCP wanted to use the Japanese labor forces, such as engineers and nurses. Moreover, the Soviet Army delayed withdrawal from Manchuria (the withdrawal was supposed to begin in November 1945) in order to transfer the industrial facilities and hardware materials of the South Manchuria Railway as war bounty. With the Cold War looming, the assets left by the Japanese in Manchuria
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were essential to the recovery of the Soviet Union heavily damaged by Germany. The industrial facilities in Manchuria were intact and useful, whereas those in Germany were damaged by war. For this very reason, the Soviet Union was indifferent to the repatriation of the Japanese. As soon as it completed the transfer of Japanese assets, the Soviet Army withdrew from Manchuria in March 1946. In turn, the first priority of the United States was to repatriate its own soldiers scattered all over the world. It had no spare ships to repatriate Japanese civilians. Thus, no authority existed that was willing to deal with the repatriation of Japanese civilians in Manchuria. The civilians were left at the mercy of international politics that was at play in the region.22 Then, a turning point came. President Harry Truman drastically changed U.S. policy toward China in December 1945. The new policy stipulated active support of the KMT regime, a ceasefire between the KMT and the CCP, and the early repatriation of Japanese POWs in China. The ceasefire and resumption of traffic in January 1946 enabled the KMT Army to move to the Northeast Region (formerly Manchuria). The change in the Truman administration’s policy toward China derived from its concern that the CCP might take over China, destabilizing East Asia. For this reason, the administration chose the “lesser evil” and tried to strengthen the political basis of the KMT.23 Further, as the repatriation of American soldiers was almost complete, the U.S. administration was ready to use its ships for military deployment for the KMT. However, there were still almost three million Japanese in China at that time: one million military personnel and 500,000 civilians in mainland China, over one million civilians in Manchuria, and 230,000 civilians in Dalian, as well as 330,000 in Taiwan. The Truman administration feared that if these Japanese continued to remain in China, the Japanese military would become mercenaries of either the KMT or the CCP, while the civilians would become economic refugees, jeopardizing Chinese society. Therefore, in order to promote U.S. national interests in East Asia, the Truman administration became a promoter of Japanese repatriation. In this context, the SCAP- GHQ instructed the Japanese Ministry of Health to expedite repatriation of the Japanese civilians. Thus began their repatriation from mainland China, Taiwan, and “South Korea.”24 Meanwhile, the Chinese government objected to the Truman administration’s policy to repatriate all the Japanese in China, because the KMT and the CCP recruited the Japanese into the workforce. Both claimed that the Japanese volunteered to work, contrary to the fact
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that they had commandeered the Japanese to work. The KMT’s use of Japanese labor was limited to engineers, and was brief. In contrast, the CCP recruited not only engineers but also nurses and medical assistants. It had them engaged in rear area operations of the civil war, which took them all over China (see chapter 7). The absence of diplomatic relations between communist China and Japan prolonged the forced labor of those left behind. Moreover, while the Soviet Army was disorganized, completely devoid of morale, and could not care less about indoctrinating the Japanese, the CCP systematically gave the Japanese recruits “thought education.” These Japanese resented this and became staunchly anticommunist upon repatriation.25 Repatriation of Japanese Civilians in Manchuria The repatriation of the Japanese civilians from Manchuria was further delayed because this territory was held by the Soviet Union. Only after the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Manchuria in March 1946 did the KMT Army move en masse into Manchuria. The KMT Army took over Shenyang, designating it as the administrative center of the Northeast Region. It established the Northeast Security Commander in Chief Department’s Japanese Control Section in April 1946. The KMT Army issued a directive in May to the Japanese Liaison Office in Shenyang to repatriate all Japanese in Northeast China, in line with the Truman administration’s policy. The KMT Army and the U.S. Army reached an agreement on the arrangements for shipment. The first repatriation freight ship, with 2,400 Japanese in the Jinxi-Huludao District (west of the Liaodong peninsula) aboard, departed Huludao on May 7, heading for Sasebo port. The first repatriation train to Huludao departed Shenyang on May 15. Thus, the Japanese repatriation from Manchuria began due to the good offices of the KMT and the Truman administration. However, about 210,000–220,000 settlers did not survive until that spring and perished in Manchuria.26 From May to October 1946, as many as 1,010,022 Japanese were repatriated from Huludao: 773,263 from the territories occupied by the KMT Army and 236,759 from the territories occupied by the CCP Army. The repatriation continued despite the escalation of the civil war, and a total of 1,046,954 Japanese were repatriated during the KMT rule. In addition, the Soviet Army Command Department decided in October 1946 to repatriate the Japanese in Dalian, which was occupied by the Soviet Army and was administered by the CCP. Consequently,
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the repatriation of 225,000 Japanese from Dalian began in December 1946 and was completed in March 1947.27 Upon repatriation, U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC, a prototype of the CIA) personnel interviewed the repatriates at the local repatriation assistance offices in Hakata and Sasebo ports, to gather information on the Soviet Army and the CCP. The repatriates were “primary sources” of information for the U.S. government. The darkest aspect of the Japanese repatriation was that these local assistance offices examined repatriated women and systematically performed abortions. The Japanese government took special care to eliminate these “illegal pregnancies” and control venereal disease. Consequently, there were hardly any children fathered by the Soviet Army personnel and the local Chinese among the repatriates, despite the fact that countless Japanese women were raped by them.28 Meanwhile, an estimated 60,000 Japanese were left out from the repatriation. The plight of the survivors deep in the hinterland near the Soviet border was especially tragic. They were not aware of the repatriation notice and remained there until 1953, when repatriation resumed (examined below). Many of them remain there to this day. As Ide stated, it is important to note that the repatriation took place during a turbulent time when Japan had lost its sovereignty under the U.S. occupation and had no diplomatic relations with China, which was in the total chaos of the civil war. This suggests that the Japanese government could have repatriated all the survivors if it had wanted to do so. Nevertheless, it left them behind in China in recourse to the naturalization policy.29 Cold War and Cancellation of Collective Repatriation The Cold War intensified with the establishment of the divided Korean states in 1948, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the divided German states in 1949, followed by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The collective repatriation of the Japanese from China was thus cancelled. The last repatriation ship left Huludao in August 1948. In this Cold War structure, Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty with the Allied Powers, excluding the Soviet Union, the PRC, and other communist countries: the “partial peace” (tandoku kowa) as opposed to the “total peace” (zenmen kowa). Japan also concluded the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, in September 1951, and thereby regained independence in the framework of the “San
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Francisco system.” Japan then concluded a peace treaty with the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan on April 28, 1952, the day the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect. The ROC government under Chiang Kai- shek relinquished Japan’s war reparations toward China in the peace treaty.30 According to Ide, Japan then wrongly assumed that Japan’s war responsibilities toward China had ended, despite the fact that the sovereignty of China rested with the PRC in Beijing. In Ide’s opinion, this “partial peace” became the “crucifixion” for Japan, as this framework has distorted Japan’s politics and foreign policy ever since. In this false structure, Ide argues, the Yoshida cabinet (1946–1954) neglected the existence of 60,000 Japanese left behind in China. Ide might be too harsh on Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, because Japanese foreign policy options were dictated by the San Francisco system and were characterized as “dependent independence” or “subordinate independence.” During and after the U.S. occupation of Japan, no Japanese political leader could have chosen otherwise. Japanese policy toward China was caught in domestic politics as well as the foreign policies of Great Britain and the United States toward China. While many Japanese politicians personally entertained a desire for normalizing relations with the PRC, the Yoshida cabinet took an anti-PRC stance officially. Normalizing relations with the PRC was unfeasible insofar as the United States was at odds with the PRC (for the chronological correlations between Sino-Japanese relations and each cabinet’s policy toward the orphan issue, see table 1.1 in appendix).31 Prime Minister Yoshida began his diplomatic career as acting- consul in Mukden in 1907 (he was appointed to that position in Tianjin in 1906, but this appointment was rescinded). He became consul general in Tianjin in 1922 and then in Mukden in 1925. During the postwar occupation of Japan, Yoshida was reluctant to normalize relations with Chiang’s ROC. As noted by John W. Dower and Chalmers Johnson, Prime Minister Yoshida resisted the pressure of the Truman administration’s chief peace treaty negotiator, John Foster Dulles, to have Japan recognize the Taipei government. Although Yoshida built strong relations with the United States, he condoned two privatesector trade agreements with the PRC in 1952 and 1953 (examined below). In turn, SCAP carefully monitored Sino- Japanese trade transactions, to keep Japan from becoming too dependent on the PRC for its strategic food and raw materials. Japan had to wait for two decades, until the Sino-U.S. rapprochement, to establish its accord with the PRC.32
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
In the face of the stalemate in the Cold War, a few maverick Japanese politicians tried to establish a feeble link between Japan and the PRC. A bipartisan group of three members of the Japanese parliament, Kora Tomi (a member of the Ryokufu-kai, a moderate group of Independents in the House of Councillors [HC], the upper house), Miyakoshi Kisuke (a member of the House of Representatives [the HR] from the Progressive Party), and Hoashi Kei (then a former member of the HC from the Japan Socialist Party, who later became a member of the HR), visited Beijing via Moscow in May 1952. Kora was a vice-chair of the HC Special Committee for the Repatriation of the Overseas Japanese. Their visit was a diplomatic breakthrough. They had crossed the “iron curtain” and the “bamboo curtain” when international tension was at its highest. The news startled the Yoshida cabinet, but they had two important missions: to conclude the first Sino-Japanese private-sector trade agreement and to resume the repatriation of the Japanese left behind in China.33 Since the end of the war, the Japan Red Cross had been in charge of the postwar settlement tasks, such as the repatriation of POWs and investigations of the missing in action. With the escalation of the civil war in China, however, it lost its communication route to China. The International Red Cross (IRC) then acknowledged the PRC’s China Red Cross upon its establishment. In turn, the Japan Red Cross was allowed to send a representative to the IRC meeting for the first time in the postwar period in 1950. Because of these two factors, the representative of the Japan Red Cross, Shimazu Tadatsugu, met his PRC counterpart Li Dequan at the IRC meeting in Monte Carlo, Monaco, in the summer of 1950. Shimazu mentioned to her that over 300 Japanese nurses had not been repatriated from China. Li promised to investigate the plight of the Japanese left behind in China.34 In this context, Kora and two politicians met Li in Beijing in May 1952. The three parliamentarians also signed the first trade agreement with the PRC International Trade Promotion Committee. As Li had promised, the PRC government broadcast in December 1952 that there were about 30,000 Japanese residing in China under the protection of the government. There were also Japanese POWs who were awaiting trial. The PRC government also mentioned that it would assist Japanese repatriation in consultation with the China Red Cross, the Japan Red Cross, the Japan- China Friendship Association, and the Japan Peace Liaison Council.35
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Back in Tokyo, in order not to lose momentum, Kora organized a delegation to Beijing that comprised seven members, which included the representatives from the three private organizations that had connections with the PRC (mentioned above). However, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) refused to issue a visa to Kora. Foreign Minister Okazaki Katsuo stated in a press conference that they would not issue a visa to Kora because she had already violated the Passport Law in 1952. Okazaki also stated that Kora was not a member of any of the three private organizations that the China Red Cross had invited. He added that he did not think that China would refuse negotiations about the Japanese repatriation because of her absence. Then, Administrative Vice-Foreign Minister Okumura Katsuzo held another press conference. He stated that Kora had voluntarily resigned from the position of delegation head, which was contrary to the fact. Foreign Minister Okazaki stated the next day that the other six members of the delegation were willing to go to Beijing without Kora, which was again contrary to the truth. In the end, the Ministry issued Kora a visa on the day of the departure of the delegation, because all the other six members of the delegation refused to proceed without her.36 The trip produced the Agreement on the Issues Concerning Japanese Repatriation among the China Red Cross, the Japan Red Cross, the Japan-China Friendship Association, and the Japan Peace Liaison Council: the “Beijing Agreement” of March 1953. As a result, the collective repatriation of Japanese adults resumed in March 1953, and 26,000–27,000 adults sailed to Maizuru port. Nevertheless, nothing was mentioned in the agreement about the Japanese children left behind in China. The agreement considered these children as having become naturalized Chinese, because they were adopted by the local Chinese.37 Orphans Missed Collective Repatriation of 1953 Following the Beijing Agreement, the Chinese police visited the Japanese orphans, informed them of the repatriation plan, and strongly encouraged their repatriation. However, most of the orphans did not join the collective repatriation of 1953, because they did not know what to do. Some did not even know that they were Japanese until the police informed them about it. Most of their foster parents denied that their children were Japanese. Moreover, the orphans did not know their Japanese names and any of their Japanese kin, and did not know where to return to in Japan. They also felt that their repatriation would be a betrayal of their foster parents
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who had saved their lives and raised them. Therefore, they ended up missing the opportunity for repatriation. In retrospect, the orphans thought that if members of Japanese private organizations such as the Japan Red Cross, instead of the Chinese police, had visited them and arranged for their repatriation, they could have been repatriated in 1953. However, no Japanese organizations took such an initiative (see chapters 6 and 7).38 Meanwhile, in October 1953, a bipartisan Japanese delegation, made up of thirteen parliamentarians and twelve businessmen, led by Ikeda Masanosuke (an HR member from the Liberal Party) and Hoashi, as deputy head, signed the second Sino-Japanese private-sector trade agreement. In hindsight, the Yoshida cabinet’s public repudiation of the unofficial Japanese missions to the PRC might partly have been an act put up for the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Dower noted that Prime Minister Yoshida took an “obsequious” stance toward the U.S. administrations, while arguing domestically in favor of promoting Sino-Japanese economic relations. Yoshida spoke in “double tongue” for political reasons, because U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was not in favor of promoting Sino-Japanese trade relations (President Eisenhower was not much opposed to it, but his view remained a minority opinion). This was a highly sensitive political issue when the U.S. administrations dealt with East-West trade and the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) Lists.39 Sayuri Shimizu also mentioned that the Yoshida cabinet was “playing up to the Americans” when it publicly repudiated the first private-sector trade agreement, because the agreement was negligible in substance. It was a mere “written statement of intent to barter goods,” in the absence of a formal payments agreement and a serious dearth of foreign exchange in both countries. Its significance was largely in its symbolic value. Prime Minister Yoshida did not disclose in his memoirs the circumstances of these agreements. He wrote in 1963, however, that promoting contact with the PRC would be tantamount to playing the fool who would willingly disturb the international balance of power. Yet, he wrote in 1957 that the United States had not really come to understand China, and that almost all of the postwar U.S. policies toward China were failures.40 Tianjin Agreement and Temporary Homecoming of the Women Left Behind When the fifth Yoshida cabinet resigned en masse in December 1954, Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro (1954–1956, grandfather of Prime
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Minister Hatoyama Yukio) formulated a jishu (independent-minded) foreign policy and promoted trade relations with the PRC, sanctioning the third Sino-Japanese private-sector trade agreement in May 1955. While considering relations with the United States as the cardinal national policy for Japan, Hatoyama sought to reduce Japan’s economic and political dependence on the United States. In contrast to Yoshida who had adhered to the “subordinate independence” position, Hatoyama took a more straightforward approach, to the extent that the Eisenhower administration considered his initiative to be an outright defiance of the United States. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Hatoyama stopped short of making a commitment in writing to the third trade agreement (he only stated the words “support and cooperation”), because Japan’s admission to the United Nations, one of his major foreign policy goals, required the consent of the ROC, as well as of the other permanent members of the Security Council.41 The Hatoyama cabinet’s Economic Affairs Council (the prototype of the Economic Planning Agency) Director General Takasaki Tatsunosuke and Education Minister Matsumura Kenzo were the chief architects for establishing Japan’s semiofficial trade relations with the PRC. They laid the foundations for the so-called LT (the acronym for PRC International Trade Promotion Committee Chairman Liao Chengzhi and Takasaki) trade agreement, or the memorandum concerning Sino-Japanese long-term comprehensive trade, in 1962. The Hatoyama cabinet also concluded the “Tianjin Agreement” of June 1956 in order to facilitate the repatriation of the Japanese left behind in China. As a result, 1,368 Japanese, including 1,018 war criminals who were not accused, were repatriated in five installments. In addition, the Japanese women who had been married to Chinese were allowed to make temporary homecomings (see chapter 9). However, nothing was mentioned in the agreement on the Japanese children left behind, because it was followed up by the Beijing Agreement of 1953, which considered these children as naturalized in China. In total, 30,000– 35,000 Japanese were repatriated in twenty-one separate groups in the five years between March 1953 and May 1958, which included temporary homecomings.42 PRC National Flag Desecration Incident Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke (1957–1960), who revised the U.S.Japan Security Treaty to make it more reciprocal, in exchange for his
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“political life,” considered communist penetration into Japan by the Chinese more dangerous than that by the Soviets, and took a strong anti-PRC position. He unequivocally sought to strengthen Japan’s ties with the ROC and became the first postwar Japanese leader to visit Taipei in June 1957. Then, in May 1958, a Japanese dragged down a PRC national f lag at an exhibition of Chinese stamps and paper artwork, hosted by the Japan- China Friendship Association, at a department store in Nagasaki. The police arrested the man, but then they released him because the f lag was not damaged. The ROC government protested to the Kishi cabinet about the fact that the PRC national f lag was raised at the exhibition. In turn, the PRC government protested to the Kishi cabinet about the authorities’ heedless action of releasing the man.43 Prime Minister Kishi responded to the PRC Foreign Ministry’s protest by stating that the crime of the desecration of national f lags should be applied only between countries that acknowledged their sovereign status with each other. He stated that the PRC government had no right to criticize the incident because Japan had not recognized the PRC. Prime Minister Kishi declared that the PRC’s protest was intended to inf luence the Japanese political process, as the campaigns for the HR general elections had just begun. The exchange of harsh words between the two governments ended the positive relations, albeit limited, that had been built up unofficially between the two countries. It resulted in the cancellation of a large Japanese trade fair in Wuhan and of other new business deals, as well as in the deadlock of agreements on fishing and steel. The repatriation of the Japanese, which the PRC had agreed to despite the absence of official diplomatic relations, was also terminated.44 Kishi Cabinet’s “Wartime Death Decree” The worst scenario for the Japanese left behind in China ensued after the PRC National Flag Desecration Incident. The Kishi cabinet enacted the Special Measures Law Concerning the Un-Repatriated in March 1959, known as the “Wartime Death Decree.” The law declared those un-repatriated persons who “did not have sufficient information to prove their existence for the last seven years” to be regarded as dead. All the orphans and many of the women left behind fitted into this category. Accordingly, the Kishi cabinet in effect eliminated their domiciles, equivalent to birth certificates. The cabinet directed the
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local governments to rubber- stamp each missing settler’s registry record with the “wartime-death-decree” seal. It also coerced the families of the un-repatriated to eliminate their domiciles, by giving them an incentive of ¥30,000 (US$83) as a condolence payment. By this measure, the Kishi cabinet designated 11,473 un-repatriated persons (7,343 military personnel and 4,131 civilians [sic]) as “wartime dead.” This number corresponds to 37 percent of the total number of un-repatriates in April 1959. The subsequent cabinet further added 16,968 persons to this category between 1960 and 1964.45 Earlier in 1958, the Ministry of Health Repatriation Assistance Bureau Director General had stated that the Ministry estimated that there were about 6,000 Japanese left behind in China. He stated that they were mostly either women who were married to Chinese or children who were adopted by Chinese. He declared that both of these groups of people had virtually become Chinese, and that very few wanted to return to Japan. This is contrary to the fact that they were desperately longing for repatriation. The Kishi cabinet then conducted a special comprehensive survey of the un-repatriated at the end of 1958. The survey indicated that more than 20,000 Japanese had not been repatriated from China. Nevertheless, the cabinet issued the “Wartime Death Decree” and cancelled the search for the missing persons in the former Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. Yet, the Ministry claimed that the Special Measures Law “opened a way for families of the unrepatriated to declare their deaths,” as if it were doing a favor to these families. It was contrary to the fact that they were desperately hoping that those left behind were alive and could be repatriated. Subsequently, the Ministry changed the name of its Repatriation Assistance Bureau to simply the Assistance Bureau, in March 1959, and considered its repatriation work completed.46 Japanese Government Abandoned the Children Left Behind in China It is estimated that as many as 3,000 to 5,000 Japanese children were left behind in China at the end of World War II. However, the Japanese government did not recognize their existence, considering them to be naturalized Chinese. To put the number of the un-repatriated persons from Manchuria into perspective, there were about 1,550,000 Japanese civilians in Manchuria at the end of the war. Out of these, about 1,010,000 Japanese were repatriated from Huludao in 1946, due
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to an agreement between the KMT and U.S. military representatives. In addition, 225,000 people were repatriated directly from the Dalian port. Then, about 30,000–35,000 people were repatriated as a result of the Beijing Agreement of 1953 and the Tianjin Agreement of 1956. Subtracting these numbers leaves more than 280,000 Japanese who have not yet returned home. Mainichi shimbun reporter Endo Mitsuo states, “Did all of them die in Manchuria? The number is more than that of the victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The delays in the repatriation caused at least 210,000–220,000 deaths of Japanese civilians in Manchuria ‘after’ the war had ended. It is one of the worst tragedies for refugees in world history.”47 As the Japanese government ignored the orphans’ existence, the issue became “taboo” in Japan. Most of the Japanese people pretended that such an issue did not exist. Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato (1960–1964) stressed economic recovery (with the slogan of the “income-doubling plan”) and tried to salvage Sino-Japanese economic relations, which had hit bottom during the Kishi cabinet, through the efforts of politicians such as Takasaki and Matsumura. However, the Ikeda cabinet was also indifferent to those left behind in China, who were designated as “wartime dead” by the previous administration. Prime Minister Sato Eisaku (1964–1972) was Prime Minister Kishi’s birth brother. Prime Minister Sato, in the latter half of his administration, took as staunch an anti-PRC foreign policy as his elder brother, because his ultimate goal was the reversion of Okinawa. He needed the utmost cooperation of the Nixon administration to achieve this end, in exchange for Japan’s commitment to the security of South Korea and Taiwan. In the words of Ide, the Sato cabinet put the clock back and wasted seven precious years in terms of normalizing relations with China and searching for the orphans.48 Normalization of Sino-Japanese Diplomatic Relations No sooner had President Richard Nixon visited Beijing in February 1972 than Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei (1972–1974) normalized diplomatic relations with China in September 1972, through the Sino-Japanese Joint Declaration. Prime Minister Tanaka took a proactive stance toward China by unequivocally recognizing the Beijing government as the sole legitimate government of China, and considering Taiwan as an integral part of China. In contrast, the Nixon
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administration only acknowledged in the “Shanghai Communiqué” that it would not object to China’s claim to Taiwan being part of China: a “one China, but not now” formula, prescribed by career diplomat Morton Abramowitz. One scholar argues that the Nixon administration regarded Tanaka’s commitment to China as a de facto Sino-Japanese nonaggression pact, making Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger deeply distrustful of Tanaka. Thus, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai succeeded in creating a crevice in the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. In fact, U.S.- Japan relations subsequently deteriorated. Tanaka also promised a sizable economic aid to China, which was in effect war reparations to China, ushering in the practice of Japan’s massive overseas development aid (ODA) to that country. However, the Tanaka cabinet did not take any action to repatriate the orphans, because the Kishi cabinet had declared the case closed (see chapter 6).49 Repatriation of POWs in Siberia Meanwhile, 560,000–760,000 Japanese soldiers and last-minute farmersettler conscripts, who were taken by the Soviet Army to Siberia and engaged in forced labor, were repatriated by the end of 1956, except for those who had died of hunger and severe cold there. This was owed to the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration, which resumed their diplomatic relations that year. Such a diplomatic breakthrough was regarded as taboo by most. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Hatoyama took the initiative to repatriate the POWs detained in Siberia, as well as to gain Japan’s admission to the United Nations, at the cost of his “political life.” After signing the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration, Prime Minister Hatoyama resigned his post, instead of trying to hang on to power. Had it not been for his initiative, there is no telling whether and when the detainees would have been repatriated from Siberia.50 Prime Minister Hatoyama paid a price for his “independentminded” foreign policy. After him, no Japanese prime minister took such a foreign policy initiative. They essentially adhered to the “subordinate independence” position. Caught in the strained Sino-Japanese relations amidst the U.S.-Japan alliance in the Cold War framework, the Japanese government and its leaders ignored the Japanese orphans and women left behind in China. Thereafter, it became the official view of the Japanese government that the civil war in China and the
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absence of diplomatic relations with the PRC were the causes for the cancellation of the Japanese repatriation. As noted earlier, however, the Japanese government could have repatriated these orphans if it really wanted to do so. In this sense, the orphans are as much the victims of Japanese government policy, or the lack thereof, as they are victims of Sino-Japanese relations or the Cold War.
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F I V E
Plight of Orphans During Postwar Era
The Japanese orphans in Manchuria were traumatized by their experiences during the Soviet Army invasion, such as incurring near fatal injuries (being shot or stabbed by bayonets), witnessing group rape, massacres, and mass suicides, being separated from their parents, and becoming displaced persons in an enemy country. They survived the war only because local Chinese rescued and adopted them. They then grew up in China at a time when there were no diplomatic relations between China and Japan. Meanwhile, China waged a series of brutal ideological conf licts and political liquidation campaigns, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, resulting in an unprecedented death toll in human history. By the time the Japanese government began official search missions for the orphans’ kin in 1981, they had lived in China for several decades and had become middle-aged. What was it like to live as a Japanese orphan in China during the most turbulent period in Chinese modern history? This chapter gives summaries of the accounts of some of the survivors, from the Japanese literature, introduced for the first time in English. Most of the repatriates this author sought interviews with were either orphans who were afraid to talk, or their offspring whose stories were not as credible; therefore, one interview by this author has been included in this chapter. One-and-Half-Year- Old Girl A female orphan was separated from her parents in Jilin province when she was one-and-half-year old. She was taken in by a Chinese man who
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
was her father’s friend. Her foster father moved to a Chinese community in current North Korea. Her foster parents concealed her Japanese origin, but the rumor about it spread. She was bullied as “little Japan” in elementary school. Then her family moved back to Jilin province. There she married a Chinese who was an owner-chef of a Chinese restaurant. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, she was scared to death, as the Japanese were tried as foreign spies in front of the public (“people’s trials”), were dragged around the streets, and even executed. She lived a life of constant fear during the Revolution. When the Japanese government search missions for the orphans’ kin began in 1981, she started thinking about repatriation to Japan, because she did not want to again face a danger similar to the one she faced during the Cultural Revolution. However, her husband was reluctant to leave because his restaurant was prospering. She eventually convinced her husband and joined the supplementary search mission in 1990 (see chapter 6). She was repatriated to Japan along with her husband and son the following year.1 Five-Year- Old Girl Tanaka Toshiko Tanaka Toshiko, who had witnessed her family being murdered by the Japanese soldiers, was adopted by a Chinese farmer. The family moved to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and then to Tongliao in Inner Mongolia to escape persecution for raising a Japanese girl. Nevertheless, her foster father was accused of being pro-Japanese and was tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution. She studied hard, obtained a teacher’s certificate, and became an elementary school teacher in Tongliao. However, the authorities questioned her. She escaped persecution only because her pupils and their parents testified that she had done nothing wrong. She married a Chinese, raised three children, and had a stable life. There were no Japanese in the neighborhood, and she led a life as a Chinese. She was not very excited about the normalization of SinoJapanese relations, because she did not know anything about Japan.2 A policeman visited her in 1986 and asked Tanaka why she did not join the Japanese government search mission. She replied that her Japanese family died in China. Her own family was in China. The policeman told her that she should join the mission because she was Japanese. He said that just going to see Japan would not hurt. Tanaka joined the eleventh mission of June 1986. However, she could not locate any of her kin. Since February 1985, the Japanese government had
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allowed permanent repatriation of the unidentified orphans who had failed to find their kin through the search missions. However, it did not allow their married children to accompany them in their repatriation. Tanaka’s two children were already married, and she could take along only her younger son with her if she decided to return to Japan. She did not want her family to be separated, because she had led a lonely life as an orphan. She did not want her children to experience the same loneliness. However, as she grew older, her feelings toward Japan changed, as symbolized by the Chinese axiom, “a fallen leaf returns to its root.” Her longing for Japan grew stronger when her foster mother died and all of her children became independent. Her retirement life was guaranteed as she received 90 percent of her salary as a pension, but Tanaka decided to return to Japan.3 Three-Year- Old Girl Nakai Reiko Nakai Reiko’s (born circa 1942) earliest memory was that of a small theater hut where her foster father was giving a storytelling recital of ancient China’s Warring States period. After the performance, it was her job to collect admission fees. Her hands were frozen and she kept dropping the coins. Her foster father scolded her. His wife used to be a prostitute and could not have a child. He bought Nakai from an opium addict in Jilin province when she was about three years old. The neighborhood children called her “100 yuan,” because her foster father bought her for 100 yuan. Her foster parents did not tell her that she was a Japanese orphan and raised her as their own child. They were kind and let her go to school when she was eight years old. There was no compulsory education in China, and there was no required age for a child to begin elementary school. It was at the discretion of parents to decide whether or when a child would begin schooling. Upon graduating from middle school (equivalent to high school), she took a teacher’s qualifying exam and became an elementary school teacher.4 Nakai felt that she could finally be happy in her life. However, she was fired from her job in 1962. She thought that it was because of her foster father, who was a circus ringmaster then and was persecuted as a rightist opportunist in 1959. His salary was reduced in 1959, and he was fired during the Cultural Revolution. He was put on a “people’s trial,” and was dragged through the streets in town. At his deathbed in 1970, he told Nakai that she was a Japanese orphan and she should look for her kin. The revelation shocked her. The police department
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at the Jilin province confirmed this fact. Only then did she understand why she could not join the CCP Youth Pioneers and did not have any friends to play with at school. She had thought that it was because her foster father was a low-class performer and her foster mother used to be a prostitute. During the Cultural Revolution, Nakai was sent to a reeducation labor camp in a remote area. She was assigned to engage in construction and meat slaughter work. She was able to go back to teaching only in 1980. Her husband beat her, and she has marks on her face and body to prove it.5 Ten-Year- Old Girl Morita Eiko Morita Eiko was ten years old when a Chinese officer of the Manchukuo Army adopted her. He changed his name after the war to escape persecution for being pro-Japanese. However, he was found out and was shot to death by the Shenyang police as a “historical counterrevolutionary” in May 1950. Morita was labeled as the “historical counterrevolutionary’s daughter” and was deprived of fundamental human rights. Yet, she finished elementary and middle schools and began working at a pharmaceutical factory at the age of fifteen. Then she went to Beijing Chemical Engineering University in 1956, majoring in chemical analysis, but could not graduate until 1964. She did not attend school for four years because she suffered from a mental disorder, and even attempted to commit suicide because of the stigma attached to her. Morita married a Chinese in 1954 but was divorced in 1976. Her stigma became an impediment for the promotion of her husband, who was climbing the bureaucratic ladder of the Shenyang city administration. She raised three sons by working as a substitute chemistry teacher. Morita lived in infamy in China for four decades.6 Five-Year- Old Girl Sato Kyoko Sato Kyoko was five years old when the Soviet Army invaded the northern border town of Heihe across Blagoveshchensk. Her father was an army translator, f luent in Chinese, Korean, and Russian. Her mother was a doctor. The Soviet Army raped Japanese women and threw children into the river. Her mother asked her female Chinese friend to look after Sato and her brother. She then covered her face with mud and f led in the dark. Later, Sato heard that her mother was taken in a
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refugee camp and committed mass suicide with the others. Sato’s foster mother was a doctor of Chinese traditional medicine and ran a hospital in Harbin. She also had a branch office in Heihe. Her foster father was an atomic energy specialist and worked in Germany. They had two sons and a daughter.7 The Soviet Army inspected Chinese families to see if they were hiding Japanese children. Sato’s foster mother thought that if she suddenly had two more children, the Soviets would suspect the family. She therefore took Sato’s brother to Sato’s relative who worked at the South Manchuria Railway. Sato had never heard of him since then. Her foster mother hid Sato in the basement storage and had her younger sister look after Sato. They held their breath when the Russian soldiers came to inspect. Her foster mother occasionally let her go outside to get the sunlight. Once when she was playing outside with her foster mother’s daughter, the Soviet Army suddenly came. A barber living nearby had informed the Soviets that there were four children in that house. The Russian soldiers asked her foster mother why there were two girls. She held Sato tightly, and told them that she was her own child. The Russian soldiers then asked her if the other girl (her own daughter) was not her child. They grabbed her daughter, split her body into two from the legs, and threw her on the ground. Her intestines splashed out from her body. Sato had never forgotten the scene. Her foster mother lost her own daughter by protecting Sato.8 In order to save Sato’s life, her foster mother then sent her to her husband, who was living in Germany with a German woman and had two sons there. She asked her husband to raise Sato as his own daughter. Her foster mother’s sister took Sato to Germany via Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in the spring of 1946. Her foster father had studied in Japan and was kind to her, but she could not understand German and wanted to go back to China. Her foster mother wrote to her not to come back to China until China and Japan normalize diplomatic relations. With the outbreak of the Korean War, her foster father and his elder brother, who also lived in Germany, received orders to return to China. Her foster father was afraid of going back to China, but his brother decided to go back. Sato left Germany with this uncle’s family.9 On return to China, Sato lived in Beijing, went to the Shanghai Military Academy, and studied medicine. She was assigned to the Liberation Army Hospital in Beijing as a surgeon. She married a military doctor at the hospital and had two daughters. She also acquired a license to practice traditional Chinese medicine. Then the Cultural Revolution shattered her life. She was charged with being a Japanese
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spy and was detained. She was sent to the coldest part of China and was tortured there from 1966 to 1970. Sato was beaten and kicked. Her hands were pierced with red hot iron needles. She was then hung in the air with her fingers tied to the ceiling. Her feet were chained, and her legs festered. Her foster mother sold valuables, bought penicillin, and sent a doctor to the prison. There was a rumor that the prisoners were killed at midnight. Sato tried to escape at suppertime when her foot chains were removed. She climbed the wall to escape, but was caught. Sato was then sentenced to a twelve-year prison term and was put on handcuffs and shackles.10 Sato later heard that her Chinese husband was charged with being a spy, because he had married a Japanese, and was beaten to death. Her foster mother was also imprisoned because she was viewed as a bourgeois and had raised a Japanese child. Sato was released in 1978, but she has not been able to walk normally to this day. Her two daughters survived the Cultural Revolution because her housemaid had hid them in the countryside.11 Five-Year- Old Boy Utsumi Tadashi Utsumi Tadashi, the survivor of the Hataho settlement group that committed mass suicide in Mashan, was five years old when a Chinese farmer rescued him. Utsumi’s foster father washed his wounds with medicine every day. His foster father had chronic difficulty in walking. His foster mother had an illness in her eyes and could not work due to foot-binding (the Chinese tradition of binding women’s feet from childhood). As soon as Utsumi recovered from his injury, he was ordered to do household chores. He took cattle and pigs to the pasture to graze, fetched water, and cut logs. In winter he took cattle and horses to graze. But he had to walk many miles until he found grass to feed them. He had no shoes or socks and was barefooted. His feet were swollen with frostbite and kept bleeding. He warmed his feet by soaking them in cattle dung and urine. Yet, these were the easier chores he had to perform. In the ensuing spring, Utsumi took his foster parents’ cattle and pigs, as well as their neighbors’ livestock, to the pasture. It was dangerous to take the livestock to the forested hills. Wolves often killed children. However, he had to do all these chores and was not allowed to go to school. Utsumi stated, “I wanted to die, but I did not know how.”12 When Utsumi became ten years old, his foster parents let him go to school. They bought him a pair of cloth shoes for the first time.
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He woke up at three in the morning, released the cattle and pigs into the pasture, and then went to school. He could not resist falling asleep in the afternoon classes. After school, he collected the cattle and pigs and took care of them. At school, children called him “little Japan.” He persevered through the bullying and graduated from elementary school. Utsumi passed the entrance exam for the middle school, but he soon quit school in order to help with his foster parents’ household chores. He then began working at an electric factory; however, the factory workers discovered that he was Japanese and called him “Japanese demon.” The Cultural Revolution made things worse for Utsumi. He was transferred to a farm and drove a tractor for fourteen years until 1980.13 Seven-Year- Old Boy Beniya Torao Beniya Torao, the survivor of the Hanishina settlement in the Abandoned Sado Settlement Incident, was seven years old when a childless Chinese family named Li adopted him. His foster mother used to work in the rice field of a Japanese farmer, who was kind to her. His foster parents were good to him, but the villagers were not. They called him “little Japan” and “Japanese demon,” but he could not talk back to them in Chinese. His parents then moved to a nearby village in May 1946. However, people soon found out that Beniya was Japanese and called him names. His foster parents let him go to school, but he had to also help his foster parents. He took cattle, horses, and pigs to graze in the fields and worked on the farm before breakfast, and then he went to school. There was no fifth grade class in his village school, so he went to a school in a neighboring village from the fifth grade. Older students in that school beat him, held him upside down in the air, urinated in his mouth, and put their feces into his mouth. Beniya could not understand why he was a little Japanese demon. He despaired for his life.14 Beniya gradually forgot Japanese. He even forgot his name, except for the first character, beni (red). When he was thirteen, he could not bear his life any longer. He wanted to go back to Japan and ran away from his foster home. He wandered around the mountains and was chased by a wolf. He was not scared because he did not mind dying. After one month of wandering in the forest, his foster mother’s sister and her husband found him and took him back to his foster parents’ house. He did not run away again because he did not know how to
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return to Japan. He went to a middle school, then went to a veterinary training school in Jiamusi, and became a veterinarian for the Boli prefectural government in 1961. When he was making a house call in a village in 1962, he saw Zhang, one of the four Chinese who had rescued him at the Abandoned Sado settlement in 1945. He took Beniya to a Japanese woman. She was one of two girls who survived the massacre with Beniya seventeen years earlier. She called him “Tora- chan.” She remembered his full name.15 Beniya then became a veterinarian for a military horse stable in Harbin. However, after the workers’ background check was conducted, his supervisor told Beniya that he should go back to the countryside, because he was Japanese. Back in Boli, Beniya befriended Gao, who used to work as a train operator for the Japanese. In 1966, Beniya and Gao were attacked at the “people’s trials.” They were made to wear triangular hats labeled with the words “Japanese demon,” and were dragged around the streets until late at night. This persecution lasted for five years until Gao committed suicide. Beniya also thought of committing suicide, but he abandoned the idea because he wanted to go back to Japan. He was fired from his job and was sent to a labor reform camp in the mountains. Beniya’s children were also bullied as Japanese. Beniya had persevered through these ordeals hoping that the day of repatriation would eventually come.16 Four-Year- Old Boy Tanaka Bunji Tanaka Bunji, who witnessed his father being brutally murdered, was rescued by a Chinese farmer. His foster father was kind, but his foster mother disliked him, did not feed him, and beat him, because he was mentally and physically disturbed. One day, while his foster father was away, his foster mother took him to an older childless couple in a nearby village in Linkou prefecture and sold him. His second foster parents barely made a living by selling snacks. Since they had no children, they were happy to adopt him and gave him medicine and food. He went to elementary school in 1949. Although he was called “little Japan” in the neighborhood, he was not bullied at school. He studied hard and received a red scarf, the symbol of the CCP Youth Pioneers. He did household chores as much as he could to help his foster parents. He picked up leftover coke from the coal dumpsite at the train station after school hours and on Sundays and traded it for cash or food in town.17
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Tanaka became a champion track runner and won both the 400meter and 800-meter races at the Heilongjiang province competition. He went on to middle school and to Harbin Physical Education University. He became a PE teacher in Mudanjiang and tried to repay his debt of gratitude to his foster parents. He married a Chinese in 1962 and led a happy life. However, his foster mother died three years later and his foster father’s death soon followed. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a reeducation camp in a remote hinterland for two years, studying anti-Liu Shaoqi and anti-Deng Xiaoping doctrine. He was then sent to a labor reform camp and worked as a storage guard for eight years. After Tanaka had spent ten years wasting time, he was given back his position as a PE school assistant principal in 1976. He was admitted to the CCP and was promoted to vice-principal and then to principle in 1984. A Japanese novelist Yamazaki Toyoko interviewed Tanaka in 1985 because Tanaka’s career was exceptional for a Japanese orphan. Tanaka told Yamazaki, “Although I have Japanese blood, the Chinese people gave me a second life by giving me their ‘blood.’ Therefore I am the child of the earth of China.” This interview became an inspiration, and it resulted in Yamazaki’s bestseller Daichi no ko (“Children of the Good Earth,” echoing Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth).18 Eleven-Year- Old Boy Shima Kiyoshi Shima Kiyoshi lost his parents in a refugee camp in Fangzheng. He could not speak Chinese. He did not know how to live. Only his parents’ wish that he return to Japan alive kept him going. He walked in the direction of Harbin, 125 miles away, but he was taken into a refugee camp in Juhe prefecture. He survived alone without being adopted through helping an oil vendor and a tofu vendor in town. He also went to a night school. He missed the repatriation in August 1946. Shima kept his Japanese name because he was not adopted by any Chinese and fended for himself. He endured in silence the cursing and bullying by the Chinese people. He moved to Harbin and went to a medical school attached to the Public Health Department. Upon graduation, he immersed himself in his work as a traveling doctor, visiting villages. Nevertheless, the sense of alienation did not leave him. Shima then married a Chinese and obtained a doctor’s license. However, his longing for returning to his homeland remained unchanged.19
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
Shinoda Kinji settled in Dabalang, Huachuan prefecture in Sanjiang province, in April 1940 with his family of five (parents, grandmother, and younger brother) from Yasuoka village, Nagano prefecture (see photographs 3, 5, and 7). His settlement group was charged with creating Yasuoka branch village there. Shinoda and his father were suddenly conscripted on August 9, 1945, the day of the Soviet Army invasion. His family was shocked to learn that the conscription age had been lowered to seventeen. Shinoda had just turned seventeen years twentyfive days ago. Then Shinoda and his father were captured by the Soviet Army and were sent to Blagoveshchensk. Shinoda was then sent back alone to the border town of Heihe because he was a minor. He wandered around and reached the coalmine town of Hegang. He saw the Red Guards indoctrinating local people through anti-Japanese songs teaching them to remember September 18, the date of the Manchurian Incident in 1931. He also witnessed the “people’s trials,” in which “reactionaries” were dragged around the streets wearing a long white hat. They were accused of being counterrevolutionaries and puppets of Japanese imperialism.20 Shinoda was repatriated in 1953 at the age of twenty-five. Although he already knew that his mother, grandmother, and younger brother had died, he decided to return because he hoped that his father might be alive. However, he learned upon repatriation that his father had died in Siberia. In hindsight, Shinoda questioned why his father was attracted to the idea of settling in Manchuria, which resulted in the loss of the entire family, except for one. Before settling in Manchuria, he had helped with his family’s business of delivering newspapers when his father was conscripted and was sent to China from 1937 to 1939. It was strenuous work to do in the mountain village, going up and down steep hills repeatedly under the Morning Star and Evening Star (Venus). Shinoda missed the school field trip in the sixth grade because of his work. His father told him that he could make a grand field trip to Manchuria, travelling by train and ship, instead. Shinoda was sad to be separated from his friends. He packed his school supplies and toys to give to children in Manchuria so that he could make new friends there. However, his “grand field trip” turned out to be a trip to hell.21 Shinoda’s grandmother was missing at the time of the departure to Manchuria in 1940. She did not want to go to Manchuria and had cried for many days. It turned out that she had gone to a nearby temple to collect soil to take along with her to Manchuria, because she felt that
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she might not come back to Japan alive. Women in the village were reluctant to go to Manchuria. To the last minute, older women were specifically opposed to going. Therefore, the Ministry of Colonial Affairs and Nagano prefecture officials paid special emphasis to the task of persuading women in their effort to recruit farmer-settlers. The village women’s instincts proved correct, as most of the women from Yasuoka village perished in the frozen earth in Manchuria several years later.22 Reasons Why Chinese Adopted Enemy Country’s Children The accounts of some of the Japanese orphans indicate that they had a new lease of life because local Chinese rescued and raised them as their own children. A big question then remains: Why did the Chinese adopt the children of their enemies? To borrow Asaeda Shigeharu’s analogy, why did they raise the children of the burglars who had robbed them? Those who were familiar with the situation at that time noted that it was a popular trend among childless Chinese couples to adopt Japanese children. The local brokers involved in child trade knew that Japanese children would sell well. Chinese families wanted Japanese children as workforce in the farmland. There was also a superstition in China that if they adopt a child, they will have a child of their own afterward. Curiously enough, many of the foster parents did have their own children after they adopted Japanese orphans, often several children per couple.23 Nevertheless, the thought that local Chinese farmers adopted Japanese children for their own interests does not fully explain their motivation in adopting these orphans. These children were very weak and many were on the verge of death. They had serious skin diseases, as well as gastroenteritis from malnutrition. Yet, local Chinese could not ignore the crying babies left on the streets nor the infants starving to death. They knew that these children would die unless they saved them. If they could not afford to take the children in by themselves, they looked for someone who could. Many foster parents fed the Japanese orphans first, because they were sick and weak, while feeding their own children only twice a day. While it is true that some foster parents abused these orphans (the orphans hesitate to talk ill of their foster parents because of their sense of indebtedness toward them), overall, foster parents took care of the orphans well, to the extent that some of them allowed the orphans to go college. In addition, although many local
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Chinese turned into mobs and plundered the Japanese settlers, there were many others who did not turn against them. In the words of a Chinese foster parent, “Japanese farmer-settlers were powerless farmers, just like us. They were not responsible for Japanese militarism. Besides, children were innocent and had nothing to do with the war.” It is interesting to consider whether the Japanese would have done the same for Chinese children, had they been in the opposite situation.24
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SI X
Initial Searches for Orphans: Volunteer Groups and Official Missions
The early postwar Japanese governments were indifferent to the existence of the Japanese orphans left behind in China, considering them to be naturalized Chinese. The Kishi cabinet ultimately designated them as “wartime dead,” burying their existence in the vault of history. Consequently, the succeeding cabinets ignored their existence altogether. Meanwhile, the orphans had endured discrimination and persecution in China, and longed to return to Japan, where they thought they would be free and safe. The more they suffered, the stronger their longing became. As soon as Sino-Japanese relations normalized in 1972, the orphans began writing to the newly opened Japanese embassy in Beijing, asking for information on their identities and birthparents. Nevertheless, the Japanese government was still reluctant to begin a search for the orphans, as Sino-Japanese relations were intertwined with the U.S.- China-Soviet strategic triangle. The process for concluding a Sino-Japanese peace treaty stumbled over the “hegemonic clause” issue, while Sino-U.S. rapprochement followed a less smooth path, as it was involved with the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It took six years for China and Japan to sign a peace treaty in August 1978, after they had normalized their diplomatic relations. It took seven years for China and the United States to establish their diplomatic relations in January 1979, after President Nixon’s visit to Beijing. Consequently, the orphan issue was sidelined during this period, and the Japanese government did not take any initiative to solve it. It was three years after the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty, and only after incessant pressures from the volunteer
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
Volunteer Searches for Orphans: Yamamoto Jisho Yamamoto Jisho joined the Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement Mission in May 1945, which turned out to be the last mission from his region. The group of 250 settlers was charged to develop a new village in Baoqing prefecture in Dongan province, at the eastern border by the Ussuri River. Yamamoto was to teach fifty-one children at the new public school in the village. However, just when they began to settle, the Soviet Army attacked the settlement. Yamamoto took all of his fifty-one pupils and wandered around the wilderness until the Soviet Army captured them. Yamamoto was sent to Siberia, released, and repatriated in 1948. Out of 250 settlers who left their hometown with Yamamoto, only thirteen came home. Out of his fifty-one pupils, only six returned. His wife and two daughters went missing. The repatriates did not want to talk about their missing family members in Manchuria. They said that all of them had died. Yamamoto chanted the sutra every day at the graves of the missing settlers and his pupils, who were designated as “wartime dead.”1 Nearly a quarter century later, in 1969, Yamamoto was called to the deathbed of one of the repatriates. The person confessed to Yamamoto that she had left her children with the local Chinese. Yamamoto went to Tokyo and requested that the Ministry of Health search for the children left behind in China. The Ministry rejected his request. It had already finished repatriation of war veterans and considered the government task of repatriating Japanese completed. In fact, the Repatriation Assistance Bureau no longer existed. It was given the ambiguous name of “Assistance Bureau” in 1959. The Ministry officials said, “The parents left their children in China of their own will. Why should the government search for the orphans?” Yamamoto persisted and visited the Ministry repeatedly.2 It was not until September 1972 when Prime Minister Tanaka visited Beijing that the Ministry’s attitude begin to change. Yamamoto also received a letter from China. It was a “letter from the dead” because
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organizations created to help the orphans in the absence of government initiatives, that the Japanese Ministry of Health organized official missions to search for the orphans’ kin in Japan in 1981 (see table 6.1 in appendix). Meanwhile, some Japanese challenged the taboo about the orphans and began their own searches for the orphans. A Buddhist priest, Yamamoto Jisho in Nagano prefecture, became the pioneer of such endeavors.
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the sender, Kosaka Yone, was designated as “wartime dead.” She had a grave in her hometown. Kosaka and her husband had joined the same settlement mission as Yamamoto in May 1945. Her husband was conscripted and was missing. A Chinese man rescued her. She married him and had four children, but she had never forgotten her hometown. She wanted to see her mother again just once before she died. She divorced her husband in order to come home. She begged for Yamamoto’s help. Yamamoto worked day and night, negotiating with the Chinese and Japanese governments to repatriate Kosaka. His efforts bore fruit and she came home in May 1973.3 Creation of Japan- China Friendship Bridge Society From these encounters, Yamamoto felt sure that some of the children left behind in China must be alive. In the absence of Japanese government initiative, Yamamoto established the Japan- China Friendship Bridge Society in June 1973 to search for these children. This was the beginning of private volunteer activities for the orphans. Suddenly, people all over Japan contacted Yamamoto, saying that they too had left their children in China. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Finance’s position was that it could not allocate a budget to search for “dead people.” Accordingly, the Society did everything on a volunteer basis. On August 15, 1974, the Society released the first of “The records of those who had been separated,” in collaboration with the newspaper, Asahi shimbun. This article ushered in the private searches for the orphans.4 The Japan- China Friendship Bridge Society expanded into a nationwide organization and sent its own search missions to China, in collaboration with the Asahi shimbun. They conducted sixteen search missions in total from August 1974 to January 1982. Stimulated by the pioneering work of Yamamoto, other similar volunteer groups were formed. Gunji Hiko, for instance, created the Japan-China Federation on Issues Concerning the Orphans in February 1976. Together, they exerted pressure on the Ministry of Health to initiate official searches for the orphans. Yamamoto also gained dependable helpers in his group. Chino Seiji was a member of the Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement Youth Volunteer Corps, and had gone through the same ordeals as the farmer-settlers. Chino became president of the Japan- China Friendship Bridge Society Tokyo Chapter. Chino later became vice president of another volunteer group, the National Council on Issues Concerning the Orphans Left Behind in China, established in November 1982.5
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Another great helper of Yamamoto was Takegawa Hideyuki. Takegawa himself was an orphan until 1975. Takegawa was severely injured in the head during the evacuation when he was twelve years old. Thinking that his injury was fatal, his parents left him on the Boli Road near Mudanjiang. Due to the shock and trauma, Takegawa lost all memories of the twelve years of his life. He even forgot his name. A Korean minister and his wife passed by and rescued him from the verge of death. The couple took him to their hometown in Seoul and raised him as their eldest son. Soon the Korean War broke out. Takegawa lost his foster father in the war. He was separated from his foster mother and his foster siblings during the air strikes. He became an orphan again at the age of sixteen. Takegawa then enlisted in the South Korean Army, but he could not stop thinking about his birthparents. He was smuggled in a ship to Japan in 1958.6 Although Takegawa returned to Japan, he was still an orphan because he did not know his identity. He was an illegal alien in his own country. He lived in Japan without citizenship for seventeen years. Then he met Yamamoto in 1975. Takegawa’s Shinshu accent (a dialect specific to Shinshu, present Nagano), which he barely remembered, became the clue to find his identity. He met his parents in October 1975 after thirty years of separation. Since then, Takegawa has devoted himself to helping the orphans. Takegawa became the president of the Japan-China Friendship Bridge Society Osaka Chapter, which opened in October 1976.7 Inomata Masaru: “Balkan Guerrilla Fighter” for the Orphans Inomata Masaru, whose mother left him and his younger sister in Tonghe, was ten years old when a poor butcher adopted him. A schoolteacher adopted his sister. He did not go to school at all in China. The Chinese police visited Inomata and informed him of the Japanese collective repatriation in 1953. He immediately went to see his sister and asked her to go back to Japan with him. However, she told him that their birthmother had abandoned them and that she had become a Chinese. Inomata alone joined the repatriation in July 1953. He was eighteen years old at the time. With the address his birthmother had left with him in 1945, Inomata came home in Kashiwazaki, in Niigata prefecture.8
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On return, he found that, out of ten family members, only his father (who was sent to Siberia), the eldest brother (who had been repatriated in October 1946), and he had come home. He wrote to his foster mother that he had returned to Japan safely. He did not know then that the letter did not reach her (she had moved to Harbin). Inomata could not find a stable job because he had forgotten Japanese. His left leg still hurt from a Soviet machine gun shot. He worked as a newspaper delivery boy first, changed jobs many times, and became a taxi driver in Tokyo.9 Inomata left Japan when he was in the fourth grade. Then he learned Chinese without attending school. He then had to relearn Japanese at the age of eighteen. It took five years for him to be able to speak Japanese again. The identity crisis and difficulty with the language made him a loner. When the first official search mission arrived in Tokyo in March 1981, Inomata drove to the Yoyogi Olympic Memorial Youth Center. His guilt feelings about leaving his sister in China had led him to the center, but she was not there. Then in August 1981 he read an article in the Asahi shimbun, “Wang Fucun, Have You Forgotten Me?” It was about a Chinese foster mother who was looking for her Japanese son. She was Inomata’s foster mother. Next day the newspaper carried a headline article, “I am the Boy Wang.”10 Inomata saved money and found an opportunity to visit China in 1982 (travel to China was restricted). He wanted to apologize to his foster mother, but he had forgotten Chinese. He was glad to learn that she had her own child after he had left, and was leading a peaceful life. Inomata also wanted to know what happened to his sister. His foster mother remembered the name of his sister’s foster father. The Chinese police found her whereabouts. She had died of pneumonia in 1956. Inomata could not help but think that had he forced her to return with him she might have been alive. Instead of his sister, however, many other orphans were waiting for him in Harbin. This trip became the catalyst for his devotion to helping repatriate the orphans. Inomata was a “lone wolf ” and helped the orphans without affiliating with any volunteer organizations. Thus, he was dubbed a “Balkan guerrilla fighter” for the orphans.11 Sugawara Kosuke: Military Police Officer’s Atonement Sugawara Kosuke, one of the military police officers who escorted the evacuation train of the Kwantung Army personnel’s families, immersed
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himself with work at the Asahi shimbun and forgot about his experiences in Manchuria. Sugawara went to Chinatown in Yokohama in 1978 to interview two Chinese students. In order to break the ice, he told them that he had lived in Manchukuo and remembered some Chinese words. Then, one of the students said to him, “There was no such nation as Manchukuo. It was a puppet state of Japan created by Japan’s invasion.” Sugawara replied, “I went there to farm, not to invade.” Then, the student said, “Settlement was an invasion. The land the Japanese settled in belonged to the Chinese.” All of a sudden, Sugawara remembered the words “My land” in Chinese. They were the words of Li who looked after him in the Hataho settlement in 1941. The student asked, “Why were the Japanese armed, just to farm?” Sugawara answered, “Because there were bandits who attacked the settlers.” The student said, “They were the farmers whose land was taken away by the Japanese settlers.”12 Each of the words spoken by the Chinese students awoke his memories of the settlement. His first sight of the settlement was that of an already cultivated land, not of a wilderness. He had memories of his elbows from the regular alternations of hard soil and soft soil during the crawling exercises at the military school in Ningan. They were the furrows of the ridges that were prepared for cultivation. The discussion with the Chinese students revived the scene of the blazing sunset on the Manchurian horizon and shook his memories of the past. Sugawara then went to the library and devoured the records about Manchuria. The more he read, the more he felt ashamed of his ignorance.13 Another encounter that wrenched Sugawara’s heart was the article, “The records of those who had been separated.” The pleas of these orphans longing to find their birthparents revived a scene buried deep in his mind. Sugawara was a guard in the evacuation train that had stopped near a riverbank in the wilderness. The moon was shining. The train was surrounded by local mobs; it then made a squeaky sound of departure and began to move forward. Sugawara then saw a Japanese mother and child being attacked by the mobs and chasing the train, calling for help. But the train had left without them. He saw the ref lection of a sickle in the moonlight coming down on them. Ever since the discussion with the Chinese students, Sugawara came to realize that what he did in Manchuria was nothing but a Japanese invasion of China. His act of atonement began at the age of fifty-three.14 After the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty, the Chinese government gradually began to allow the Japanese to visit restricted cities. Sugawara joined the Agricultural Inspection
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Mission to Heilongjiang Province in June 1980, which was organized by the Japan-China Friendship Association. The agricultural inspection was only a nominal purpose. The participants joined the mission to search for the orphans. The Chinese government was aware of the real purpose and allowed it. Sugawara noticed a female participant begging a guide to stop at the site of the former Sado settlement. The guide hesitated, but the woman’s persistence won in the end. The guide agreed to visit the hill overlooking the site. The woman’s name was Takayama Sumiko (see chapter 3). She had waited for thirty-five years to revisit the Sado settlement ruins. Meanwhile, she had combed through every article about the orphans, hoping for a miracle, to the extent that the newspapers were torn apart and crumbled into pieces. At the hill, she made a makeshift altar, with f lowers, candles, and incense. Then, she knelt down and called out the names of her children. “It’s your ma. Can you hear me? Did you become Nono-sama (Buddhas)? I’m sorry for deceiving you into dying. I’m sorry to be late. I came to pick you up. It’s your ma.” She left sweat buns, cooked white rice, and many other offerings, in addition to mounds of caramel candies, on the hill. Sugawara thought of the countless children who could not even become “orphans.”15 During the trip, Sugawara met another unforgettable person. When the group stayed at Mudanjiang, several middle-aged orphans f locked to the hotel, hearing that a Japanese group was visiting the city for the first time since the war. They kept begging for help, like children, without wiping their tears. One of them was Xu Ming (see chapter 7). Her desperate pleas for help touched Sugawara. In order to make amends for his deeds in Manchuria, Sugawara became a major driving force to help repatriate the orphans.16 Ministry of Health’s Open Searches With the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, the orphans in China began to act more openly. Letters of inquiry inundated the newly opened Japanese Embassy in Beijing. The Ministry of Health belatedly began to compile files on the orphans in cooperation with the Chinese government. The Assistance Bureau also resumed the repatriation task, which had been cancelled in 1958. Consequently, over 5,000 households of Japanese women left behind were repatriated after 1973, including temporary homecomings. However, the orphans were again left out, because they did not know their Japanese identities. The Ministry still did not initiate actual searches for the orphans in this period.17
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The Ministry officials responded to the requests from the private groups by stating that the mandate of the Assistance Bureau was to assist war veterans. They also stated that it was not clear which ministry of the wartime government was in charge of sending the farmersettlers to Manchuria (for example, the Ministry of Colonial Affairs or the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, or others). Therefore, the postwar government could not assume the whole responsibility for the orphans. The officials also “confessed” that dealing with the orphans in itself was actually not very difficult. Their number was not large and it would not cost much. The Ministry was more concerned with a spillover effect of the orphan issue. Once the Ministry helped them out, other groups of civilian war victims would demand similar government assistance. It would be like “waking up a sleeping baby,” or “poking in a grove and stirring up mosquitoes.” The Ministry did not want that to happen.18 Instead of trying to save the orphans who had been left behind in China for three decades, the Ministry was afraid of opening a “Pandora’s Box” for war victims’ compensation. The Ministry belatedly conducted its first “open search” for orphans in March 1975. The only thing the Ministry did in this “open search” was to release 397 files on the orphans to the public. However, as many as 191 orphans (48 percent) found out their identities from this search alone. Simultaneously, however, the Ministry of Justice’s Immigration Control Bureau declared that it would treat repatriates from China as legal aliens (see chapter 7). The Ministry carried out nine such “open searches” until January 1981 (from the fourth search onward, they were conducted in collaboration with private organizations). Nonetheless, the Ministry did not organize the missions to search for the orphans’ kin until March 1981, nine years after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. The Japan- China Friendship Bridge Society Aichi Chapter Secretary- General Kinoshita Takao stated that the disparity between the way the Ministry dealt with the orphans and the way it treated the war veterans and bereaved families was astounding and deplorable (see Chapter 12).19 Official Search Missions for Orphans’ Kin The Ministry of Health sponsored the official mission to search for the orphans’ kin in March 1981 by inviting the prospective orphans to Japan. It conducted fifteen such missions between March 1981and February 1987 (see table 6.1 in appendix). The longest interval, between
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the second and third missions, was caused by the “textbook issue.” However, the political issues in Sino-Japanese relations were not the only causes for the delays in the process of finding orphans’ kin. Most of the orphans did not have any decisive clues to prove their identities. They did not know their names or hometowns. Their foster parents had burned the “evidence” (such as their Japanese name tags sewn on their clothes) for fear of execution. As a result, only 37.8 percent of the orphans who visited Japan during the fifteen missions, or 563 orphans out of a total of 1,488, have found their identities and their kin.20 Worse, the success rate of the search missions gradually declined. The eighth mission representative stated upon arrival in Tokyo in September 1985 that this task was like “finding a needle in the ocean,” to quote a Chinese axiom. The success rate dropped to 30.4 percent for this mission. The volunteer Chino’s detestation for the Japanese government that had ignored the orphans for four decades grew deeper each time he met visiting orphans on the search missions. While 563 orphans found their identities and kin by the end of the fifteenth mission, 925 orphans failed to do so, and went back to China heartbroken. The government did nothing to help these orphans afterward. At least 2,000 orphans still remained unidentified and lived in China then.21 Cancellation of Search Missions In 1986, the Ministry of Health decided to end its search missions, claiming that the mandate of the search missions was completed. Volunteer groups vehemently opposed the Ministry’s decision. The volunteer groups noted the fact that less than 1,500 orphans had joined the search missions thus far, and that there were at least 2,000 more orphans awaiting their turn to visit Japan. The volunteer groups argued that the Ministry should continue the search mission as long as there remained orphans who wished to visit Japan to search for their kin. They brought the issue to the Japanese parliament. The Ministry in the end agreed to continue the search missions, but only under the new name of “supplementary” missions, to save face.22 Supplementary Search Missions The Ministry of Health sponsored fifteen supplementary official search missions from November 1987 to November 1999 (see table 6.2 in
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appendix). The success rate of the fifteen supplementary missions dropped drastically. Only 101 orphans out of a total of 628 found their identities and kin, with the success rate of 16.1 percent. The combined results of the regular fifteen missions and fifteen supplementary missions make an overall success rate of 31.4 percent. Out of a total of 2,116 participants in the missions between 1981 and 1999, only 664 orphans found their identities, leaving 1,452 unidentified.23 The fifteenth supplementary search mission became the last collective search mission of the orphans. Afterward, the Ministry of Health decided to grant permission for visits to Japan, on an ad hoc basis, only to orphans who had a high probability of finding their kin, based on prior local investigations in China first. Following that, the first prescreened search mission visited Japan in November 2000, and had a success rate of 15 percent (3 out of 20). The second such mission visited in November 2001, with a success rate of 20 percent (4 out of 20). The third such mission took place in November 2002, with a success rate of 66.7 percent (4 out of 6). Even afterward, about 100 orphans came forward and claimed that they were Japanese every year.24 Difficulties in Finding Orphan’s Identities The clock was ticking for the orphans. Their foster parents had lost their memories about how they had adopted them, or had passed away. Their birthparents, who had survived the war and had been repatriated, shut out their experiences in Manchuria and rebuilt their lives in postwar Japan. They told people that their children had died in Manchuria. Many birthfathers had remarried and had a new family. Many parents found it difficult to come forward to identify the orphans, because they had returned to Japan alive after all, leaving their children behind in China. This fact was hard to swallow, no matter how the situation in Manchuria might have justified their act of “abandoning” their children. This sense of guilt carried by the birthparents made the search even more difficult. Moreover, the birthparents were also dying out. They took their guilt feelings with them to the grave.25 Here, a caveat is in order. Not all of the orphans’ claims were authentic. Some Chinese claimed to be Japanese orphans, so that they could live in Japan. There are organized groups that operate to smuggle Chinese into Japan. Some of them used false orphan identities. These false claims are however detectable by blood appraisal tests, and in most cases the false orphans were deported back to China. It is also
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Illusory Comprehensive List of Settlers in Manchuria Nagano prefecture had published its own “History of Manchuria Settlement” in 1984, in which it lists the names and whereabouts of all the farmer-settlers from the prefecture. This indicates that it would have been possible to do the same thing for all the other prefectures in Japan, and also that it could have been done much earlier. The footnotes of the volume by Nagano prefecture in fact mention that the list of settlers was made from data of the national government and the prefecture. This suggests that the national government did have sufficient data to compile the list of all the Japanese settlers, their families, and their whereabouts. It could have obtained more information from the collective repatriates in the late 1940s and early 1950s and compiled such a list if it had wanted. Had the government done that, the solution for the orphan issue would have taken a completely different path.27 Ide Magoroku argues, while the Kwantung Army originally planned the Manchuria settlement, the Imperial Japanese Parliament approved the plan without any revisions. The government then promoted the program as a national policy. Therefore, the Japanese government was responsible for the orphans. The postwar government should have designated the search for the orphans as one of its postwar settlement mandates, along with the search for the missing soldiers. Nevertheless, in reality, the postwar policy toward former Manchuria was as f lawed and perfunctory as the planning and promotion of the ManchuriaMongolia settlement itself.28
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necessary to keep in mind that the potential orphans might have told exaggerated or madeup stories, seeking recognition from the Japanese government as such. Overall, while there were some opportunists, most of the orphans’ claims were authentic. Their disabilities and the injuries incurred during evacuation and the abuse sufferred thereafter suggested their aff liction since early childhood (see chapter 7).26
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SE V E N
Barriers to Repatriation: Reestablishing Identity and Domicile
With the “Wartime Death Decree” of 1959, most of the orphans’ domiciles (equivalent to birth certificates) were eliminated from their parents’ household domiciles. They already had their graves in their hometowns. Instead of rescinding this wrongful decree, the Ministry of Justice decided to treat the repatriates from China as legal aliens in 1975. Even if their domiciles had not been eliminated, the orphans had no way to find them unless they knew their Japanese names. Therefore, the orphans could not legally become Japanese again unless they reestablished their domiciles. Reestablishing domiciles required a trial process at a local family court, as well as the kin’s proof of their identities. Another way to establish their domiciles was to reconfirm their Japanese nationality at a district court. The latter procedure was even more difficult than the former, because it involved a prosecutor as an agent of the national government. In addition to the arduous task of finding their kin, the orphans had to go through a strenuous legal battle with the Japanese government to reestablish their domiciles for repatriation to their homeland.1 Even more strangely, the Ministry of Justice treated the orphans, who knew their identities and had their domiciles kept intact, as foreigners. For example, Beniya Torao wrote to his hometown in Nagano prefecture in 1973 after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. His domicile was intact at the local government. The local office contacted his elder sister who did not settle in Manchuria and had moved to Tokyo. She identified Beniya as her brother and became his guarantor (see chapter 8 for the guarantor requirement). Beniya was repatriated permanently in
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April 1975. Nevertheless, the Immigration Control Bureau told him to register as an alien. Then they told him to file a procedure of naturalization in order to become legally Japanese. He was a legal alien until his naturalization application came through in December 1978.2 Similarly, Shimizu Hiroo, who was taken to an orphanage and then was accepted only by the fourth foster parents, remembered his name, his birthfather’s name, and his sister’s name in Chinese characters (he forgot how they were pronounced in Japanese). He found out that his domicile had not been eliminated. His relatives on his father’s side in Nagano prefecture identified him in 1976. However, they did not agree to become his guarantor. Then his mother’s sister agreed to become his guarantor. Shimizu was thus repatriated in 1979. However, he was told to register as a legal alien and undertake a procedure for naturalization. The Ministry of Justice recognized his Japanese citizenship only in July 1984.3 Why did the Immigration Control Bureau treat the repatriates from China as legal aliens? Why did the orphans who had their Japanese domiciles intact have to undertake naturalization process? The Ministry of Justice considered the orphans legal aliens because they entered Japan with Chinese passports. In turn, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) refused to issue them Japanese passports, because they did not have Japanese domiciles. Thus, the Japanese orphans were caught in the bind of the Japanese immigration red tape, and were treated as legal aliens. This treatment seems to contradict Japan’s Nationality Law, which stipulates that Japanese nationality is determined by blood, not by birthplace. Given the fact that the Ministry made the orphans who had intact Japanese domiciles be naturalized as Japanese, one could only imagine the difficulty it had imposed on the orphans who did not know their identities. There was no way to find or reestablish their domiciles unless they could find their identities and kin. They knew that they were Japanese from various circumstantial evidences, but they could not reestablish their domiciles without positive proof from their kin. Worse, they could neither speak nor write Japanese. All the burdens of the legal procedures fell on their kin or volunteers. The Ministry took the help of private hands for granted. The Kojima Fumiko Incident was a case in point.4 Kojima Fumiko Incident Kojima Fumiko was born in the housing facility of the South Manchuria Railway in Qiqihar in Longjiang province in 1938. Her father worked
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at the Railway. Her mother was a nurse at the Railway Hospital. Kojima and her mother moved to Fulaerji, near Qiqihar, in 1944 and opened a Japanese restaurant. Her mother disappeared during the Soviet Army invasion and she became an orphan. She was adopted by a Chinese couple, grew up in Tianjin, and worked at a bank. Then she met a Taiwanese man and married him. His father was a merchant (“overseas Chinese”) and had lived in Osaka since the prewar time. When his father died in 1974, they visited Japan. While in Japan, Kojima frantically searched for her kin, but all the “witnesses” who could identify her were already dead. Kojima extended her stay and kept searching for three years, but in vain. Out of desperation, she ran into the office of the Japan- China Friendship Bridge Society Osaka Chapter on its opening day in October 1976. Takegawa Hideyuki was there.5 Takegawa was convinced that Kojima was Japanese. She had on her left arm a mark of the smallpox inoculation that the only Japanese children had in Manchuria. She could easily draw the layout of the housing facility of the South Manchuria Railway. She was able to sing the Japanese school songs although she only spoke Chinese. There was a record that indicated that a nurse named Kojima worked at the South Manchuria Railway Hospital in Qiqihar. In addition, the Fulaerji station director testified that there was a Japanese restaurant in front of the station. Nevertheless, Kojima could not become legally Japanese. She had entered Japan as a Chinese. With Takegawa’s help, Kojima filed a lawsuit with the Iida Family Court in Nagano prefecture in October 1977 to request the establishment of her Japanese domicile. Meanwhile, the Osaka Immigration Control Bureau issued Kojima a deportation order from Japan. The Immigration Bureau adhered to the legal red tape that a tourist visa could be renewed only up to three times. Takegawa went back and forth between Osaka and Nagano, and managed to get approval for establishing Kojima’s domicile in February 1978. This was three days before her deportation deadline. The Kojima Fumiko Incident was one of the first cases in which a Japanese family court granted establishment of domicile to a Japanese orphan whose legal identity was unknown. The next case became a cause célèbre.6 Xu Ming Incident Xu Ming was born in Mudanjiang in Mudanjiang province. Her foster father ran a fabric shop. Her foster mother could not write her own
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name, but was a kind person. She had never let Xu go outside alone until she was five. When she did go out, neighborhood children called her “little Japanese demon.” They told her to kneel down and crawl under their legs, like a dog, if she wanted to join them. The namecalling continued at elementary school. In 1953, a police officer called on her foster mother. The policeman told her that there was a plan to repatriate Japanese collectively and she should let Xu go. Her foster mother denied that Xu was Japanese. But the police knew that she could not bear children. Then her foster mother confessed the truth to Xu. On August 15, 1945, the Soviet Army gathered the Japanese into the Mudan River and massacred them. There was bloodbath at the river. When the Soviet Army soldiers found Japanese children, they grabbed their legs, hung them upside down, and split their bodies into two pieces. Xu’s Japanese birthmother had trudged along amidst this violence with a baby on her back and dragging two girls by their hands. Xu’s mother then asked a Chinese man, Li, to take her baby in. Li felt sorry for her, but he already had four children, and could not afford to take in another. Li asked a female passerby, Wang, to raise the baby. Wang wanted to adopt a child, but the baby was too weak and she agreed only to take care of the baby for the time being until Li found Xu’s foster mother.7 Xu’s foster mother told her that all the Japanese women she knew were gracious. She even said that she wished Xu would grow up to be like a Japanese woman. She also said that Japanese men were honest and industrious. Xu wanted to know about her birthparents, but her foster mother told her that she would be better off if she did not know. Then her foster father’s business went bankrupt, and they had to move residence twice. Her foster father was running away from his creditors and hardly came home. Her mother had bound feet, but she pushed a small cart selling ice cream. One night Xu saw her foster mother trying to commit suicide. Xu begged her not to. The next morning she told Xu that she was wrong in trying to commit suicide. She decided that she must raise Xu, because Xu’s birthmother saved Xu’s life by begging for help from the Chinese. Afterward, her foster mother began to go to work early in the morning and did not come home until late at night. Xu got up at two in the morning and went to pick up coke to be used as fuel. She climbed up the city wall and walked in the sewers and gutters to reach town. She headed to restaurants because they dumped used coke outside around two in the morning. She suffered frostbite on her face, hands, and feet. She picked up the burning red coke with her bare hands and used it for cooking. That was the only way they could
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cook food to eat. While the poorest Chinese ate meat at least on the New Year’s Day, Xu’s family could not afford to make meat dumplings for the New Year. When neighbors gave them four pounds of pork, her foster mother sold it right away for the money they needed.8 When Xu was thirteen years old, a police officer visited again and told Xu that she should be repatriated. If she wanted to remain in China, she should apply for Chinese citizenship when she became eighteen. Xu felt that she could return to Japan some day and did not apply for Chinese citizenship at eighteen. Xu went to the teacher’s training school in Mudanjiang where the tuition was low. When she graduated, she was assigned to a school in a remotest region in Heilongjiang province, which could be reached only by a lumber freight train that ran just once a week. The school assignment was normally made based on the student’s academic grades and the residence location. Xu was at the top in her class. Then she was given the best teacher’s award in the district, but her salary remained lower than that of her peers. Eager to excel, she applied for membership in the CCP. The principal rejected her application because her citizenship was “unknown.”9 Xu married a Chinese electric technician in 1969 and had three children, who were bullied as Japanese. A Japanese female dentist near Xu’s foster parents’ house was arrested by the Red Guards as a spy and was beaten to death. When Xu heard about the normalization of SinoJapanese relations, she was too excited to sleep. She gazed in the direction of Japan (east of China) at sunrise and shed tears. In 1973 the police visited Xu again, but told her to register as Japanese this time. Xu also wrote to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, but it wrote back to her years later, saying that they could not be of any help to her. Then, in July 1980, the police told her to meet Sugawara Kosuke, who was visiting Mudanjiang. Sugawara was the first “real” Japanese she met. She felt as if she had met her birthfather. She went to the station next morning and gave him a letter. She wished that he would take her with him.10 In September 1980, Xu heard from Yoshikawa Jin’ichi in Sapporo, Hokkaido, who was looking for his daughter, who had been missing in Mudanjiang. He read the Asahi shimbun article in July, introducing Xu. Yoshikawa was a Kwantung Army officer and was stationed in Mudanjiang. His division was transferred in April 1945. He told his pregnant wife that should they fail to meet again in Manchuria, they should meet in Akita, his wife’s hometown. He asked her to name the baby Akiko if it was a girl. He heard that Akiko was born in May. Then he was taken to Siberia. When he was repatriated in 1956, he visited Akita. But his wife was not there. Then he read about Xu
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From Xu Ming to Yoshikawa Akiko Xu was elated. The Ministry of Health was preparing for its first search mission for March 1981. Xu asked the Ministry to let her join the mission, but they told her that it was too late. The airfare cost was ¥40,000 (US$364) per person, which equaled her annual salary. Yoshikawa sent her ¥100,000. Xu sold everything and borrowed money from her friends. Xu and her three children left Beijing in July 1981 with a temporary six-month visa. When they arrived at Haneda airport, she was surprised to find that she could not understand the language spoken there. She had assumed that the Japanese spoke Chinese. She was also amazed at the high living standards and amenities in Tokyo. Xu stayed at Yoshikawa’s house in Sapporo. Yoshikawa applied to reestablish Xu’s domicile, as Yoshikawa Akiko, to the Sapporo Family Court. However, the court ordered him to prove their kinship by blood appraisal tests, which cost ¥200,000 (US$1,818). The blood appraisal test consisted not only of a blood-type test, but also of a thorough twenty-seven-point test. The accuracy of the test was said to be 99 percent. Yoshikawa used up his savings to pay for the tests. The result was negative. Yoshikawa’s attitude toward Xu suddenly changed. He threw her gifts away and yelled at her to go back to China. Xu felt as if she had fallen from heaven to hell.12 Society to Help the Xu Ming Family The Ministry of Justice ordered Xu to return to China. She was temporarily taken into custody at the Chinese Consul General in Sapporo. Xu left Yoshikawa’s house and lived on welfare. She applied for an extension of her visa to the Sapporo Immigration Control Bureau, but it was denied. She then showed the “certificate of Japanese orphan” issued by Mudanjiang city. The personnel at Immigration Control told her that the Chinese government proof had no legal validity in Japan, and that they would deport her forcibly unless she returned to China
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after an interval of thirty-five years. He thought that Xu’s given name “Ming” might ref lect his daughter’s name “Akiko.” “Ming” and “aki” are different pronunciations of the same Chinese character. They had exchanged twenty letters in the eight months. Akiko’s birth date was May 5, 1945, and Xu’s was May 14, 1945. Both Yoshikawa and Xu were blood type AB. They had no doubt about their kinship.11
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From Yoshikawa Akiko to Imamura Akiko Xu went to the Ministry of Health with Chino, but the staff there told that they could not help her. When she went to the Ministry of Justice to request a visa extension, they told her to go to the Tokyo Immigration Control Bureau. The Tokyo Immigration Control Bureau told her to go to the Shinagawa Immigration Control Bureau. Meanwhile, Sugawara’s article moved many readers, and letters of support and donations f locked to Chino’s office. One of the readers was Kawai Hiroyuki, a successful business lawyer. Kawai was born in Manchuria in 1944 and lost a baby brother during the repatriation. He volunteered to act as Xu’s agent. When a six-month extension of her visa was approved in January 1982, Kawai filed a suit to establish Xu’s domicile at the Tokyo Family Court. She applied for her Japanese name to be “Imamura” Akiko, after a repatriated woman who had helped her. The Tokyo Family Court granted her domicile in May 1982. She became legally Imamura Akiko. Xu’s case became the first case in which the “certificate of Japanese orphan” issued by the Chinese government served as the basis of the approval of the domicile of an unidentified orphan.14 From Imamura Akiko to Ikeda Sumie Xu kept searching for her birthparents and visited the Ministry of Health many times, but the Ministry repeatedly rejected Xu’s requests. Xu also went to the Yoyogi Olympic Memorial Youth Center each time the official search mission visited Japan, but she could find no clues about her birthparents. Meanwhile, Xu began working at Kawai’s law office. Years passed. Xu and Kawai went to the Yoyogi Center in 1994 as volunteers. As Kawai explained to the orphans how to acquire Japanese nationality and establish domicile, Xu interpreted in Chinese. A Japanese woman complimented her Chinese (she did not know that Xu was one of the orphans). The woman was searching for her baby
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within the visa deadline. She wrote to Sugawara again. Sugawara’s newspaper article describing Xu’s predicaments led the volunteers in Tokyo and Kanagawa to organize the “Society to Help the Xu Ming Family.” Chino Seiji became the secretary-general of the group. Chino suggested that she apply for a visa extension in Tokyo, and had her move to Tokyo in December 1981.13
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
sister left in Mudanjiang. Her sister would be fifty years old and her blood type should be AB. Her mother had left her nine-month-old baby to a Chinese man named Li. Upon this, Xu drew a map of the area around the house of Li, to whom her birthmother had handed her. The woman developed goose bumps and called for her younger sister, who had come along. Her sister felt that Xu resembled her mother who had just died in June. Xu also felt a chill in her body, but she tried to be calm, because she did not want to go through another emotional roller-coaster.15 Xu requested blood appraisal tests to the Ministry of Health. The blood appraisal tests usually took six months, but their tests took much longer. In July 1996, after a twenty monthlong wait, the tests proved their kinship with 99.99 percent accuracy. Xu’s true identity was Ikeda Sumie, born on October 14, 1944. That was her fourth name. She found her true identity and kin fifteen years after she had returned to Japan. This also meant the end of the Ikeda sisters’ (Miyoko and Misako) search for their baby sister. Miyoko had visited China more than two dozen times to search for Sumie. She even opened a Japanese restaurant in Harbin in order to obtain information about Sumie. Misako had also visited China many times to search for Sumie. She felt that her mother who had just passed away had brought them together.16 While the case of Xu Ming began with a tragedy and ended with serendipity, the next case began with a happy family reunion, which soon turned into a nightmare. Takahashi Hideya’s Battle with Birthmother Takahashi Hideya was born in October 1944. With the Soviet Army invasion, his mother f led with her six children and was taken to a refugee camp in Ningan in Mudanjiang province. She tried to save her three younger children’s lives, including Takahashi’s, by leaving them under the care of the Chinese. His mother took her three older children and returned to Japan. Takahashi’s foster parents named him Wang Zhangqing and raised him as their own son. He helped his parents and worked hard to become the head of the production unit of the Ningan People’s Public Corporation, supervising 350 people. This promotion inadvertently led him to find his true identity. When he was recommended to apply for the CCP, his foster father confessed that he was Japanese. This happened in 1965 when even the unofficial relations between China and Japan had been disrupted, and animosity
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toward “imperialist Japan” was strong. Nevertheless, he wanted to find his birthmother. He heard of a Japanese woman in Ningan who had just returned from her temporary homecoming to Japan. She gave him the address of President Gunji Hiko of the Japan- China Federation on Issues Concerning the Orphans.17 Takahashi wrote to Gunji, but he did not receive any reply. Japan was very distant from China politically, if not geographically. Takahashi finally heard from Gunji eleven years later, in 1976. Then Gunji located his mother in Saitama prefecture in August 1977. Takahashi’s mother was not forthcoming at first, but recognized that Wang must be her son. His mother told Gunji that she also had left his elder brother and sister in China. Takahashi enthusiastically searched for them. Within a year he found out that his elder brother was a doctor at a hospital in Mudanjiang. His elder sister lived in Sichuan province, 2,000 miles away. With this great news to his mother, Takahashi arrived at Narita airport with his wife and two children in June 1981 (he had left behind three other children in China). He finally had come back to his birthmother.18 Birthmother’s Denial Takahashi stayed at his eldest sister’s house in Saitama prefecture. As their initial welcome wore out, his sister’s attitude began to change. The change became conspicuous when Takahashi told his mother and sister that he would like to live in Japan permanently, and also have his other three children and his foster parents live with him. His mother and sister were infuriated, and they told him to go back to China. The family ties that Takahashi thought were firm shattered into pieces. Then his mother stated that he was not her son and filed a claim of a mistaken identity. Takahashi left his sister’s house, rented a small apartment, and lived on welfare. By extending his visas, he sought for a way to live in Japan permanently. However, he could not establish his domicile as long as his mother denied him as her son. He was legally still Wang Zhangqing and was almost forcibly deported to China for violation of the Alien Registration Law, under which a foreign national scheduled to reside in Japan for more than ninety days is required to apply for alien registration. He moved to a public apartment complex in Iwatsuki in June 1982. His eldest son married in March 1983. He did not want to leave his aging foster parents in China alone. By saving every penny, he had his foster parents and three other children come to live with him in October 1983. Takahashi’s household grew to be ten people. By that time, Takahashi was stressed out
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from the disputes with his kin for over two years. Then, in 1984, he met Inomata Masaru (see Chapter 6).19
Takahashi begged Inomata for help with his shaky Japanese. His life in China had an uncanny resemblance to Inomata’s. Inomata contacted the lawyer Suzuki Takao of the Tokyo Bar Association. At Suzuki’s instruction, Inomata appealed the case to the Human Rights Protection Committee of the Tokyo Bar Association in March 1984, requesting it to take necessary measures so that the government would recognize Wang as Takahashi. With the formal appeal filed, Suzuki interviewed Wang and also reported this case to the Ministry of Health. The Ministry requested his mother to take a blood appraisal test. She refused. With volunteers’ persistence, his mother agreed in June. The result of the blood appraisal test proved that Wang was her son. After due investigation by the Ministry of Justice, Takahashi’s domicile was reestablished as the third son of the Takahashi family in November 1984. Wang legally became Takahashi Hideya. It took more than three years to establish his domicile after his repatriation. His five children were subsequently granted Japanese citizenship.20 Takahashi’s New Battle However, his battle to settle in his homeland had not ended. It was only the beginning. Although the legal issues had been resolved, the gulf between Takahashi and his birthmother remained deep. His mother did not open her heart to his family. Even if his children called her, greeting “Hi, Grandma,” she remained silent on the phone. Takahashi understood his mother’s behavior. They were unwelcome because his mother and his siblings thought that Takahashi’s large family would be a burden on them. After leaving his sister’s house, he had supported his family without his kin’s assistance. He did not want to depend on welfare for long, so he went to Urawa and Tokyo to learn Japanese and eagerly searched for jobs. He found a job at the Iwai Factory in January 1984. His wife worked part-time at a nearby supermarket. His son worked at the same factory and lived in another apartment in the same complex. His granddaughter Chieko was born in July 1985. He found another apartment for his foster parents. Three households of Takahashi’s family lived in the same complex.21
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Inomata Masaru’s Help
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The case of Takahashi Etsuko (unrelated to Hideya) presents an opposite case. Etsuko was born in Juhe prefecture in Binjiang province. Her father Minoru was conscripted in 1944. Before leaving, Minoru asked his wife Noriko to name their baby Etsuko if it was a girl. Etsuko was born in April 1945. With the Soviet Army invasion, Noriko left the settlement village and was taken to a refugee camp in Harbin. There was an epidemic of typhoid fever in the shelter. Her sisters’ children died of the fever one by one. Many parents strangled their children who were suffering from the fever, as if it were a routine thing to do. Noriko was also suffering from the fever and was holding on to her baby tightly. People told her to “dispose of ” her baby because she would not live. But she refused. Noriko wanted Etsuko to meet her father alive. Noriko then ran out of the shelter and looked for a Chinese man who used to work at her aunt’s house. She found his house and asked him to look after Etsuko.22 Then Noriko received an order from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to serve as an army nurse. She had just turned twenty years old. She was taken to the PLA hospital near Mudanjiang. Noriko moved around with the PLA and learned to speak Chinese. Wearing a Chinese uniform and speaking Chinese f luently, nobody could recognize her as Japanese. She had assimilated into Chinese society in order to survive. Eight years passed. Noriko had a chance to return to Japan in the collective repatriation of 1953. She confided about her daughter to a Chinese supervisor whom she trusted. She told Noriko that Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations would be normalized in the future, and that she could see her daughter then. Noriko sailed back to Maizuru port without Etsuko. To her surprise, Minoru was at the seaport. Minoru had been repatriated from South Korea and had waited for Noriko and Etsuko for eight years, believing that they were alive.23 Is Zhang Daiqin Etsuko? It took nineteen more years until Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations were normalized. Noriko wasted no time in starting a search for Etsuko, going back and forth among the Ministry of Health, the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo, and so on, but to no avail. Then, ten more years later, she heard that there was an orphan who had a similar background to Etsuko among the orphans in the search mission in February 1982. Her name was Zhang Daiqin. According to Zhang’s data, her
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In Search of Takahashi Etsuko
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birthparents left her to a Chinese man in the winter of 1945 when she was one month old, through a Japanese woman in Harbin. Noriko identified Zhang as Etsuko. They did not take blood appraisal tests. Noriko and Minoru visited Harbin in May 1982 to meet Zhang’s family. The house of the Chinese man with whom Noriko had left her baby still stood on the main street, but he did not live there any longer. The house of Zhang’s foster parents was nearby. Her foster father was already dead. Her foster mother lived with her own son’s family. Zhang’s foster mother could not clarify the details about the time when they had adopted Zhang. Zhang had five children. Her sick mother-in-law lived with them. Noriko understood the hardships Zhang had gone through in China. She decided to believe that Zhang was Etsuko.24 Accepting Zhang as Etsuko Noriko refused Zhang’s family’s wish to live in Japan permanently, because she felt that they were too old to start a new life in Japan. While Zhang was Japanese, her husband and children were Chinese. Noriko knew the difficulties of living in a foreign country firsthand. Besides, who would take care of Zhang’s bedridden mother-in-law if they all moved to Japan? Noriko made it clear that she would not allow Zhang’s family to live in Japan while her mother-in-law was alive. Zhang wrote to her that her husband’s brother would look after his mother. Noriko undertook all the procedures for the Zhang family’s repatriation. Strangely, Zhang’s eldest daughter, who was married and was supposed to stay in China, came along with the family. Noriko found out that they had brought this daughter along because she had become pregnant. Noriko was deceived, but it was too late. She decided to help them out and raise the baby by herself. After all, she had accepted Zhang as Etsuko. She moved around the government agencies to receive public assistance for the family. She arranged for the Zhang family to move to a public housing facility near her house. Zhang’s eldest daughter had a baby boy. Noriko became a great grandmother at the age of sixty. Noriko also had her granddaughter’s husband come to live in Japan, and found a different apartment and a job at a Chinese restaurant for the young couple. The Zhang family was fortunate that Noriko could communicate with them in Chinese. Noriko’s two sons who were born in Japan accepted their sister’s family warmly. Noriko stopped thinking whether Zhang was Etsuko. Etsuko was with her.25 This case ended with mixed blessings, whereas the next case illustrates complex twists and turns of mistaken identity.
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Takano Yasuyuki was born in Dongning in Mudanjiang province in June 1944. His mother and four children left the settlement village and were taken to a refugee camp in Ningan, south of Mudanjiang. His sister Tsuneko (nine years old) was hired as a housemaid. One day when she came back from work, Yasuyuki was missing. Her mother did not tell her anything. Half a year later when their chance of repatriation came, her mother took her to a Chinese house. She saw Yasuyuki there. Her mother begged the Chinese couple to give Yasuyuki back. They refused. Her family sailed to Shimonoseki without Yasuyuki. Her mother never mentioned him since then. It was a family taboo. After her mother’s death in 1962, Tsuneko began frantically searching for Yasuyuki. She vividly recalled what the Chinese couple looked like and what their house looked like, but her attempts were in vain because Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations were disrupted. In 1967, she heard of a Japanese woman who had returned from Ningan. The woman knew of an orphan who had a similar background to Yasuyuki. His name was Fan Ruijun. After many exchanges of letters with Fan, Tsuneko was convinced that Fan was Yasuyuki. With the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, Fan began to express his wish to live in Japan permanently. Tsuneko’s father, who had been repatriated from Siberia, and her siblings were all in favor of repatriating Fan.26 Fan Ruijun’s Repatriation Fan Ruijun arrived at Osaka airport with a temporary six-month visa in July 1975. Yasuyuki’s domicile was still intact. His parents had refused to eliminate his domicile when the government designated him as “wartime dead.” They knew that he was alive. Thus, Fan became Takano Yasuyuki legally. The first step for settlement was learning Japanese, but there was no Japanese language school in Shimonoseki. Fan moved to Osaka in April 1976 and went to a Japanese school, working part-time, but he stopped going to school and to work after two years. Tsuneko had him come back to Shimonoseki. She asked him to draw the layout of the Chinese house he grew up in. It was completely different from the one that had been imprinted in her mind. Then he confessed that he was not her brother. Fan knew that he was a Japanese orphan, but he was not Yasuyuki. He said that he too had the right to live in Japan and that he had legally become Yasuyuki.27
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Tsuneko’s search for her brother began anew. In 1980, newspapers published hundreds of orphans’ pictures, collected by volunteer groups. A picture of an orphan named Zhao Peixiang caught Tsuneko’s eyes. The caption said his mother had left him with a Chinese couple in Ningan in February 1946. Tsuneko was cautious this time. After many exchanges of letters with Zhao, she joined the first mission to China to search for orphans, organized by the Japan-China Federation on Issues Concerning the Orphans in August 1981. Tsuneko met Zhao in Ningan. It still had many of the same buildings and houses as at the time she left thirty-five years ago. She was speechless when she saw Zhao’s house. It was the same house her mother took her to have Yasuyuki back. She met Zhao’s foster parents. Although they had grown older, they resembled the couple she had remembered. That was enough to convince her. Zhao was Yasuyuki. Then Zhao did a strange thing. He showed Tsuneko a picture. It was a picture of Fan Ruijun. He said, “Yasuyuki went back to Japan six years ago. I am therefore not Yasuyuki.” Tsuneko was stunned. Zhao and Fan had known each other. They had lived only a mile apart. Tsuneko returned home, confused. With Fan’s consent, Tsuneko took Fan to the Chinese Consul General in Fukuoka and applied for his repatriation to China. The Chinese Embassy in Tokyo replied that they expected him to continue to live in Japan, because he was a Japanese orphan. Tsuneko then helped Fan to apply for a new domicile, independent of the Takano family, at the Shimonoseki Family Court. However, Fan suddenly requested a cancellation of his domicile application. As long as Fan remained legally Yasuyuki, Zhao could not be repatriated.28 Dealing with Two “Yasuyukis” Tsuneko went back and forth among the Yamaguchi prefecture government, the Shimonoseki city government, and other offices to find a suitable job for Fan so that he could become self-sufficient, but he refused to go to work and stayed at his apartment. She thought the only way to repatriate Zhao was to have him join an official search mission and have the government identify him as Yasuyuki through the blood appraisal test. Zhao joined the search mission in February 1984. Tsuneko took her father to Tokyo to have his blood appraisal test done. The tests proved their kinship. Zhao legally became Yasuyuki. Fan’s domicile was then eliminated, and he became domicile-less. By this
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time Tsuneko was worn out, her father had become ill, and her siblings were exhausted. Then, Zhao became enthusiastic about his permanent repatriation with his family—his foster mother, wife, and four children. Tsuneko felt that it was impossible to take care of his big family, but Zhao kept writing. She succumbed to Zhao’s enthusiasm, signed herself as his guarantor, and applied for his family’s repatriation travel expenses, except for his foster mother, who was too weak to move to Japan. Their application came through in December 1985. The Zhao family arrived at Narita airport in June 1986. Eleven years had passed since Fan was repatriated. Tsuneko’s new struggle to help her brother’s settlement had begun.29 All the above cases present the complexity of reestablishing orphans’ identity and domicile. While the government applied strict measures for granting orphans Japanese nationality, it took a perfunctory attitude in establishing their kinship. It seemed as if the government did not care whether they were true kin or not, insofar as there was someone to accept the orphans and become their guarantors. With the recurrence of many mistaken identities, the National Council on Issues Concerning the Orphans Left Behind in China requested the Ministry of Health to conduct blood appraisal tests on all orphans in the third official mission in February 1983, but this was in vain. The council again made the same request in December. The Ministry decided to conduct blood tests on all the participants in the fourth mission and thereafter.30 In retrospect, a curious reciprocity between the Chinese and Japanese occurred in the process of orphans’ repatriation. While the Chinese raised the Japanese orphans as their own, the kin of repatriated Japanese orphans helped the Chinese—the orphans’ spouses, offspring, foster parents, and in-laws. It created an unusual phenomenon of a double cross-ethnic “adoption.” It is as if the Japanese were repaying their indebtedness to the Chinese who had rescued the orphans, by helping in the settlement of the orphans’ Chinese families in Japan. In addition, the Japanese mothers had left younger children behind in China, believing that the chances of their survival would be better, which resulted in families being separated across the Sea of Japan. In turn, the orphans had to leave their adult children behind in China upon repatriation, because the Japanese government did not allow them to accompany their parents’ repatriation. This created a tragic “double family separation” across the Sea of Japan. It was an ironic twist of history (see chapter 10).
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Reestablishing Identity and Domicile
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EIGH T
Barriers to Repatriation: Guarantor/Receiver Requirement
The orphans examined in chapter 7 returned to Japan owing to devoted volunteers and kin, who had begun the search for the orphans prior to the official search missions. The road to repatriation was also difficult for those who joined the official search missions. In addition to the increasing difficulty of finding their kin, the orphans were faced with the Japanese monolithic bureaucratic red tape. Instead of rescinding the wrongful “Wartime Death Decree” and restoring Japanese domiciles universally for all the orphans, the Japanese government required them to reestablish their domiciles on their own, as well as to find a Japanese guarantor or “receiver,” as conditions for their permanent repatriation. The Japanese government repatriation policy toward the orphans has essentially remained unchanged to this day. First Legal Barrier to Repatriation: Proof of Identity and Domicile The slow rate of orphans’ repatriation became a diplomatic issue between China and Japan, amidst the escalating tension involving the textbook issue in 1982. This resulted in the cancellation of the search missions. The officials of the two governments met in January 1983 to salvage the situation. They agreed to resume the missions. Nevertheless, the Chinese Guangming Daily still reported in May 1983 that the Japanese government had not worked out measures to assist the orphans’ repatriation and settlement, and called Japan as “a disillusioned heaven to the orphans.” The two governments reached a verbal agreement in
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CH A P T E R
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“Certificate of Japanese Orphan” A series of negative comments by the Chinese government obliged Japanese Health Minister Watanabe Kozo to visit Beijing in November 1984 to thank the Chinese government for its cooperation thus far and request further cooperation. Consequently, China and Japan exchanged a memorandum in February 1985. It stipulated that the Japanese government would grant Japanese nationality to those orphans who did not know their Japanese identities, provided that they could prove that they are Japanese orphans. This meant that the unidentified orphans could apply for Japanese domicile with the submission of the “certificate of Japanese orphan” issued by the Chinese government. Seventeen years had passed by then since the Kojima Fumiko Incident and three years since the Xu Ming Incident.2 This decision-making process indicates that until 1985 the Japanese government imposed an unreasonable and unrealistic requirement on the orphans, who did not have credible proofs of their Japanese identities. It also demonstrated the protracted nature of the Japanese government decision-making process, as well as the non-proactive nature of Japanese foreign policy decision-making, referred to as the “reactive state” model, as expounded by Kent E. Calder. In fact, the Ministry of Health created a small section to promote orphans’ settlement only in April 1985, while their repatriation began in 1981. Nevertheless, despite this particular change (accepting the Chinese government “certificate” as proof of Japanese identity), the basic requirement that the orphans must reestablish their domiciles for their permanent repatriation remained unchanged. This indicates the unreasonable nature of the repatriation policy overall.3 Mass Production of “Sugawaras” Sugawara Kosuke has personally sponsored about 140 orphans’ domicile establishment, as their agent. He filled out the forms on their behalf and
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March 1984 on the orphan issue. In September, however, the Chinese government declared that as many as 2,000 Japanese orphans were still in China, who wished to be repatriated. Then in October the Chinese government criticized the Japanese government by stating that all the responsibilities for the excessive delays in the orphans’ searches for their kin rested with the Japanese government.1
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went to the Yokohama Family Court every day. The orphans wanted to be named after him, because they did not know their Japanese names. Soon, “Sugawaras” were mass-produced, and this became very confusing. Yet the orphans insisted that Sugawara was their sole kin in Japan and asked to be given part of his name at least. In addition, Chino Seiji and Kawai Hiroyuki created the “Society to Assist the Orphans Left Behind in China to Acquire Nationality” and helped nearly 3,000 orphans obtain Japanese nationality. They undertook the task of restoring the nationality of orphans, which should have been the task of the government.4 Second Legal Barrier to Repatriation: Guarantor Requirement While the process for reestablishing domiciles was relaxed to some extent, there was little change in the orphans’ legal status as legal aliens. Upon repatriation, the orphans were required to register as aliens, based on the Alien Registration Law. The Ministry of Justice also applied the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (the “Immigration Control Act,” hereafter) to the orphans’ repatriation. According to the Immigration Control Act, alien residents in Japan are required to have guarantors who would undertake the legal and financial responsibilities for their well-being in Japan. This meant for the orphans that they could not return to their homeland unless they could find their kin. In reality, except for their immediate kin, few Japanese would be willing to be their guarantors.5 The Immigration Control Act imposes on a guarantor the following obligations: (1) to carry financial responsibility for the expenses of the person’s travel and stay; (2) to have the person observe Japanese laws during the stay in Japan; (3) to report the person’s whereabouts and conduct in Japan without delay upon request by the authorities concerned; (4) to report any changes in the duration of the person’s stay in Japan in advance to the authorities concerned and have the person observe instructions from the authorities on these changes; (5) to not allow the person to engage in the activities other than those specified as the purpose of the entry into Japan; and (6) to have the person leave Japan before the visa expires.6 Before examining how the guarantor requirement affected the orphans’ repatriation, it should be noted that the Ministry of Justice waived the guarantor requirement for immigrants from South Korea
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Guarantor/Receiver Requirement
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and Southeast Asia to Japan. The Japanese government exempted the immigrants from South Korea from the guarantor requirement, because they had families living in Japan. These families are called “Korean residents in Japan,” and had originally immigrated as forced laborers after the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 (see chapter 11). The Japanese government also waived the guarantor requirement for Southeast Asian immigrants in order to accommodate Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, in response to international pressure to allow these refugees into Japan. Nevertheless, the Ministry imposed the guarantor requirement on the repatriation of the orphans, who were actually Japanese.7 Sun Shijian, who had worked on the orphan issue as the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Heilongjiang Province Office deputy director general, stated that the Chinese government allowed all the orphans’ families to be repatriated together if they wished, whereas the Japanese government did not. Sun had an impression that the Japanese government did not want to be responsible for the orphans. Therefore it required the orphans to find their guarantors who would look after them. The Japanese government in the 1980s appropriated ¥60 billion (US$545 million) for Vietnamese refugees, whereas it appropriated only ¥1.5 billion (US$13.6 million) for Japanese refugees (the orphans). The Japanese government built public recreation centers in Southeast Asia, spending ¥200 million to ¥300 million (US$1.8–-2.7 million) for each, whereas it gave only a little money to the Osaka Settlement Promotion Center for the Repatriates from China (see chapter 10).8 Financial Burdens on Guarantor The guarantor requirement had become a major impediment to the orphans’ search for their kin. Many parents did not come forward to identify the orphans, not only because of the fear of revealing their secrets but also because of the financial burden involved in becoming the orphans’ guarantors. The orphans’ birthparents were all in retirement (if not dead already), and they did not have the financial means to become guarantors. The orphans’ aging siblings were in the same situation. In addition, many fathers were remarried and had new families. It was hard to obtain consent from their spouses to become guarantors of long-lost children from previous marriages. Under these circumstances, the guarantor requirement became an additional deterrent to orphans’ searches for their kin. This accounted for the declining success rates of the search missions.9
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Moreover, the guarantor requirement had also become a major impediment to the repatriation of those who had found their kin. While orphans’ kin were happy to find their missing children or younger siblings, many refused to become guarantors because of the financial burden. The orphans had large families, with their spouses, several children (with the children’s own families), and parents-inlaw, or foster parents, following the traditional “three-generationsunder-one-roof ” family structure in China. The orphans wanted to bring large families with them to Japan. It was not a welcome situation for the orphans’ aged birthparents and siblings. The family feud of Takahashi Hideya was a case in point. An observer noted that the orphans’ parents were happy initially to have found their children. However, they were shocked to find that their children were no longer adorable infants, as they remembered them from long ago. Instead, they had become inf lexible middle-aged people who had adapted to the Chinese ways. The parents assumed that their children spoke Japanese and were shocked to find that they could not communicate with them. Both the birthparents and the orphans had to suffer the anguish of dealing with the communication and cultural gaps between them for the rest of their lives.10 Repatriation of Utsumi Tadashi The repatriation of Utsumi Tadashi, the five-year-old survivor in the Mashan Incident, was delayed for six years because of the guarantor requirement. After Sino-Japanese relations were normalized, Utsumi found a Japanese woman left behind and asked for her help. Together they found a Chinese who remembered his name and his father’s name. Utsumi wrote to the Japanese Embassy and Ministry of Health several times, but there was no response. Around 1980, Utsumi heard that a Japanese mission was visiting Jixi. He met the mission members. They located his father back in Japan. He finally heard from his father in 1982. His father had been taken to Siberia and was repatriated in 1950. Utsumi’s father had been told that all of his family died in Manchuria. He then remarried a repatriate from China who had three children from her previous marriage. They had two sons of their own. Utsumi wanted to see his father right away. However, his stepmother wrote to him that he could not partake in any inheritance from his father. He replied that he did not want his father’s inheritance, and that he just wanted to return to Japan.11
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Utsumi’s stepmother agreed to his temporary homecoming in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa prefecture, in March 1984. His father came to Narita airport. They hugged each other and cried, but Utsumi could not communicate with his father. Although the Kanagawa prefecture provided an interpreter, the interpreter was seldom present. Utsumi could not “rekindle” the kinship with his father. He asked his father’s permission for his permanent repatriation. His father told him that his repatriation would jeopardize his half- siblings’ marriages (Utsumi felt that his stepmother made his father say so). After returning to China, Utsumi kept writing to his father asking for his permission, but in vain.12 Utsumi’s friend, a repatriated orphan, requested that his guarantor in Kyoto also become Utsumi’s guarantor. It was difficult for a third person to become a guarantor of an orphan who had located his kin. This person was willing to do so only if Utsumi’s kin definitely refused to become his guarantor. This person wrote to Utsumi’s father, but he did not receive any reply. This person thus agreed to become Utsumi’s guarantor. They finished all the required paperwork. Then Utsumi heard from one of his kin, informing him that this person was willing to become his guarantor. Utsumi thought that this kin felt embarrassed about the fact that a third person had agreed to become his guarantor. Utsumi was already set to move to Kyoto, but he moved to Hiratsuka in February 1986. He was already forty-seven years old and could not learn Japanese. Utsumi does not blame his kin. He feels that the Japanese government should repatriate the orphans without their kin’s consent.13 Introduction of “Receiver System” Concerned with the declining success rates of the search missions, the Ministry of Health introduced the “receiver system” in March 1985 in consultation with the Ministry of Justice. The new system was designed to help the unidentified orphans, who had failed to find their kin during the search missions, by assigning them to what the Ministry called “receivers,” in lieu of guarantors. Under the receiver system, the Ministry of Health accepted the Tokorozawa Settlement Promotion Center’s admission notice to the orphans as the equivalent of an entry visa for the orphans (see chapter 10). The Center then acted as the orphans’ initial receiver. While the orphans were taking the four-month language training at the Center, the Center recruited
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“receivers” who would act as the orphans’ guarantors. The Center then sent off the orphans to settle in the neighborhoods of their respective receivers.14 There were no specific qualifications required for a receiver. The Ministry of Health paid the receiver a stipend of ¥20,000 (US$182) per month for the three-year duration. The Ministry chose receivers from the same area as the orphans’ most likely hometowns, which were often small local cities with no Japanese language schools. Nevertheless, the orphans were in the custody of their receivers and were required to live near them. To ensure this, in addition to a Japanese domicile and a statement from their receivers, the Ministry of Justice required the orphans to submit an acceptance in writing of the “receiver system.” They must agree that they would be received by their respective receivers after their four-month language training, and that they could not choose the place to live by themselves. The orphans also needed to submit certificates of authorized employment in Japan and so on, before repatriation. However, it was virtually impossible for the orphans to obtain such certificates while living in China.15 With the introduction of the receiver system, the “receiver” replaced the “guarantor,” and all the orphans then had to have receivers for their repatriation. The Ministry of Health claimed that this system was intended to help the orphans’ repatriation. However, it had exactly the opposite effect. In reality, it was difficult to find receivers, other than the orphan’s immediate kin. In fact, the number of kin who had identified the orphans and yet refused to become their receivers increased. For example, a male orphan found and met his father in 1984. His father survived the war because he was transferred to a post in Japan. His father wanted him to come home, but his father was remarried. His stepmother and her kin opposed his repatriation. Only after he signed a document pledging to renounce all rights to claim any inheritance from his father did his stepmother allow his father to become his receiver. He thus returned to his homeland in June 1991 when he was 48 years old. This orphan had lost seven years on account of the receiver system. This orphan’s name was Saima Takashi (see chapter 10). Saima had remained anonymous when he told this story first, because his father was still alive then. Many orphans had gone through similar difficulties with their kin.16 The receiver system paradoxically contributed to a further decrease in the success rate of the search missions. For instance, the eighth search mission of September 1985, which was the first mission after
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the receiver system was implemented, registered a sharp decline in the success rate, with only 30.4 percent. Further, the ninth search mission of November 1985 registered the lowest success rate of 24.4 percent among the total fifteen missions (see table 6.1 in appendix). Kinoshita Takao states, “The scant information on the orphans’ identity was evidently not the sole culprit for the decline in the success rate of the search missions in that period.”17 Introduction of “Special Receiver System” With many refusals by the orphans’ kin to become their receivers, the Ministry of Health in July 1989 also introduced the “special receiver system,” instead of removing the receiver system altogether. This was designed to help repatriate the identified orphans whose kin had refused to become their receivers. The Ministry assigned individuals from the orphans’ hometown to be their “special receivers” and to act as their guarantors. It was extremely difficult to find individuals who would be willing to become special receivers. People felt that their kin should look after them because they had now found their kin. As a result, the special receiver system created a paradox for the orphans’ repatriation. Their chance of repatriation was better if they did not find out their identities, because then they would be eventually assigned a receiver. However, if they located their kin, they must first try to obtain the consent of their kin, which was becoming ever more difficult. Then the Ministry had to find a special receiver for them from their hometown, which was also very difficult. Therefore, in reality, the identified orphans could not be repatriated as long as their kin refused to become their receivers.18 Consequently, the introduction of the special receiver system caused an ironical phenomenon: unidentified orphans could now return to Japan, while identified orphans could not. Under these circumstances, the orphans who participated in the search missions were afraid that if they found their kin, they could not be repatriated. Thus, the introduction of the receiver and special receiver systems resulted in distorting the very rationale for the official search missions. Despite these grave f laws, the Ministry continued to employ the special receiver system until February 1995. Kinoshita states, “It is not an exaggeration to say that the Japanese government imposed its responsibilities upon individuals by adopting the receiver and special receiver systems. Why else did the Ministry implement such ineffectual systems?”19
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In this bind, Sugawara again filled the void. Three thousands letters came to Sugawara from the orphans. He devoted himself to finding each orphan’s clues for identity. Translation took time and cost money, but he took the task of helping the orphans upon himself, because the government was not helping them. He thought of the anguish of the orphans who were rejected by their own kin they had just located. In total, Sugawara became the receiver or the special receiver of about fifty orphans. He also established a nonprofit organization, the Kanagawa Welfare Association to Assist the Repatriates from China, in 1989. Other volunteers dubbed the association the “Kanagawa formula” and modeled other groups after his institution. It was his “evacuation train” that Sugawara sent to the orphans, if belatedly.20 In summary, although the process of reestablishing orphans’ domiciles was somewhat relaxed, through the acceptance of the “certificate of Japanese orphan” in 1985, the introduction of the receiver system in 1985, as well as that of the special receiver system in 1989, became new impediments to the orphans’ repatriation. The imposition of the receiver requirement not only delayed their repatriation, but also strained the orphans’ relations with their kin whom they had finally located. The orphans just wanted to feel the warmth of their kin’s presence, but their kin shied away and rejected the orphans. In an extreme case, an orphan couple was killed in Nagoya in December 1991, and police suspected that their kin committed the crime. The government stance of considering the orphans’ repatriation as an individual problem and imposing the burden on their kin brought about this tragic situation. Nevertheless, the government has not removed the receiver requirement to this day. Meanwhile, the orphans who were rejected by their own kin “kowtowed” to their special receivers, which created exploitative and subjugating relations between the orphans and the special receivers, deepening the misery of the orphans.21 Legislation of Law to Assist Japanese Left Behind in China With the mounting pressure from the Chinese government and Japanese volunteer groups, the Japanese parliament legislated in
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Sugawara Became Multiple Receiver
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March 1994 the Law Concerning Promotion of Smooth Repatriation and Assistance to Self- Sufficiency After Permanent Repatriation of the Japanese Left Behind in China and Others (the “1994 Assistance Law,” hereafter). It was the first legislation of a law concerning the Japanese left behind in China ever to be legislated by the Japanese parliament. The enactment came thirteen years after the orphans’ repatriation began in 1981. This was forty-nine years after these Japanese were left behind in China in 1945. The Law was made possible by a historic change in the Japanese government: the “1993 political reformation.” The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost in the general elections of the House of Representatives (HR), the powerhouse of the Japanese parliament, in July. Subsequently, an anti-LDP coalition cabinet took over power from the conservative LDP that had ruled Japan for nearly four decades. Then Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro of the new coalition cabinet stated in August 1993, on the end- of-the-war anniversary, that the Japanese war in Asia was a “war of aggression, a mistaken war,” and admitted Japan’s responsibility for it. Moreover, former Democratic Socialist Party President Ouchi Keigo became the Hosokawa cabinet’s health minister. Ouchi tried to alleviate the misery of the orphans and the women left behind (see chapter 9).22 The legislation was also owed to a new HR member who was elected in the July 1993 general elections. That was Tanaka Makiko, daughter of Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei (1972–1974). Tanaka had been revered by the Chinese as the builder of the restoration of SinoJapanese relations (Tanaka’s nickname was “bulldozer”), even after his fall from power, involving money scandals. Makiko ran in her father’s electoral district and won a seat in the HR in 1993, before his death later that year. She carried on her father’s mission to promote Sino-Japanese relations and became an advocate for the orphan issue. In defiance of the Ministry of Heath, this first-year parliamentarian sponsored a bill in December 1993. The parliament passed it in March 1994; thus the “1944 Assistance Law” was legislated. Thereafter, the Ministry of Health removed the special receiver system by integrating it into the receiver system. This meant that the orphans and the women left behind, who could not be repatriated due to their kin’s refusal to become their special receivers, could be repatriated by finding a regular “receiver” instead of a “special receiver.” They still needed receivers for their repatriation, though not their kin’s consent. The Ministry also decided to assume the legal cost of establishing their domiciles.23
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The 1994 Assistance Law, however, was not a panacea. The law did not remove the core legal barriers to the repatriation of the orphans: the need to reestablish their domiciles, as well as the need to find receivers. The orphans were still Chinese as far as the Japanese government was concerned. They needed a receiver in order to return to their homeland. Their receiver still had to request the government for repatriation travel expenses on their behalf. Without satisfying these requirements, the orphans could not be repatriated through the official channels and could not receive any public assistance for settlement. The Ministry of Health officials in fact stated that the law simply enacted the things that they had been doing already, and that there was nothing new in its content. The one thing that should be noted was that the law for the first time referred to the promotion of repatriation of the Japanese left behind and provision of assistance for their self-sufficiency as the “responsibility of the government and others.” While the addition of “and others” makes the accountability ambiguous, it was the first time that the Japanese government appeared to have acknowledged its postwar responsibility toward the orphans officially. It took half a century for the government to refer to its postwar responsibility toward the orphans.24 The 1994 Assistance Law also limited the number of adult family members that could accompany the orphans, adding a new impediment to their repatriation (see chapter 11). Overall, the 1994 Assistance Law was “two steps forward and one step backward” at best. The government dealt with the orphan issue with patchwork measures, without any consistent plans. It treated the orphans as legal aliens and considered the orphan issue as a problem of the individuals, imposing the task of repatriation on the orphans’ kin and volunteers.25 Kinoshita does not blame the orphans’ kin for not coming forward and agreeing to become their receivers, because the financial and psychological burdens were too heavy for any individual to carry. Instead, Kinoshita holds the government responsible for not taking realistic measures to repatriate the orphans. He argues that the government should have exempted the orphans from the legal requirements applicable for foreigners to enter Japan. It should have arranged the legal framework in such a way that they could be repatriated as Japanese. The government also should have made the unidentified orphans, who were recognized as Japanese by the Chinese government, legally Japanese as soon as possible. It should have taken the initiative to facilitate their repatriation by
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acting as their “collective receiver.” After all, the orphans had missed the chance of repatriation half a century earlier on account of the war. They were legally Japanese then. It was the Japanese government (the Kishi cabinet) that designated them as “wartime dead” and had their parents eliminate their domiciles in 1959.26 Kinoshita also states that when it comes to the legal status of the orphans, the Ministry of Justice was most rigid, adhering to its original position of treating them as legal aliens. In comparison, the Ministry of Health was not so much concerned with their legal status, and provided repatriation travel expenses and some other assistance, albeit quite insufficient. Japanese family courts approved the establishment of their domiciles. The Chinese government also recognized the orphans as Japanese and permitted them to leave the country. Kinoshita notes that the Ministry of Justice’s persistent position that the orphans were legal aliens brought about unlimited difficulties for the orphans’ repatriation. In this sense, the Ministry of Health should be given due credit for assisting the orphans’ repatriation as much as it could within its jurisdiction, amid the inter-ministry turf battles among the Ministry of Justice, the MOFA, and the Ministry of Finance, whose officials questioned why they should pay for travel expenses of people who were not yet proven to be Japanese. Overall, the Ministry of Health demonstrated typical bureaucratic inertia and inaction in dealing with the orphan issue.27 Third Obstacle to Orphans’ Repatriation: Foster Parents’ Care As soon as the first official search mission ended in March 1981, the permanent settlement of the orphans became a foreign policy issue between China and Japan. The Japanese government had no policy regarding how to support the orphans’ foster parents in China after the orphans settled in Japan. The officials of the two governments met in January 1983 to salvage the situation, and the Ministry of Health agreed to create a fund to support the orphans’ foster parents.28 Creation of Private Fund to Assist Orphans In April 1983, the Ministry of Health created a private fund, called the “Fund to Assist the Orphans Left Behind in China.” It was designed to
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send money to the foster parents of the orphans and to assist the repatriated orphans’ settlement and self-sufficiency. Health Minister Imai Isamu f lew to Beijing in May 1986 and settled the amount of the benefit. The Ministry decided to pay a lump sum per person of 10,800 yuan (US$1,481), which was the estimated cost of taking care of one foster parent for fifteen years. The amount was based on the assumption that the monthly cost to support one dependent was 60 yuan (US$8.23). Even though the cost of living was low in China, 60 yuan was hardly enough to support one foster parent, let alone two.29 The Ministry decided that the private fund would raise ¥1 billion (US$9.1 million). The collected money would be sent to the China Red Cross. The China Red Cross would then distribute the money to the respective foster parents. The Ministry established a private fund to raise money, instead of appropriating it in the national budget. The Ministry justified soliciting donations from the Japanese at large by stating that it was necessary to show the sincerity of the Japanese people. The Japanese government was either oblivious to the necessity to show sincerity on its own part, or thought that it was unnecessary to do so.30 The fund only collected ¥80 million (US$727,000), far below the target amount, in half a year. With the tireless networking of the volunteers, however, the fund managed to collect ¥1 billion in June 1985. The government again made the volunteer groups to take charge of the task. In order for the foster parents to receive the allowance, the orphans had to apply to the fund on their behalf. However, it was difficult for them to fill out the complex forms in Japanese, which were hard even for ordinary Japanese to understand. Again the volunteers had to help them out. As noted earlier, the Japanese government dealt with the “comfort women” in exactly the same fashion, by creating the Asia Peace Fund for Women at the Japan Red Cross.31 Japan Bar Association’s Resolution Meanwhile, at the initiative of Suzuki Takao of the Tokyo Bar Association, the Japan Bar Association adopted in October 1984 a resolution regarding the repatriation of the Japanese left behind in China. The resolution stated that these Japanese had been deprived of their fundamental human right of repatriation to their homeland for four decades due to the lack of measures on the part of the Japanese government. The resolution called for the government to take necessary
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Tokyo Bar Association’s Request to Government Gravely concerned with the ways in which the government was dealing with the orphan issue, the Tokyo Bar Association submitted a request to the respective ministries concerned, both the HR and the HC, political parties, and the Tokyo government, in October 1986. The request included the following: (1) simplify the repatriation procedures (such as removing the receiver system and the certificate of authorized employment requirement), stop having the orphans register as aliens, and allow them to settle where they wished; (2) assist the orphans’ settlement by providing expansive public services, such as public housing, employment, welfare programs, and education; (3) leave open the opportunity to repatriate the orphans who remained in China, because of their foster parents or other family matters, any time in the future they wished to be repatriated, and at government expense, permit repatriation of the offspring of the orphans who had decided to remain in China permanently, and pay the orphans remaining in China the equivalent amount of the repatriation travel allowances; and (4) help repatriate the women left behind and establish facilities for them to live in Japan.33 There is little change in the legal environment associated with repatriation of the orphans to this day. With the help of the devoted volunteers and lawyers, the orphans fought against the unreasonable legal barriers to repatriation. Nevertheless, their struggle is far from over. Little did they know that it was only the end of the beginning. Before examining a new chapter in their struggle, it is necessary to visit another group of forgotten Japanese left behind in China.
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measures to repatriate orphans as soon as possible and legislate a special law to guarantee the repatriates’ living in Japan and assist them to become self-sufficient. This resolution was significant as the first of its kind that called the government’s neglect a violation of fundamental human rights.32
N I N E
Japanese Women Left Behind in China
There was a strange scene at Narita airport in September 1993. Twelve women who appeared to be Chinese f lew in from Beijing but were “stranded” at Narita airport. The airport immigration control officers did not allow them to enter Japan, because they did not have valid visas and return tickets to China. They were among over 5,000 “Japanese women left behind in China” at the end of World War II. They put out a banner saying, “Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro, please help us.” They pleaded to him, “Please let us die in our homeland, instead of deporting us back to China.” The Ministry of Health identified those who were aged thirteen or more in 1945 as “women left behind in China,” and considered them to have remained in China of their own will. The Ministry did not help their repatriation when it began the search missions for the orphans’ kin in March 1981. The Ministry’s stance was that it owed them nothing, because they knew their identities and (contrary to the fact) they could have returned to Japan on their own if they had wanted. Thus the Japanese government kept ignoring these women. The Ministry allowed them to participate in the orphans’ search missions only in October 1986.1 The Japanese women’s repatriation was still difficult. Just as with the orphans, many of them were designated as “wartime dead” and had graves in their hometowns. The Ministry of Justice treated them as legal aliens and applied the Immigration Control Act and the Alien Registration Law to their repatriation. It required the consent of their kin as guarantors, despite the fact that they were born in Japan and had grown up in Japan. The parents of most of these women had died in Manchuria, or passed away after their own repatriation. Their aged siblings had refused to become their guarantors. Worse, these women
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could not use the “receiver system” introduced in 1985, because it was designed solely to help the unidentified orphans. While the Ministry of Health allowed these women to use the “special receiver system” in 1991, few people were willing to become the aged women’s special receivers.2 As the special receiver system did little to help the identified orphans, the system proved to be ineffectual to the women’s repatriation. In fact, only about fifty women had been repatriated through the special receiver system by September 1993, when the twelve women landed at Narita airport. That was 2.5 percent of the 2,000 women still left behind in China at that time. An observer states that, given the impracticality of the special receiver system, one is hard pressed to believe that the government conceived it to help repatriate anyone. Moreover, the unreasonable requirements imposed on these women’s repatriation seem to contradict the government’s stated stance on these women. The government considered these women mature enough to fend for themselves in war-torn Manchuria and to have remained in China on their own will. The government also did not help their repatriation, considering them mature enough to return to Japan by themselves. Following this logic, why should they need a guarantor in order to return to their homeland where they had grown up? Worse, the government did not allow their spouses and children to accompany their repatriation. Consequently, their repatriation was blocked for half a century.3 “12 Angry Women” The “12 angry women,” ranging in age from fifty-six to eighty years, f lew to Narita airport, with one-way tickets, in their desperate attempt to return to their homeland. They were in a poor condition in every sense of the word. Most of them had chronic ailments. Only three of them spoke Japanese f luently. Others had forgotten Japanese. They wanted to appeal to the Japanese government that had kept denying them the right to repatriation to their homeland, one of the fundamental human rights stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. They had planned to go straight to Tokyo to appeal to Prime Minister Hosokawa; however, their arrival fell on a Sunday and they were obliged to stay overnight in the airport lobby. Their leader Takekoshi Rie did not realize this, being preoccupied with the more serious concern that they would be detained or deported back to China.4
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Hearing of their “forcible landing” and the “besieging” of Narita airport, the mass media f locked to the airport. Through the press the 12 women appealed to Prime Minister Hosokawa, saying that the government had kept telling them to ask their kin, or to wait until they found special receivers. They could not wait for government permission any longer. The coverage of their tearful pleas caught national attention. The Hosokawa coalition cabinet had just been formed in August during the historic political reformation of 1993. Prime Minister Hosokawa stated on August 15 (end- of-the-war anniversary) that Japan’s war in Asia was a “war of aggression, a mistaken war.” It was under this political context that the twelve women landed in Japan “forcibly” in September 1993.5 Japanese Women Missed Collective Repatriation of 1953 The Japanese government insisted that over 5,000 Japanese women had remained in China of their own will. Then why did they miss the collective repatriation of 1953? It was because they had married Chinese and had families in China. This was the only way for them to survive in China. There were other reasons why Japanese girls had married Chinese men and had remained in China. They did so in exchange for Chinese help to repatriate the rest of their families. In either case, with the Soviet Army invasion, Japanese women were left to fend for themselves and to take care of their children, siblings, and in-laws, while their fathers and husbands were conscripted. They wandered around in the wilderness until the local Chinese saved their lives. They married their saviors or their sons. These women experienced even more horrendous cruelty and misery than the orphans, including gang rape by the Soviet Army or the local Chinese militia groups. They endured unspeakable humiliation and subjugation. Among them were thirteenyear-old girls.6 The accounts of some of these women given below show the extreme circumstances in which they had married Chinese and remained in China. Takekoshi Rie: Leader of the “12 Angry Women” The leader of the “12 angry women,” Takekoshi Rie (69 years old), went to Manchuria in 1944 at the age of twenty. She was one of the “war brides to the continent,” who were recruited by the Imperial
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Japanese Women Left Behind in China
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Japanese Army (IJA) to marry officers there. Her bridegroom was stationed at the military headquarters at Jiamusi. He left Jiamusi on a secret mission in June 1945, without telling her where he would be going. A month later, Takekoshi and other officers’ families were ordered to evacuate. A group of about fifty people left Jiamusi on the evacuation train, but the train stopped at Tonghe. The local Chinese there attacked them. Then the Russian soldiers told them that they would release the train if they gave them their watches. They gave the soldiers thirty watches. The train then left Tonghe but stopped again at Changchun. The Japanese soldiers had already withdrawn to Dalian, and the refugees stayed in the vacated military housing. Takekoshi and another woman began working at a Chinese restaurant as dishwashers, but they ran away when the owner tried to make them his concubines. They spent the winter in a Japanese refugee camp. Takekoshi then worked at a dance hall where KMT and Russian military officers visited. Dancers were provided with food only once a day. A Chinese police officer one day told Takekoshi that it was not a good place to work. She replied that she could not make a living otherwise. Then, he proposed to her. Takekoshi accepted his proposal.7 In 1953, Takekoshi had a chance to join the collective repatriation. Her husband consented to her repatriation. However, she would have to leave her baby son in China. The Japanese government did not allow the Japanese women’s children to accompany them, because their children were Chinese according to Japanese law. In contrast, Japanese men could bring their children to Japan, because their children were legally Japanese. They were legally Japanese even if they were born in China and their mothers were Chinese, due to the paternal blood principle of the Japanese Nationality Law (see chapter 11). Takekoshi gave up the chance for repatriation. They had four children. Then her husband was detained during the Cultural Revolution, because his father was a landlord and he was married to a Japanese. She sold all their furniture to survive. Their eldest son passed the entrance exam of Jilin University, but was denied admission. Their eldest daughter was bullied as a “little Japanese demon” at school. When Sino-Japanese relations were normalized, Takekoshi wrote to her mother in Hokkaido and made her first homecoming in 1977. Her mother begged her to stay in Japan. She told Takekoshi that she would give her a restaurant and a hotel she owned if she stayed. However, her husband wrote to her that she should come back and live in China until all of their children became independent. She wanted to stay in Japan, but she could not abandon her family in China. Also, her mother’s offer was not well received by
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her siblings. She thus went back to China. Her mother died three years later. Afterward, her siblings stopped answering her letters.8
Nakagawa Tami had settled in a village sixty-five miles north of Qiqihar. Her husband had been conscripted. She was twenty-seven years old when the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria. At the time, she had a child who was a toddler and was also pregnant. The Chinese mobs looted all the food and firewood from their settlement. She still vividly remembered the faces of dying fellow settlers, calling out the names of their spouses and mothers. Then the Chinese villagers came with horse carriages to the settlement in order to “recruit” wives. According to Chinese custom, men paid a dowry to their brides’ families. The villagers came to the Japanese settlements to have wives for free. The surviving women, including Nakagawa, were “allocated” to Chinese men as their wives. They had no place to appeal. That was how she married a Chinese. Another woman was taken by the Soviet Army and was forced to work to remove railroad tracks to be shipped to Siberia, without wearing boots. She “ran” to a Chinese house for help when her soles came off from her feet due to severe frostbite. She survived only by marrying the son of the Chinese who saved her. These women would have crawled back to Japan had it not been for the Sea of Japan.9 Temporary Homecoming of 1956 Many Japanese women left behind made a temporary homecoming in June 1956 made possible by the Tianjin Agreement. Nevertheless, their lost years and the sufferings during these years were not relieved by these visits. The Japanese folks and the government officials questioned them as to why they had married Chinese, and disdained them as “Chinese.” They did not try to understand that death was the only alternative to their marriage to Chinese. Heartbroken, these women returned to their Chinese families. Even after the normalization of Sino- Japanese relations, these women not only could not return to Japan permanently but also could not make a temporary homecoming, unless their kin had consented to their visits. The Ministry of Health allowed their temporary homecoming at its
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expense, at ten-year intervals and for a maximum of twice per person in her lifetime, only when their Japanese kin applied for authorization for each trip from the Ministry on their behalf. Similarly, the Ministry allowed their permanent repatriation only when their kin agreed to become their guarantors. With the introduction of the special receiver system, they needed to have a special receiver in lieu of their kin’s consent.10 In October 1986, the Ministry for the first time released statistics on the Japanese women left behind in China. According to that data, about 1,000 women had already returned to Japan and 3,500 still remained in China. About 2,700 of them made temporary homecomings after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. These visits awakened their longing for their homeland buried deep in their hearts. As they aged, this longing grew stronger. Unlike the orphans, who were born in Manchuria or left Japan when they were small and have little memory of Japan, these women had grown up in Japan. They wanted to visit their old hometowns and see their parents while they were still alive.11 Volunteer Kunitomo Tadashi As in the case of the orphans, it was volunteers who helped out these women. Kunitomo Tadashi was conscripted at the age of twenty and had been engaged in the covert information task in China. After the war, he suffered from guilt feelings for having left behind uninformed civilians who knew nothing about the military moves of Japan and of the Soviet Union. To atone for his guilt, Kunitomo created the Shun’yo-kai (the Spring Light Society) to help the women left behind in China. He built an accommodation facility, Furusato-no-ie (Home sweet home), in Ibaragi prefecture. He then invited the women who had never returned to Japan, or had not returned to Japan for more than ten years, for a twenty- day homecoming. He hosted the women whose kin refused to have them in their hometown, and took them sightseeing. Kunitomo has sponsored more than 300 women since 1989. He also gave them ¥100,000 (US$909) each to buy anything they wanted. They saved the money, instead of spending it for their own pleasure.12 Meanwhile, exceptional women returned to Japan alone, worked hard to save money, and succeeded in having their families move to Japan.
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Fujita Tomino settled in Hunchun, near Vladivostok, in May 1945 with her father and four younger siblings when she was eighteen years old. They had no choice but to go there, because the village official ordered them to go. She was recalled from her job at a silk thread factory in Nagano in order to join the settlement mission. During the Soviet Army invasion, her father was beaten to death by Japanese Youth Volunteer Corps members. Three of her siblings died of hunger and sickness. Fujita lost the sight in her right eye owing to a bomb explosion. After the war, Fujita and her surviving brother worked in a coal mine, but the mine was soon closed down. Her brother was adopted and taken away. Fujita was sold to an old Chinese couple, as a house slave. They made her tend pigs, but she could not understand Chinese. Her foster mother frequently beat her. Then the family’s house was destroyed by a f lood. The couple’s son sold Fujita to a fifty-three-yearold man for 155 pounds of corn. Her husband also beat her up. Her first baby died five months after birth. Then she had a son, but her husband kept beating her. One of the villagers took pity on her and rescued her from her husband, and sold her to another man. Her second husband was kind. He treated her as a wife, not as a slave, and took her to a doctor. His brother’s children taught her Chinese. For the first time after the war, she was treated as a human being. Fujita returned to Japan alone in 1974. Her relatives were cold to her. Her coworkers bullied her as Chinese. She changed jobs more than a dozen times in five years. She worked hard until the age of seventy-one at a carpentry shop, and meanwhile managed to save money to have her children come to live in Japan.13 Suzuki Noriko: Exploited as House Slave Suzuki Noriko was sold to a Chinese man at the age of sixteen. He was a trader and gambler. He beat her and made her work like a cow, even her injured leg was left untreated. In winter she made yarn out of goat hair and knitted a sweater, but the man took it away from her. Without any warm clothes to wear, she kept shivering in a hemp sack, freezing to death, and thinking only about dying. After three years, other villagers decided to save her life, and one of them bought her from the trader. This villager was a poor farmer, but his family was kind to her. When she was released from the bondage of enslavement,
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she felt a sudden burst of longing for her homeland. Then came the establishment of communist China. A political counselor then visited the village. Suzuki thought that she would be tortured to death for being Japanese. To her surprise, the counselor told her that she too was a victim of the war. The trader who treated her brutally was arrested and sentenced to death by the “peoples’ trial.”14 Suzuki felt that she was given a new lease on life in the new China. She made up her mind to live as an honorable Japanese and to return her indebtedness to the villager’s family and China. She married the villager’s eldest son, who was a coalminer in Liaoning province. She worked at a tractor parts manufacturing factory and learned Chinese. They worked day and night, but their living conditions were difficult. Meanwhile, she kept thinking about many questions she did not know the answers to. “Why did the Japanese settle in China? Why did the Kwantung Army leave the settlers behind? What was the idea of equality in the new China?” When China joined the Korean War, the Chinese suffered from food shortages and the staple food was rationed. The government, however, gave the Japanese residents special ration of rice, instead of wheat. When she later learned about the Japanese invasion of China through photo exhibitions on the “Rape of Nanking” and other incidents, she was shocked and felt guilty for having received the special ration of rice from the Chinese government. She had five children with her Chinese husband. But they were bullied and called “little Japan.” She felt helpless for the fact that children could not choose their birthplace. Thinking of her children and the Chinese victims of the war, she could not bring herself to ask her husband about repatriation, which was always in her mind.15 When Sino-Japanese relations were normalized in 1972, Suzuki found out that she was the only survivor in her family that had settled in Manchuria. Suzuki made a homecoming to Tokyo in 1978 with her youngest daughter. Japan had become an economic giant and had forgotten about people like her. She rented an apartment and worked as a cleaner and a seamstress day and night. Two years later, she found a public housing in Tokyo and had the rest of her family members move to Japan. However, people were cold to her family. Her husband worked at a bicycle parking lot until he was seventy. Suzuki worked until she was sixty-five years old, when her children asked her to stop working.16 Having experienced firsthand the tribulations of the orphans, Suzuki organized the “Society for the Repatriates from China” in Tokyo in 1982. Realizing that language was the hardest obstacle for their settlement, the group opened a Japanese language school. It was located in
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the basement of a small office building behind Tokyo Dome, a huge sports arena with a 50,000-person capacity. Tokyo Dome symbolized postwar Japan’s prosperity, while the tiny Japanese school symbolized the orphans’ poverty. The dichotomy was an epitome of the plight of the repatriates from China. The orphans and their families came to the school every day from far away places. The Society opened nine Japanese schools in total, and also a Japanese training center in Harbin in August 1988, with the help of Heilongjiang province. It required enormous energy for a voluntary group to run all these facilities. Suzuki was the driving force behind it all.17 Tragedies upon Repatriation The lives of the repatriated women were not easy, even if they grew up in Japan and spoke Japanese. The Japanese society treated them harshly. People despised them for marrying Chinese. Their relatives kept a distance from them. The repatriated women could not find stable jobs in their hometowns. Their children were bullied at school, where there was no Japanese language class. As a result, they drifted to Tokyo and lived in the homeless repatriates’ shelter. In this social context, there were some tragic incidents that occurred. For instance, a woman who made a temporary homecoming committed suicide in August 1979. Then, a permanently repatriated woman killed her kin in a family feud in Kobe in November 1982. The Osaka High Court sentenced her to a five-year-prison term with probation, considering the mitigating circumstances.18 In addition, a woman hanged herself in 1991, during her homecoming at the invitation of Kunitomo’s Shun’yo-kai, after she found out that her kin were opposed to her permanent repatriation. None of her kin were willing to be involved with her funeral, and Kunitomo ended up holding her funeral service. This incident made him realize the need to take more drastic actions to help repatriate the remaining 2,000–2,500 women left behind. Kunitomo told Takekoshi, who was one of his guests in April 1993, that she could take action with other women. Takekoshi discussed the matter with the other five women who were in the same homecoming and “recruited” six more women back in China. In September 1993, the “12 angry women” landed at Narita airport. Kunitomo had told Takekoshi not to mention about him to anyone, even to the eleven other women. He stayed behind the scenes, so that their visit would cause a sensation. His plan had worked. He had
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hired twenty lawyers as a precaution in case they were arrested at the airport. Takekoshi revealed this truth after Kunitomo died in 2005, at the age of eighty-six.19
In September 1993, the Hosokawa cabinet’s Health Minister Ouchi Keigo tried to intervene with the bureaucratic red tape. Ouchi rejected the suggestion of the Ministry’s Assistance Bureau Director General to deport the twelve women back to China. Instead, Ouchi decided that if the Ministry would not accept them because they did not have receivers, he would become the special receiver of all twelve women. The Ministry official told Ouchi that a health minister could not do that. In the end, the Ministry decided to accept their repatriation, as an exception. The Ministry allowed them to stay at the Tokorozawa Settlement Promotion Center, which was otherwise reserved exclusively for the orphans, while the Ministry looked for their receivers. Only three women were accepted by their kin, and the other nine were assigned to special receivers.20 The “12 angry women’s” media coverage affected public opinion and led to a change in the government’s treatment of these women. Health Minister Ouchi also made it clear that the government should take charge of the repatriation of these women, rather than depending on individual goodwill. Ouchi also shortened the interval for the women’s temporary homecoming to five years from ten years, and to three years for those who were seventy years and older. Aided by this new health minister, the parliament legislated the Law to Assist the Japanese Left Behind in China, in 1994 (see chapter 8). This legislation stipulated that the Ministry give the women the same public assistance as the orphans, including the repatriation travel expense and public housing accommodations. The Ministry also opened a branch settlement promotion center to assist them. These women were finally treated equally with the orphans. A half a century had passed since the end of the war.21 “12 Angry Women’s” Lives after Repatriation Nevertheless, it was only the end of the beginning for the twelve women’s struggle to resettle in their homeland. Six months after their
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repatriation, only one had any work. All the rest received welfare benefit. All of them wished that their families also could settle in Japan, but only four of them could afford to move some of their children to Japan at that time. Their kin or special receivers felt that looking after these women itself was a burden, let alone their families. In fact, only one case, out of the three that were accepted by their kin, actually worked out. Sasaki Hisae’s elder brother in Fukuoka originally refused to become her receiver, but he accepted her permanent repatriation and undertook to care for her. However, the case of Aoki Satoko was different.22 Aoki Satoko: Rejected by Birth Brother Aoki Satoko settled in Heihe, across Blagoveshchensk, in 1943 at the age of nineteen. During the evacuation, the Russian soldiers robbed her group. Aoki and other women shaved their heads and put charcoal on their faces to disguise themselves as men; however, the soldiers touched their bosoms to check if they were women. Aoki was then taken into a refugee camp. She suffered from diarrhea and malnutrition and spent the subzero winter with a single layer of clothes on. She caught typhoid fever and was abandoned on the street in Qiqihar. Then an old Chinese took her to a hospital. She married this man’s son. Aoki gave up repatriation in 1953 because she could not leave her child. When Sino-Japanese relations were normalized, she wrote to her father in her hometown, Yamagata. Her father was by then already dead, and her elder brother wrote back to her. He sent her several letters requesting her to relinquish all properties and assets in Japan. When she agreed to all his conditions, her brother accepted her temporary visit in 1974; however, he did not approve her permanent repatriation.23 In 1993, Aoki’s brother agreed to become her receiver only to save face. He was an inf luential figure in her hometown, and the “12 women” had become a national sensation. Even so, he asked her why she came back. When Aoki asked him to have one of her grandchildren come to live with her, he rejected it. He told her to go back to China. Aoki left her brother’s house. They never spoke to each other again. Then people criticized her for living off the government money (welfare benefit). They asked why the government had to pay for her living when she had her own kin to look after her. Aoki stated, “I have spent 50 years in China, crying. Then I had to live in my homeland, crying again. The only things that did not change were the mountains and rivers of
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my hometown.” Aoki felt that the war was not over as long as women were still left behind in China. She had witnessed Japanese soldiers and military police officers beating the local Chinese, like killing dogs. Yet they receive generous military pensions. The women left behind were “punished” in China for decades for the crimes committed by the Japanese military. Yet repatriated women receive nothing. Looking at an old picture of her Japanese family, Aoki wonders what made her family become so torn apart.24 Araki Michiko: Exploited by Special Receiver The lives of those who were completely rejected by their kin were even more miserable. Araki Michiko was orphaned at age eight when her parents were shot to death during their evacuation from Mishan in Dongan province. A Chinese who came to pick up the belongings of the dead Japanese settlers found her and two of her surviving siblings and took them to a village. She was adopted by a childless couple and worked as a house slave. Her foster parents had ten children of their own after they had adopted her. Her foster grandmother beat her up. Each time she was beaten, she thought of her birthmother and her hometown, Shimabara-Unzen (the location of an active volcano, Unzendake), in Nagasaki prefecture. She kept thinking about the bubbling hot spa in her backyard, the smell of sulfur, and boiled eggs her mother made in the hot spa, hoping that she would return there someday. She had only one pair of clothes and had no shoes. Her feet were swollen and festered from frostbite. She was not allowed to go to school. Her foster parents sold her to a Chinese as his wife, for 300 yuan, when she was eighteen years old. Her husband was kind. He used to work at a gold refinery in Shenyang run by a Japanese, who was kind to Chinese workers. However, Araki’s children were bullied. The neighborhood children threw stones at them, pinioned them, and chopped their hair off.25 When Sino-Japanese relations were normalized, Araki contacted her elder sister who had remained in Japan and visited her in 1976. However, her sister refused to become her guarantor. In 1993, she joined the homecoming sponsored by the Shun’yo-kai and learned about Takekoshi’s plan. She did not miss the chance. Nevertheless, her sister still refused to become her receiver. Araki settled in at her special receiver’s house in Nagasaki in November 1993. She received ¥60,000 (US$545) monthly welfare benefit, but her special receiver asked her
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to pay him ¥20,000 monthly rent. She began working at his pig farm, tending 4,000 pigs all day long. He paid her only ¥30,000 a month. He told her that her salary was low because she was part of the family. She reported her salary to the welfare office. Then the office reduced her welfare benefit by ¥30,000. No matter how hard she worked, her total income was only ¥60,000. She broke two ribs and injured her chest at work. Then the receiver told her that he was disappointed in her lack of willingness to work. He also rejected Araki’s plea to have her family come to live with her. Araki realized that he became her special receiver only to use her as his worker.26 Araki left his house and moved into the facility of the Nagasaki SelfSufficiency Training Center for the Repatriates from China (see chapter 10). A staff member at the center stated that Araki’s special receiver did not understand his role. He blames the Ministry of Health for its lack of scruples in choosing the special receiver. Araki’s height was only 4.5 feet. Araki’s shoulders were too thin to be human, suggesting the years of abuse she underwent. She went to a Japanese school only up to the second grade. She could not read letters from her Chinese family either. She began studying Japanese at the center and hoped to find a job, so that she could have her family come to live with her someday.27 These repatriated women felt that they were treated like prisoners and engaged in forced labor, whereas their special receivers thought that they were treating them very well. It was analogous to the episodes in Kurosawa Akira’s film Rashomon (based on the novel, Yabu no naka, by Akutagawa Ryunosuke), in which each suspect in a crime gives a radically divergent account of the same crime scene. The bottom line is that all the twelve women missed the 1953 collective repatriation because of their Chinese families. Their permanent repatriation was then barred due to the rejection by their kin. The government’s unreasonable repatriation restrictions and requirements caused unsalvageable severing of relations between these women and their kin. Nishida Rumiko: Eleven-Year- Old Girl Categorized as “Woman” Nishida Rumiko, born in 1934, had joined the Saga Settlement Mission with her family. She did not know that Japan had invaded China. Disguised as a boy, Nishida was a witness to living hell. Some mothers carried dead babies on their backs, while others committed
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suicide with their babies. Female settlers were begging male settlers to kill them. Nishida felt as if death was a natural thing to happen. She survived only because a Chinese saved her. She was bullied and wanted to go back to Japan, but she had no means to contact Japan. Nishida returned to Japan in 1988 alone. She worked at a Chinese restaurant and was despised as Chinese there. Once, in a public place, a Japanese woman noticed Nishida’s accent and found out that she was a repatriate from China. The woman then told Nishida that she did not have to feel ashamed and should live proudly. Nishida did not understand why she had to feel ashamed of herself in the first place. Although the woman meant well, Nishida detected in her sympathy a prejudice toward the repatriates from China on the part of Japanese society at large.28 Nishida was categorized as a “woman left behind in China,” notwithstanding the fact that she was only eleven years old at the end of the war. Confirming this fact, the Ministry of Health official in charge of the orphan issue stated, “If a girl knew her identity, she was categorized as a ‘woman left behind in China,’ even if she was three years old.” In fact, the Ministry’s definition of the orphans was “those who were under 13 years old at the end of the war and did not know their identities.” The logic behind this definition seems that if a girl knew her name, she did not need government help regardless of her age, because she could find her kin through her name. This also explains the fact that four of the “12 angry women” were younger than thirteen at the end of the war. Actually, two of them were only eight years old, and the other two were ten years old. Nevertheless, the Ministry categorized them as “women left behind,” because they knew their Japanese names, thus barring them from repatriation as orphans. In order to be repatriated, these children must not have remembered their Japanese names.29 As of July 2008, a total of 3,840 women were repatriated since the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. However, countless Japanese women still remain in China because of their reluctance to be repatriated without their Chinese families. Meanwhile, the repatriates’ struggle for settlement still continues.
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Orphans’ Struggles for Settlement
The Ministry of Health opened two Support and Exchange Centers for the Repatriates from China in 2001 (in Tokyo and Osaka), one in 2004 (Fukuoka), two in 2006 (Nagoya and Hiroshima), and two in 2007 (Sapporo and Sendai). These seven centers were created at institutions affiliated with the respective local governments and are run by government officials. These centers offer language classes (at beginner and intermediate levels), and computer classes (introductory, basic, and introductory Excel courses), in order to help the repatriates to attain “financial and social self-sufficiency.” A question then is why the Ministry had to create such centers twenty years after the orphan’s repatriation began. This indicates that the Ministry’s previous programs to help the repatriates were largely ineffectual.1 Having cleared the legal obstacles to repatriation, the orphans opened a new chapter of their arduous journey to settle in their homeland. Upon repatriation, the Ministry of Health gave the orphans a onetime “repatriation allowance.” The Ministry renamed it the “self-sufficiency assistance allowance” in 1987 and paid ¥159,400 to each orphan. In 1995, the allowance was ¥161,900 (US$1,472) per adult and ¥80,950 (US$736) for each dependent under eighteen years. The allowance remained ¥161,900 in 2007. This allowance was barely sufficient to pay the initial rent (with the guarantee fee, the handling fee, and the security deposit, with each costing a month’s rent or more). However, the financial difficulty was only the superficial problem for the orphans’ struggles in settling in Japan. The deeper problem was that the orphans did not speak Japanese. They had no knowledge of the Japanese customs or the code of conduct. Their situation was dubbed, “happy for the first year of repatriation, worried and sad for the second year, and
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growing grey hair for the third year.” The two hardest obstacles to the orphans’ settlement were learning to speak Japanese and finding jobs, which were closely interlinked.2
The repatriated orphans received Japanese language training for four months at the Tokorozawa Settlement Promotion Center for the Orphans Repatriated from China (the “Tokorozawa Center,” hereafter), which opened in Saitama prefecture in 1984. The training was hardly sufficient to learn to speak even basic Japanese. The Ministry of Health extended the language program to eight months in 1988. However, it was still difficult for middle-aged orphans to learn Japanese. It took five years for the orphans, who were old enough to speak Japanese at the end of the war, to relearn Japanese after four decades of being out of touch with the language. The pain of the language impediment was such that some orphans referred to themselves as “speech impaired.” They had to carry their “speech impediment” and the pains that accompanied it to their graves. A male orphan who could not be repatriated until 1994, because of the special receiver requirement, stated that the first employer promised to make him a full employee after two months. However, the employer later told him that he could not become a full employee until he mastered Japanese. He quit the company. Then he was injured in a traffic accident and lost his second job in January 2001. He lived on unemployment benefit until the end of that year and began working part-time afterward.3 Second Obstacle to Settlement: Finding Jobs The repatriated orphans had a hard time finding stable jobs in Japan, not only because they could not speak Japanese but also because their credentials and expertise acquired in China, such as those of doctor, engineer, or teacher, did not mean anything in Japan. For instance, a female orphan became a family-practice doctor and had a successful career and life in China. Speaking f luent Chinese, nobody would recognize her as Japanese. She found her Japanese kin in the mid-1980s and wanted to return to Japan with her Chinese family. However, her husband opposed the idea of starting all over again in Japan. He also forbade their children to go with her. Consequently, she was repatriated
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alone, leaving her family behind. Only after she had settled in Japan did she realize the difficulty of making a living in Japan. Her medical license did not mean anything in Japan and she failed to find a stable job. She subsequently returned to her family in China for good.4 In the case of Nakai Reiko, this elementary schoolteacher returned to Japan with her Chinese husband and three children, through a receiver, in April 1987. They studied Japanese for four months at the Tokorozawa Center, but they still could not speak Japanese. Regardless of her language problem, the social worker at the Center urged her to find a job as soon as possible. Nakai began working as a cook. Then she worked at a cleaning company until her retirement at the age of sixty in September 2002. There her coworkers made her do all the work that they did not want to do, such as carrying heavy things and putting out garbage bags. They told Nakai that she had to do these chores because she was Chinese. They told her that she should go back to China if she did not like it.5 The so-called 3K (kitsui, kitanai, kiken) work, or 3D (difficult, dirty, and dangerous) work, was usually assigned to foreign workers. Japanese society considered the repatriated orphans to be foreign immigrants and imposed these undesirable 3K jobs on them (see chapter 14). Ineffectual and Insufficient Government Assistance The way the Ministry of Health dealt with the orphans’ settlement is demonstrated by the fact that it opened the Tokorozawa Center only in 1984, whereas the orphans’ repatriation began in 1981. The number of Settlement Promotion Centers peaked at ten nationwide in 1995, but then it was gradually reduced to only one (Tokorozawa) by the end March 2008. Only in 1988 did the Ministry create Self-Sufficiency Training Centers for the Repatriates from China in fifteen locations nationwide, to provide language and job training for eight months duration. The number peaked at twenty in 1995, but it decreased to four by the end of March 2008.6 According to the poll released by the Ministry in September 2000, only 29.3 percent of the repatriated orphans were employed then. Only 3.1 percent of the orphans started work within less than a year after their repatriation, 2.8 percent between one and two years after repatriation, 3.2 percent between two and three years after repatriation, 27.4 percent between three and four years after repatriation, 20.0 percent between four and five years after repatriation, and 42 percent after more than five
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years after repatriation. Given the fact that most of the repatriates have failed to learn Japanese and obtain stable jobs, the usefulness of these centers was limited.7 The poll also showed that almost half of those who did work (45.6 percent) found their jobs through regular employment agencies, with no regard for the orphans’ special background. In comparison, 13.7 percent found their jobs through acquaintances, 12.1 percent on their own, 9.9 percent through trainers at the Self- Sufficiency Training Centers unofficially as a personal favor to the orphans, 4.9 percent through their receivers, 4.4 percent through the Self-Sufficiency Training Centers officially, 3.3 percent through local governments, and 2.2 percent through the Settlement Promotion Centers. As many as 87.4 percent engaged in low-skilled labor in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and 6.3 percent worked in the service sector as janitors, cleaners, and cooks. The orphans who had professional careers in China, such as doctors and school principals, were no exceptions.8 In terms of income per household (orphans and their spouses combined): 8.2 percent of those who were employed earned less than ¥100,000 (US$909) per month; 34.9 percent earned between ¥100,000 and ¥200,000 (US$1,818); 33.6 percent earned between ¥200,000 and ¥300,000 (US$2,727); 15.1 percent earned between ¥300,000 and ¥400,000; 6.8 percent earned between ¥400,000 and ¥500,000; and 1.4 percent earned more than ¥500,000. The average income was ¥220,000. In contrast, the average Japanese household income was ¥505,000 per month. That the average orphan’s household income was only 43.6 percent that of the average Japanese household epitomized the orphans’ plight.9 Creation of Support and Exchange Centers for Repatriates from China Realizing the continuing difficulty with the aging orphans’ settlement in Japan, as well as that with the second- and third-generation orphans, the Ministry of Health opened Support and Exchange Centers for the Repatriates from China in 2001, as noted above. The outline for these centers states that they offer intermediate and long-term assistance to the repatriates in collaboration with local community groups. Nevertheless, there has been no cooperation between public and private organizations in helping the repatriates from China. On the contrary, they distrust each other. The Support and Exchange Centers are
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run by local governments. They deal with the orphans because that is their job.10 One of the centers’ directors told this author upon an interview request that he would not meet her if she would ask about issues concerning the orphans. He would agree on condition that he would only talk about what the center does for the orphans per se, and nothing else. That was how an interview in late July 2008 was set up. The director, a local government official, was assigned to this position in April 2008, as part of the “rotation” of government positions every few years. He did not seem well versed in the history of Manchuria or the origin of the orphan’s issue. He stated that the repatriates were lazy and were not helping themselves. When this author asked about collaborations between this center and the local volunteer groups, the director rather indignantly stated that his center had nothing whatsoever to do with them. This author then realized that she had stepped on the boundary he had set for this interview. His reaction suggested an adversarial relationship between the two groups, which are both supposed to help the repatriates.11 This concern was confirmed through interviews with a couple of volunteer organizations for the orphans. They deplored the fact that the low-budget, understaffed volunteer groups had to operate on their own without any assistance from the government. In addition to offering language classes and other assistance, one of the volunteer groups the author met had built a collective graveyard for the repatriates’ ancestors who had perished in Manchuria, and conducts memorial services for them regularly.12 Issues Concerning Welfare Benefit Because of the difficulty in finding jobs, despite the existence of the Settlement Promotion Centers and Self-Sufficiency Training Centers, most of the orphans were obliged to live on welfare, called seikatsu-hogo (“public assistance” according to the government official English translation), as soon as they left the Tokorozawa Center or its subcenters. The Ministry of Health normally provides this benefit to Japanese who have failed to be self-sufficient. The benefit is intended to sustain a minimum level of healthy and cultural life, and included allowances for living, education, and housing. For instance, for the fiscal year 2004, a household of three members, which consisted of a thiry-three-yearold husband, a twenty-nine-year-old wife, and a four-year-old child,
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received ¥162,170 (US$1,474) per month in the metropolitan areas, and ¥125,690 (US$1,143) in the rural areas. In comparison, the household of a retired couple, of ages sixty-eight and sixty-five, received ¥121,940 (US$1,109) in the metropolitan areas, and ¥94,500 (US$859) in the rural areas, respectively. As of 2004, as many as 70 percent of the orphans lived on welfare, whereas only 1 percent of the total Japanese population lived on welfare.13 The Ministry uniformly applied strict restrictions on welfare provision to the orphans. First, in order to qualify, recipients must relinquish their personal assets, savings, and possessions, including their own car, even if they needed their cars to work. Second, if the orphans went to work to become self-sufficient, their wages were subtracted from the benefit. For example, a female orphan went to work part-time in order to pay her children’s high school tuitions (she had gone to school only up to the fourth grade, and wanted her children to go to high school. Unlike in the United States, Japanese public high schools are not free). Then, her wages were subtracted from her invalid husband’s welfare benefit, retrospective to four and half years. In addition, the orphans’ public pension of ¥22,000 (US$200) per month was also counted as income, and was subtracted from the benefit (see chapter 12). This caused the ironic situation in which they were better off not working at all, even if they wanted to work for a living. Third, the recipients were subject to house-call inspections by the Social Welfare Bureau from two to ten times per month. They could not even buy a small room air-conditioning equipment in the hot and humid summer, because it was considered a luxury item. In essence, they were forced to live in demeaning conditions of constant surveillance and rigorous scrutiny by the Bureau.14 Meanwhile, social workers kept urging the orphans to find a job as soon as possible and become self-sufficient. However, it took time for the middle-aged orphans to learn Japanese and to master new skills. A female orphan, who returned to Japan in 1991, was yelled at by a social worker at the Tokorozawa Center. The social worker told her that the Japanese people were angry with the orphans because they were living on welfare, implying that they were a burden to the Japanese taxpayers. The harsh words hurt her. She began working as a janitor in 1992, in order not to depend on welfare, earning only ¥60,000 (US$545) per month.15 The way in which the Social Welfare Bureau administered the welfare benefit to “ordinary” Japanese citizens was equally harsh. Many recipients were intimidated and pressured into signing an agreement
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to waive their benefits, and some committed suicide. When such a tragic case occurred in Kita-Kyushu in Fukuoka prefecture in 2007, the city’s confidential step-by-step manual on how to make recipients waive their benefits was discovered. One of the recipients had lost his job as a taxi driver due to illness. He was found dead after having been forced to sign the waiver of his benefit. His last sentence in his diary was, “I want to eat an onigiri (rice ball).” One foreign observer stated that Prime Minister Abe’s vision for a “beautiful nation” stressed self-reliance, which translated into “you’re on your own” for ordinary citizens.16 Advance Travel Notice Requirement Moreover, the Japanese welfare recipients must report in advance when they travel out of town. Their benefit was reduced proportionately per day during their absence. Worse, the benefit was cut off entirely if they failed to report the trip in advance. The deduction of the benefit meant for the orphans that they could not afford a trip to China. This requirement virtually cut their family ties with China. A female orphan who was repatriated in 1998 left her house for a week to look after her recently repatriated son and daughter, because they were sick. Subsequently, she was summoned by the local government office. They asked her if she had been to China and deducted the days of absence from her home from her benefit. She stated that she felt as if she were being treated as a criminal. She could neither visit her family’s graveyard in China, nor even go to Chinatown in Yokohama. She did not feel that the Japanese government treated the orphans as human beings.17 House-call Inspections Sato Kyoko, the tortured surgeon, applied for her repatriation to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing after Sino-Japanese relations were normalized. Her salary was good and her life was stable, but she was determined to return to Japan. Her foster mother also urged her to return to Japan. Sato had her two daughters go to study in Japan in 1984 and 1985, with the financial support of her foster father who had remained in Germany. Then she participated in the search mission in 1985, but could not find her kin. She resigned from the military hospital and was repatriated in February 1987, through a receiver. Sato then settled down in Tokyo. In order to save money, she planned to live with her younger
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daughter who was studying while working part-time. However, the Itabashi-ward’s social worker told her that her welfare benefit would be cut off if she lived with her daughter, because her daughter had an income of ¥100,000 (US$909). Sato rented an apartment and went to an acupuncturist training school in order to become self-sufficient. Then, her ward’s social worker told Sato, “How dare you go to school while living off the Japanese ‘blood taxes’? If you can afford to go to the school, your welfare benefit will be cut off.” She quit school and looked for other jobs. However, she could not find any job because of her disabilities caused by the torture.18 The social worker scrutinized every aspect of Sato’s life. When she passed out in the summer, volunteers bought her a room air conditioner. The social worker asked her how she could have afforded to buy the air conditioner. When she cooked Chinese dumplings for her houseguest, the social worker asked where the money to buy the ingredients came from. When she cooked dumplings for the social worker, the social worker told her that the money for the food came from Japanese taxpayers. The social worker also questioned her about the ring and necklace she had brought from China. When she was wearing new clothes or shoes, the social worker questioned how she had acquired them. When she answered that a friend gave them to her, the social worker asked who it was. She could not wear the new clothes her foster father had sent from Germany for Christmas, because she would be questioned again.19 Sato tried her best to become self-sufficient, but failed. Her two daughters saw no future in Japan and moved to the United States in 1991. Her elder daughter became a doctor and her younger daughter became an art historian. Both married and lived in New York City. Then her foster mother in China died in 1993. She wanted to attend the funeral of her foster mother in China. However, the social welfare office told her that they would not pay her benefits during her trip to China. She could not pay her apartment rent if her benefit was reduced. She gave up the trip. She could not go to the funeral of her foster mother who had saved her life at the cost of her own daughter. The only thing she could do was to save some money and ask a visitor to China to hand over the money to her foster mother’s family.20 Orphans’ Struggles with Settlement: Tanaka Bunji When Tanaka Bunji, the PE school principal, met the writer Yamazaki Toyoko in 1985, she asked him, “You are Japanese. Why wouldn’t you
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like to go back to Japan?” This question hit him and awakened his selfawareness of being Japanese. He also felt that his mother and sister might have returned to Japan. He joined the search mission in June 1986 and met several survivors of the Kurodai settlement in Mishan prefecture in Dongan province. However, none of them remembered his family. Then he met Sugawara Kosuke. Sugawara became his receiver and applied for the establishment of his domicile on his behalf. His repatriation was all set. Tanaka then found out that the Ministry of Health would not pay for his two adult children’s travel expenses. Tanaka could not understand why the Ministry rejected his children’s repatriation. The Ministry ignored the traditional Chinese family structure of “three-generations-under-one-roof.” Tanaka was repatriated in October 1988 with his wife and younger daughter. It was another episode of family separation for Tanaka after the horrific family separation he experienced in 1945. Tanaka felt that this government’s policy was in violation of the 1953 Beijing Agreement that stipulated that the Japanese government would accept the permanent repatriation of the orphans and their families if they wish to be repatriated.21 Upon admission to the Tokorozawa Center, Tanaka was surprised to find out that the attitude of the Japanese had changed from the time when he visited Japan on the search mission two years earlier. They were cold to the repatriates. Yet, Tanaka was fortunate to have his domicile already, and he was assigned to settle in Yokohama. He attended the Kanagawa Self-Sufficiency Center for four months. He could have attended for eight months, but he left earlier because he needed to work as soon as possible to have his two adult children come to live in Japan. He worked at a liquor wholesale company in Kamakura. His job was packing and loading. He learned the names of sake because they were written in Chinese characters, but he could not read the names of western liquors or wines, and there were 300 different brand names. It was both physically and mentally hard work for him. Tanaka worked day and night for three years, and managed to have his son and daughter come to live in Japan. Although he became a “connoisseur” of sake and whisky, he could not learn to speak Japanese.22 Shima Kiyoshi: Living in Salvation Army Shelter Shima Kiyoshi, the “doctor with a Japanese name,” returned to his hometown in Fukushima prefecture with his family in November 1983. His doctor’s license obtained in China did not mean anything
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in Japan. He decided to become a truck driver and went to a driving school, but that did not work out. He then decided to go to an acupuncture school in Tokyo in February 1984. However, he could not pay the admission fee and the first-year tuition, totaling ¥1,560,000 (US$14,182). He borrowed money from every acquaintance he had and decided to live alone in Tokyo, because he could not afford to support his family in Tokyo. He had no money left. His acquaintance found a Salvation Army shelter for alcoholics where he could stay. He lived on only two servings of the cheapest beef-rice-bowl (gyudon) a day. However, Shima was not miserable, having known worse days at the end of the war. He received an acupuncturist’s license in September 1986. He borrowed some money to open an office in Tokyo in January 1987. His new life in Japan had taken off.23 Repatriates’ “U-turn Phenomenon” As in the case of Shima, many orphans who had settled in their hometowns moved back to Tokyo: a U-turn phenomenon. After barely learning the basic Japanese at the Tokorozawa Center, the orphans were sent to their guarantors or receivers in their hometowns. Most of their hometowns were in remote regions where the local people did not speak standard Japanese. The dialects of the Shinshu (present Nagano prefecture), Tohoku, and Kyushu regions, and other places sound very different from standard Japanese. They were another foreign language to the orphans. As the initial welcome wore out, the language barrier blocked communications between the orphans and their kin. Also, the environment in which they grew up was very different. They grew up in a vast open land in Northeast China, whereas most of their hometowns were landlocked mountain villages (this infertile geography was the reason for their parents’ settlement in Manchuria). Differences in the ways of living aggravated the misunderstandings between the orphans and their kin.24 The orphans also realized that they could not settle in their hometowns where the local municipalities lacked or lagged behind the policy to assist the repatriates in larger cities. While there were English language schools in every corner of the streets, there were no Japanese language schools. Thus, the orphans “U-turned” back to downtown Tokyo where the temporary housing, originally built for the homeless repatriates from overseas at the end of World War II, stood. The two apartments, the Shiozaki-so and the Shinko-so in Koto-ward, were
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operated by the contributions from twenty-three wards of Tokyo. Ikeda Sumie (Xu Ming) and her three children also lived in the Shinko-so when they moved from Hokkaido.25 The compound is sarcastically called the “twenty-fourth ward of Tokyo,” as it was isolated from the rest of Tokyo. The orphans had no better place to go, and the facilities became the “harbor” for the orphans who had failed to live in their hometown. Another advantage was that the two facilities in Tokyo provided Japanese language classes. There was also a night middle- school that gave Japanese language classes in the neighboring Arakawa-ward. In addition, the Kasai elementary and middle schools in Edogawa-ward opened Japanese classes for the orphans’ children. The orphans had no choice but to leave their hometown and move to downtown Tokyo to make a living. In fact, the very first orphan who located kin in the first search mission in 1981 left the guarantor (the kin) in April 1986, shocking the Ministry of Health officials.26 Saima Takashi: Rejected by Stepmother Saima Shinzo was the leader of the initial dispatch group of the Hanishina Village Settlement Mission of 1944. Saima survived the war because his army division was transferred to Miyazaki prefecture to defend Japan’s territory proper. Meanwhile, upon repatriation in 1975, Beniya Torao, the survivor of the Abandoned Sato Settlement Incident, told Saima about his son, Takashi. Takashi was rescued by a Chinese the day after the massacre, at the age of two, and became a middle school principal in Hegang. Saima asked the Chinese government’s permission to visit the orphans left behind in Boli prefecture. He visited Harbin in 1978 and saw a dozen orphans, but his son was not among them. Later, he found out that Takashi’s foster father was afraid that Takashi would be repatriated, and did not tell Beniya the exact address of Takashi in Hegang. Saima visited Jiamusi when the city was liberated in May 1981. He managed to locate Takashi this time. However, Takashi hesitated to admit Saima as his birthfather, because Takashi felt indebted to his foster father. Saima filed for a trial procedure at the Nagano Family Court to reestablish Takashi’s domicile that was eliminated by the “Wartime Death Decree” in 1959. When his foster father passed away in April 1984, his foster mother told him that he did not have to wait until her death to be repatriated. Takashi thus made a temporary homecoming in September 1984 with his wife and eldest daughter.27
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Nevertheless, Saima opposed Takashi’s permanent repatriation. Saima had helped repatriate ten orphans, only to see that eight out of the ten families moved to Tokyo. However, Saima’s opposition to Takashi’s permanent repatriation actually had more to do with his second wife’s opposition (see chapter 8). Discouraged, Takashi went back to Boli after a three-month stay in Nagano, but he could not give up his wish to live in his homeland. He was repatriated permanently with his wife seven years later in June 1991. Takashi settled near his father’s house, only to move to Tokyo three months later, because he could not get along with his stepmother and half-siblings. Takashi rented an apartment in Tokyo, worked at a Styrofoam manufacturing company, and then worked at a building cleaning company as an office cleaner. His wife worked at a hotel as a domestic. Although he studied Japanese for twenty months, his Japanese was worse than his Chinese wife’s. He worked over ten hours a day, but his daily wage was ¥9,000 (US$82), which was lower than that of his peers. He retired in April 2003, and lived on ¥30,000 (US$273) monthly private pension and his wife’s part-time work. He could not afford to buy books or to travel.28 Orphans’ “Commune” in Iwatsuki City A large public apartment complex called Suwa-Yamashita danchi in Iwatsuki, Saitama prefecture, became a “commune” for the repatriates from China. As many as fifty households of the repatriated orphans have come to live in this complex, so that this small city with 100,000 population had the greatest concentration of repatriated orphans in Japan. Takahashi Hideya also lived in this apartment complex. Many of the repatriates who had failed to settle in their hometown came to live in this apartment complex. There were subcontractors in the surrounding area for medium- and small-sized manufacturing operations, which offered the orphans opportunity for low- skilled labor. The housing was not as costly as in Tokyo. When Murakami Yoneko, a Japanese woman repatriated from China in 1979, moved to the apartment complex, there were ten families of repatriated orphans who lived there. None of them spoke Japanese. Few had stable jobs, and most of them received welfare benefits. Being able to speak both Chinese and Japanese, Murakami helped in every aspect of their daily business. “There are comrades in Iwatsuki.” This became the repatriates’ slogan. As Murakami’s reputation grew, more orphans moved into the apartment complex. However, she began to feel that they
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could not become self- sufficient as long as they remained dependent on her. Murakami created a self-help group, called the Kobai-no-kai (the Red Plum Society), in September 1984.29
There was another advantage for the orphans in moving to the SuwaYamashita apartment complex. An elementary school in the district offered a Japanese class. It was owed to Kaneko Fumio, the principal at Higashi-Iwatsuki elementary school. Kaneko was appointed to the school in April 1981 when three orphans’ children transferred to the school. The Ministry of Education did not give a penny to a school where the orphans’ children were transferred. In order to create Japanese classes, Kaneko began his “battles” with the Saitamaprefecture Board of Education and the Ministry of Education. He could easily have been fired for making such an unprecedented proposal. Meanwhile, the school had more than a dozen repatriates’ children in April 1983. Kaneko succeeded in tearing down the bureaucratic wall in 1985, after a four-year battle with the education administration. Higashi-Iwatsuki elementary school had the first bilingual teacher in April 1985.30 Kaneko recorded his encounters with the orphans’ children. Japanese assume that all Chinese eat rice like them, but rice is not a staple food in Northeast China. They grow wheat, millet, and maize. They eat wheat cakes and pickled vegetables. They seldom eat meat, and their favorite food is pork dumplings with lots of garlic. The orphans had never eaten ramen (yellow noodle), let alone “instant ramen” or “cup noodles.” From firsthand observations, Kaneko concluded that settlement took two forms: “hardware settlement” and “software settlement.” Providing financial assistance was only concerned with hardware settlement. The repatriates also needed to have an exchange of “heart” with the Japanese people.31 At the heart of the issue was the fact that although Japan might be the orphans’ homeland in time it has become a foreign country for them. Japan has a different culture and a different way of thinking from what they had grown up with and become accustomed to. Historically, China was “Greece and Rome” to Japan. The Japanese had learned everything from China, including language. The Chinese and Japanese cultures might share the same roots, dobun doshu (same language, same race [Asians]). Yet, they eventually developed into two disparate cultures.
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The Chinese scholar Wang Min notes that the Chinese multiethnic society, with fifty-five minority groups, breeds self-assertiveness, whereas Japanese society shuns such a quality. The culture the orphans had brought to Japan with them, and the culture that they had encountered in Japan, clashed with each other. The Japanese society considered the orphans Chinese. As Kaneko stated, the “software settlement” of the orphans had a long way to go.32 Volunteers Deplore Ref lecting the difficulties with the orphans’ settlement, Takegawa Hideyuki stated that to help orphans settle in Japan is a Herculean task and that sympathy or compassion alone would not be enough. It is not a matter on the level of sentiment. It concerns turning the orphans, who had not been Japanese for forty years, back into Japanese. It is the task of the Ministry of Health. However, the Ministry developed no programs to deal with the orphans’ settlement. It only provided the repatriation travel expenses, the onetime repatriation allowance, and the four-month group language training. That’s all. Its involvement with the orphans stopped at sending them to their receivers. Afterward, it did not care. Nevertheless, the real difficulties actually began after that. The orphans encountered enormous challenges of assimilating into Japanese society. At this level, goodwill or sympathy alone could not help them.33 Nevertheless, the Ministry has treated the orphan issue as an issue of the individuals, and imposed its responsibilities on the individual receivers. Volunteers filled the void. However, without the legal framework to provide a comprehensive public program, there was a limit as to what the individual receivers or volunteers could do. There is a consensus opinion among the volunteers that the Japanese government had ignored the orphans for decades, and then it had done only the barest minimum afterward. The orphans were helpless in the face of the monolithic Japanese bureaucracy, and were further disadvantaged by the language barrier. The volunteers helped with all aspects of the problems, ranging from the searches for their identities and to locate their kin, preparing applications for their domiciles, becoming their receivers or finding those willing to be one, and finding housing, jobs, and schools. The government took the volunteers’ work for granted and even imposed its tasks on them. The pioneer of the volunteers, Yamamoto Jisho, passed away in February 1990.34
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Contemplating on the difficulties of the orphans’ settlement in Japan, Ide Magoroku states that the scene of the orphans’ family landings at Narita airport in the 1982, with small travel bags, overlaps that of their parents arriving at Jiamusi where the first farmer-settlers arrived in 1932, with their few belongings wrapped in furoshiki (large wrapping cloths). The major difference is that the orphans were carrying heavy invisible baggage, called “hetero-culture,” on their shoulders, due to having lived in China for over four decades. This image presents a curious and yet tragic reciprocity between the orphans’ parents and the orphans themselves.35 Just as the Japanese farmers had settled in Manchuria under the grandiose propaganda scheme of establishing peace and coprosperity in East Asia, their children migrated back to Japan with a dream of living in the second-largest world economy. While some orphans decided to remain in China, realizing the difficulty of starting all over again in their middle age in a “foreign” land, many orphans thought that if only they could move to Japan, they would be far better off. Just as the orphans’ parents had been propelled to settle in Manchuria almost blindly, the orphans were driven to settle in Japan without fully understanding the implications. One would be hard pressed to blame the orphans for their decisions, because they had the right to repatriation to their homeland. However, due to the delay in their repatriation, their settlement turned out to be largely unsuccessful.36 The orphans’ repatriation and settlement in Japan was a reversal of the fateful trans-Sea of Japan voyage of their parents. The repatriated orphans encountered discrimination as “Chinese” in their own homeland, just as their parents (and orphans themselves) faced death and discrimination as Japanese in Manchuria. This twist of history was a double tragic ethnic migration, which also resulted in the creation of a double family diaspora. History repeated itself when the Japanese immigrants in Latin America, such as Brazil and Peru, migrated back to Japan as “foreign workers” (see chapter 14).
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Orphans’ Reverse Ethnic Migration: Tragic Symmetry
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Struggles of Orphans’ Spouses and Offspring
As the repatriated orphans struggled to settle in their homeland, their spouses and children who accompanied them had their own share of tribulations. While the orphans had legitimate reasons and desires for repatriation, their spouses and children had little incentive or motivation to settle in Japan, except for their family ties and the attraction of Japan as an economic power. For the orphans’ spouses and children, Japan was truly a foreign country where they had no kin or friends. Confronted with the harsh realities of the Japanese society, still prejudiced against other Asians, the orphans’ spouses and offspring struggled to assimilate into Japanese society in vain. They endured discrimination from their peers at school and at work, as well as from the Japanese society at large. In a society where even the Japanese orphans were despised as Chinese, many of the Chinese spouses and children succumbed to the prevailing social intolerance. Their sense of alienation and rejection was deep to the extent that it had serious social implications and took a toll on some of them.1 Orphans’ Spouses There are a couple of episodes that illustrate the plight of the orphans’ spouses. A female orphan returned to Japan with her Chinese husband and lived in the Suwa-Yamashita apartment complex in Saitama prefecture. She was excited about starting a new life in Japan, but her husband’s attitude was different. He felt that he had settled in Japan only because of his wife. He had no will to work. While his wife went to work, he played at a pachinko parlor all day. He used up their
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welfare benefit and began borrowing money from his neighbors. He also came to borrow from Murakami Yoneko, the community leader. He told Murakami that his sister in China was getting married. He wanted to send money to her. Murakami lent him ¥20,000 (US$182) out of her small welfare benefit. The money was never returned. Murakami suspected that he spent it on pachinko. Murakami heard that he borrowed money from someone else, again. She advised her neighbors not to lend him money any more. When he heard about it, he came to her apartment with a knife at midnight, threatening to kill her. Murakami could have been seriously injured if her son did not stop him.2 Sugano Ranko’s Husband Sugano Ranko grew up in an orphanage in Harbin. She joined the search mission in 1986 but could not find any kin. She was repatriated in 1989 with her Chinese husband and a son. Her husband was a chief of the cooking ingredients order section at a hotel in Harbin, and their life was stable. However, he agreed to move to Japan in order to realize her lifelong wish to live in her homeland. Her daughter was married and was disqualified from receiving government travel expenses. She remained in China. Sugano found a part-time job, but her husband could not find any stable job. He was not feeling well, but the doctor told him that there was nothing wrong with his health. The social welfare worker thought that he was pretending to be sick, and urged him to go to work. He was stressed out and depressed. Then he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had an operation, but it was too late, and he was hospitalized. He kept telling Sugano that he would like to go back to China and die there. But this was impossible due to the restrictions on the welfare benefit. Out of despair, he hanged himself. It happened just a year and three months after their repatriation. He was only fifty-three years old.3 Sugano later found out that, as early as two months after her husband began studying Japanese at the Kanagawa Self-Sufficiency Center in Yokohama, the social welfare office had been threatening him. He was told that if he did not go to work, his welfare benefits would be cut off. He was also forced to sign a pledge stating that he would find a job and go to work soon. Sugano felt that this cold policy drove her husband to his death. Her husband’s relatives made his grave in China, but she could not afford to visit China to attend his funeral service there.4
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Ikeda Sumie (Xu Ming)’s husband was different from other orphans’ spouses. When he realized that Ikeda was determined to settle in Japan, even without him, he began reading newspapers about Japan and prepared himself for his settlement in Japan. This, however, took more than two years after Ikeda’s. Ikeda needed a guarantor and a certificate of authorized employment in Japan for her husband. She did not know how to obtain such document. Again, volunteers helped. When he joined his family in October 1983, his children’s reaction toward him foreshadowed what was to come in his new life. He could not communicate with them. They told him not to speak Chinese. He went to a Japanese language school for a year and found a job at a machine factory. He quit the job soon because he could not understand Japanese.5 Ikeda’s family did not receive any public assistance because she did not join the official search mission. Strangely, the Ministry of Health seems to consider that only those who participated in the official search missions are “legitimate” orphans. It excluded those who did not join the missions from receiving all public assistance for repatriation and settlement. Nevertheless, those who could not join the missions (and returned to Japan on their own), like Ikeda, actually needed public assistance as much as those who did, or even more. Ikeda and her husband had to pay the tuitions in the language and job training schools by themselves. Ikeda’s husband went to a job training school and studied electrical skills for a year. He then worked at an electric company, but quit after one year. Next he worked at an electric wiring company whose supervisor was kind to him. After working there for ten years, he opened his own company. New customers always doubted his competence initially, but after the work was done they were pleased with his job. His work finally got on track after years of hardship.6 Orphans’ Offspring While the orphans and their spouses were struggling to make ends meet in Japan, their offspring at more vulnerable ages had gone through various forms of discrimination. They became easy targets for bullying at school and at work. However, they could not confide their problems to their parents, who were consumed with their own battles to become self-sufficient. Consequently, many of the orphans’ offspring dropped out of school and workplace, became juvenile delinquents, and even criminals. Nevertheless, the peer and societal discriminations were
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not the only forms of discrimination the orphans’ offspring suffered in Japan.
The first and foremost obstacle the orphans’ children encountered in Japan was legal discrimination. Because of the “paternal principle” of the Japanese Nationality Law (until its revision in 1985, examined below), the orphans’ children could not obtain Japanese nationality unless their fathers were Japanese. Also, due to the “blood principle,” as opposed to the “birthplace principle,” even if the child was born in Japan, the child was legally a foreigner unless the child’s father was Japanese. As a result, many orphans’ offspring had remained legal aliens and had been deprived of the fundamental human right of being Japanese citizens, including voting rights, while paying income, property, and other taxes.7 In addition, as noted earlier, the Ministry of Health excluded the orphans’ adult children from the orphans’ household, which was against their traditional way of living. When the orphans’ repatriation began in 1981, the Ministry had only allowed the orphans’ spouses and their minor and single children to accompany their repatriation. However, the orphans had many adult children. These adult children could not afford to move to Japan without the travel allowances, and they therefore had remained in China. The orphans saved every penny to have their adult children move to Japan, while struggling to make ends meet.8 It was only as late as June 1994, following the legislation of the Law to Assist the Japanese Left Behind in China, that the Ministry allowed just one married child and his/her family to accompany the repatriation of the orphans who were older than sixty-five years. The Ministry allowed it only because the aging orphans needed the care of someone. In April 1995, the Ministry lowered the age limit for this measure to sixty years, and then lowered it further to fifty-five years in April 1997. This example also demonstrates that the Japanese government dealt with the orphan issue by patchwork measures, without any comprehensive plan. It is peculiar that the orphans who had been left behind in China in 1945 were still being repatriated more than half a century later, at a time when they actually required care from their children. All things considered, one cannot help but wonder why their repatriation is taking so long.9
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Nakai Reiko’s Children Nakai Reiko divorced her husband, as he had failed to adjust to Japanese society, became a drunk, and beat her severely. He ended up returning to China alone. Meanwhile, her three children became self- sufficient. However, they could not obtain Japanese nationality even if they had continuously lived in Japan for over fifteen years from April 1987. This was because of the “paternal principle” and the “blood principle” of the Japanese Nationality Law. The law was revised in 1985, after the child born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a Caucasian father became a controversial issue. This child could not obtain Japanese nationality because the father was not Japanese. In contrast, children born in Southeast Asia to female prostitutes there and Japanese males could do so. The 1985 revision allowed a child, born after 1965, of a Japanese mother and a foreign father to obtain Japanese nationality. However, the revision excluded such children born before 1965. Thus, Nakai’s children were still excluded from obtaining Japanese nationality.11 In another female orphan’s case, her repatriation was delayed because she had to look after her sick foster grandfather. Upon his death, she finally joined the search mission in 1995 and hoped to be repatriated with her family. However, her adult children were not allowed to accompany her repatriation. She returned to Japan with her husband and second son in 1997, leaving her two adult children behind. She established her Japanese domicile through a family court trial. Several months later, she tried to obtain Japanese nationality for her adult children in China. However, she found out that, for the case of female orphans, their children could apply for their naturalization in Japan only within three months of the time of their mother’s (the orphan) establishment of Japanese domicile. In contrast, male orphans’ children had no such restriction. This female orphan’s children therefore remained in China.12 Other female orphans encountered similar problems with their children’s legal status, which perpetuated family separations. This also deepened the disparity between the repatriated children who were given Japanese nationality and those who were not. Experiences of the
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According to the poll released by the Ministry in September 2000, as many as 36.8 percent of the orphans had their foster parents living in China, 4.9 percent had spouses in China, 67.2 percent had children in China, and 64.4 percent had grandchildren in China.10
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repatriated orphans’ families examined below illustrate the predicaments of the orphans’ children.
Morita Eiko, the persecuted chemist, was repatriated in August 1989 with her eldest son and his family (they paid the travel expenses out of their own pockets), her second and third sons, her foster mother, and her foster mother’s second husband (Morita’s husband had divorced her and remained in China). However, only Morita’s two younger sons were allowed to obtain Japanese nationality, because they were minors. Her eldest son’s family retained their Chinese nationality, because he was an adult. His family was also ineligible to receive any of the public assistance given to the orphans’ families. Morita’s younger sons managed to find jobs in Japan, but were concerned with losing their jobs at any time in the economic recession of the 1990s. However, Morita’s deepest concern was her grandson. He became an easy target for bullying and physical assaults at school. After living five years in Japan, he could not go to school any longer. He went back to China with Morita’s foster mother when he was in the fourth grade. Her foster mother’s husband also went back to China.13 Tragedy of Tian Lizhi Tian Lizhi’s mother, Kamisaka Michiko, was orphaned in Mishan in Dongan province, where she married a Chinese and had three sons. With his mother’s relative as their receiver, Tian’s elder brother and his wife were the first to move to Japan in 1987. Then Tian and his newlywed wife moved to Japan with his parents and a younger brother in August 1989. Tian was twenty-two years old and his wife was twentyone. He wanted to learn Japanese as soon as possible; however, the Ministry of Health did not provide any assistance to Tian. Tian had no language training, no job, and no place to live in Japan. He could not obtain Japanese citizenship either. Tian borrowed the self-sufficiency assistance allowance of ¥400,000 (US$3,636) his mother received for her household of three (two adults and a minor) and looked for an apartment and job. His brother found him an apartment in Tokyo. His sister-in-law found him a job at a plumbing company. It paid ¥8,000 (US$73) a day. Tian worked hard, but he could not communicate with his coworkers and became isolated.14
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Worse, Tian’s job went on into the night, and he did not have time to study Japanese. He became sick in November and did not go to work one day. He was not able to call in sick because he could not communicate on the phone in Japanese. When he showed up at work the next day, he was told that he had been fired. Then the company notified him to come to pick up his paycheck. He went to see the president with his sister-in-law. The president then told him that he would not pay him because he had quit his job. The next day Tian immolated himself with kerosene. This happened only three months after his repatriation.15 The incident was reported in some newspapers the following day as a mere fire accident. Nothing was mentioned about the tragic circumstances behind the incident. Issues on ethnicity are taboo in Japan and do not surface often. In Tian’s case, the Society for the Repatriates from China’s Secretary- General Nagano Hirohisa found out that the victim was a second-generation orphan. Nagano did not know Tian. Tian did not know the group. Nagano regretted that, had they known each other, the tragic incident could have been avoided. Tian became a victim of the lack of a public policy for the orphans’ adult children. Tian’s wife was heartbroken and returned to her parents in China. Nagano stated that an increasingly important issue was how to help the second- and third-generation orphans. They have immigrated to Japan following their parents’ decision, and not of their own will. Nagano stated that the government has kept ignoring their problems, so that their problems have now become as serious as those caused by illegal foreign workers in Japan.16 In this regard, it should be noted that, out of a total 45,502 recorded offenders in 2007 against the Immigration Control Act, as many as 36,982 (81.3 percent) engaged in illegal employment. Out of this number, 10,223 were Chinese (27.6 percent), 7,075 were Filipinos, and 5,315 were South Koreans, followed by 2,034 Indonesians, 2,013 Thai, and 1,318 Vietnamese. These Chinese included the orphans’ adult children who were not granted Japanese nationality.17 Takahashi Hideya’s Son While the majority of the second-generation orphans had succumbed to legal discrimination, social intolerance, and other impediments, Takahashi Hideya’s son Jingdong was an exception. Jingdong worked at the Iwai Factory where his father also worked. The factory manufactured car parts. The owner, Iwai Masayuki, stated that he was first surprised when Takahashi, the father, responded to his job ad in the
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newspaper, because he could not speak Japanese. Iwai hired Takahashi because he was enthusiastic and promised to work hard. Takahashi did not disappoint Iwai. Iwai was also impressed with his son. Jingdong was only sixteen years old, but he perfected his skills as a technician. Jingdong stated, “I did not want to move to Japan, but I followed my father’s decision. Although I have lived in Japan for six years, I still do not like Japan very much. But now that I am a Japanese, I do not want to be second to my coworkers.” Covered with oil, Jingdong worked hard to support his family while his contemporaries were hanging around with their friends.18 School Bullying Meanwhile, no matter how hard Ikeda Sumie and her husband worked to start all over, they could not save their children from becoming prey to school bullying. Her daughter Yukiko was ten years old when Ikeda and her three children moved to Hokkaido. However, just when Yukiko made friends in Sapporo, her family moved to Tokyo. Her school life was miserable. Although she did not understand Japanese, she played with friends in Sapporo. Tokyoites were different. She could not make any friends and stayed home. As the “Xu Ming incident” became nationally known, reporters f locked to interview them. Yukiko felt as if she were a giant panda in Ueno Zoo. People came to see them out of curiosity, but they soon forgot about them as the curiosity wore away. When her father joined the family, they moved to public housing in Adachi-ward. Yukiko who had just entered a middle school in April transferred to another middle school in October. She needed a new school uniform for that school, but her parents could not afford to buy a new uniform again ( Japanese public middle and high schools each have their own uniforms). Yukiko wore the previous school’s uniform with the principal’s permission. There she was called “Chinese” and “germ.” She was also beaten. Her homeroom teacher knew what was going on, but did nothing to stop the bullying. Yukiko stated, “I wondered why I had to live in Japan. I even hated my mother for bringing us to Japan.”19 Ikeda was unaware of Yukiko’s predicaments. One morning a neighbor told Ikeda that Yukiko had not gone to school for three days. Startled, Ikeda told Yukiko to go to school. Yukiko did not come home that day. They searched for her for three days in vain. She had attempted to commit suicide. Then the police had found her and took her to
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the school principal’s office. Afterward, explicit bullying stopped, but implicit bullying continued. Yukiko’s classmates kept their distance from her, saying, “Germs were spreading in the air.” Yukiko’s school grades were good in China and she was the class president. However, she could not raise her hands in class in Japan even if she knew the answer. She learned the Japanese axiom, “The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.” She closed her heart like a clam.20 Ikeda’s eldest son was also bullied and beaten. Ikeda was unaware of this until she was summoned by the school principal and met the four bullies. The “gang of four” stated that they enjoyed bullying him because he cried and did not fight back. Ikeda could not reconcile with the twists of her life, in which she was bullied as Japanese in China, and her children were bullied as Chinese in Japan.21 School bullying, known as ijime, has been a serious issue in Japanese schools for some time. This has resulted in numerous cases of suicide of children. In many cases the school bulling involved homeroom teachers, but principals concealed the incidents. While not being publicized, the offspring of ethnic minority groups have been the primary targets. For example, suicides caused by school bullying frequently occurred in the area where the “Korean residents in Japan” resided, who had originally immigrated as forced laborers after the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910. The second- and third-generation orphans from China had become the new targets, but the coverage of the school-bullying suicides did not delve deep into the underlying causes.22 The fundamental issue lies with the pitfalls of Japanese society, which has little tolerance of things of a heterogeneous nature, except for American pop culture and European fashion. Japanese society discriminated against even the third- and forth-generation “Korean residents in Japan,” who were born and grew up in Japan and spoke f luent Japanese. Given that, it is not hard to imagine how the second- and third-generation orphans were treated in Japan. A third-generation orphan said, “I conceal my Chinese origin, because people will look at me differently if I tell them that I am a third-generation repatriate from China.”23 Education of Orphans’ Children The education of the second-generation orphans was seriously disadvantaged due to the inertia on the part of the Ministry of Education and the local boards of education. As late as 2002, only 30 percent of
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the schools where the orphans’ children actually attended had Japanese language classes. This fraction for all the schools in Japan was negligible. In terms of the number of students, only 25 percent of the orphans’ children received Japanese language education in their schools. At first the Japanese language classes for the repatriates from China were only available at the Kasai elementary and middle schools in the Edogawaward in Tokyo. They were originally created for the Japanese repatriates’ children from Korea after World War II. The Ministry approved the creation of Japanese language classes only in five elementary schools and seven middle schools, nationwide, for the fiscal years between 1983 and 1985. The 172 students who received Japanese language classes were among the luckiest of the repatriated children. In turn, the overwhelming majority of them were thrown into the extremely competitive school life in Japan. Nevertheless, the Edogawa-ward in December 1984 rejected an enrollment request of a second-generation orphan who lived outside the ward.24 All of these situations contradicted the Beijing Agreement of 1953 that stipulated that the Japanese government would provide sufficient education to the repatriated orphans and their offspring. A private poll conducted with the second-generation orphans at the Kasai middle school showed that most of them were ridiculed for their inability to speak Japanese and were bullied as Chinese. Half of them wanted to go back to China even though the living standard in Japan was much higher. The situation in schools where a Japanese class was not provided was far worse. Faced with discrimination and insult, many young repatriates suffered from depression and other forms of mental illnesses, resulting in school absenteeism, juvenile delinquency, or even worse. These problems were not contained at school, but extended into larger social issues. Ide Magoroku argues that the lack of an effective education policy toward the second- and third-generation orphans demonstrates the sakoku (seclusionist) mentality of Japan that does not accept a bilingual society.25 Accidents and Crimes Involving Second- Generation Orphans The second-generation orphans were involved in accidents and crimes as follows: ●
April 1981: A repatriated young Chinese man killed two neighbors in Tokyo.
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August 1983: A repatriated girl jumped to her death in front of a train in Aichi prefecture. March 1984: A repatriated young man killed a man in Omiya, Saitama prefecture. May 1989: A repatriated boy was arrested in connection with a motor bike mafia group’s internal fight. May 1990: A repatriated young man killed a person in Tokyo. May 1991: A repatriated young man injured a person and was arrested. The court sentenced him to forcible deportation to China in November 1991. August 1992: A repatriated young man injured a person in Tokyo. June 1995: An orphan’s son beat his sister to death in connection with the murder of their parents in Nagoya in December 1991, and was arrested. July 1997: Members of a second-generation orphans’ group, the Dragons, were arrested. February 1998: A Chinese theft group members were arrested, including second-generation orphans. March 1999: A second-generation orphan, along with her mother (orphan), killed her Chinese husband in Saitama prefecture. August 1999: A second-generation orphan’s husband burned himself, his wife, their nephew, and niece, to death. The police suspected that it was a double suicide.26
In the case of the April 1981 incident, a twenty-year-old repatriate stabbed one of his neighbors to death because he thought that she was spying on him. He then stabbed another resident to death who tried to stop him. He had moved to Japan in 1980 with his mother and his sister, after his Chinese father passed away, leaving two elder sisters in China. They received no public assistance because the mother was a “woman left behind in China.” He went to a Japanese school and worked at a Chinese restaurant, but became mentally unstable. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital after the arrest. He stated that he thought that the victims were agents of the devil. Yagi Iwao, the manager of the Tokyo Public Assistance Housing Facility that runs the Shiozaki-so and the Shinko-so, stated that this incident was bound to happen. Many repatriates failed to adjust to the Japanese society and fell into neurosis. The government should have provided qualified psychological counselors and Chinese interpreters for the repatriates. However, the government had ignored their problems.27
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In another tragic case, a repatriated woman reported to the police that she had killed her son (twenty-nine years old) in Kobe in November 1982. She moved to Japan with her second son and daughter in 1980 after her Chinese husband passed away, leaving her three married sons in China. Her second son could not find a job, became drunken and committed domestic violence toward her. Concerned with his violence, the mother had her third and fourth sons (and their families) move to Japan to control his behavior. As a result, seven adults lived in a small two-room apartment. Her daughter slept in a closet. When the son became drunk and uncontrollably violent again, the mother and her sons strangled him to death. All the six family members at the scene of the crime were arrested. The mother insisted that she was the only culprit, while her two sons testified that they had committed the crime. In the end, only the two sons were accused. Struck by the tragic aspect of the incident, the neighborhood residents petitioned the court to reduce their sentences, and the two sons were given probation. 28 Deportation of Orphans’ Offspring After the orphans had their adult children move to Japan, at their own expense, these relatively young couples found it extremely difficult to make a living in Japan. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health did not provide any assistance to them. As a result, tension grew between the repatriated children who had received public assistance and those who did not, as well as between those who obtained Japanese nationality and those who did not. For instance, even if the second- and third-generation orphans became criminal offenders, they would not be deported if they had obtained Japanese nationality. In contrast, if the orphans’ offspring, twenty years or older, were given more than a one-year sentence, they could be forcibly deported if they were Chinese nationals. Even if they were minors they could be deported if they were given more than a three-year sentence and they did not have Japanese nationality. The forcible deportation of the orphans’ offspring is becoming one of the most serious issues concerning the orphans.29 In this regard, out of a total of 28,225 deportation orders the Ministry of Justice issued in 2007, the Chinese group had the largest number, with 7,831 cases (27.7 percent). The number was 10,242 (30.8 percent)
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in 2006. The peak was 13,834 (32.9 percent) out of a total of 42,074 in 2004. Among those deported were the second- and third-generation orphans who were involved in illegal activities.30
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While the orphans’ offspring were struggling to survive, the orphans themselves encountered the last and hardest obstacle that they had yet to overcome.
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T W E LV E
New Obstacles: Retirement and Pensions
The repatriated orphans encountered yet another obstacle. As they became sixty years old, the official retirement age in Japan then, their income was drastically reduced. Due to their short years of employment in Japan, the orphans only received the average ¥30,000 to ¥50,000 (US$273– US$455) private pensions (kosei nenkin or the “employee’s pension insurance”) per month. In fact, many of them did not receive any private pension benefits. Similarly, due to the insufficient years of premium payment, the orphans did not receive the public pension (kokumin nenkin), called the “basic pension for the elderly” (rorei kiso nenkin), which is equivalent to the U.S. Social Security pension. Worse, many orphans ended up losing all the premiums paid since they had settled in Japan. To receive a full benefit of ¥66,008 (US$600) per month payable from age sixty-five, pensioners must have paid monthly premiums for at least twenty-five years from ages between twenty and sixty. The monthly premium as of January 2008 was ¥14,410 (US$131). Consequently, the orphans could not sustain their living after retirement and were obliged to live on welfare.1 The core problem was that the orphans’ repatriation began only in the 1980s when they were in their forties and fifties. Belatedly, in November 1994, the government issued a special measures decree, following the enactment of the Law to Assist the Japanese Left Behind in China (the “1994 Assistance Law,” hereafter) earlier that year. It stipulated that the Ministry of Health retrospectively compensate for the lack of premium payments, from April 1961 (when the pension system began) to the time when they started to pay their premiums. Then the Ministry would pay the orphans a third of the full benefit. It amounted to approximately ¥22,000 (US$200) per month. The decree took effect in April 1996.2
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
Strangely, if the Ministry really compensated for the orphans’ unpaid premium payments, as the decree stated, it should have paid them the full benefit of ¥66,000, instead of ¥22,000. This point soon became crucial (as examined below). The Ministry in effect punished the orphans for the unpaid premium payments during the time they were still left behind in China. The combined amounts of the limited private and public pensions could hardly support their living in Japan. Aimoto Rei’s Retirement Aimoto Rei was orphaned when his mother was shot to death during their evacuation from Dongning in Mudanjiang province when he was six years old. Weeks later, a Chinese couple found him sleeping on the ground near Ningan and adopted him. While helping with farming, Aimoto studied hard, advanced to the Harbin Electric Engineering Institute, and became a professor of electromagnetism at Zhaonan University. He worked twice as hard as his Chinese colleagues to atone for the crime of the Japanese act of aggression. Aimoto was repatriated with his family in April 1981. He worked at NEC’s Nagano office. He could not become a full employee because of his age, and was hired as an associate employee. Then he was transferred to the NEC’s Kawasaki Technology Center in Kanagawa prefecture in October 1985. The company also gave him a housing allowance to pay for his three-bedroom apartment. He was considered one of the most fortunate orphans. With his retirement in March 2000, however, Aimoto’s life changed drastically. The status of having been an associate employee hit him hard. He was not given a retirement allowance. His private pension, after nineteen years of continuous work, only amounted to ¥49,167 (US$447) per month. He moved to public housing in a smaller city, Zama. He tried to find another job before his unemployment benefits expired, but several dozen companies turned him down. He then worked as a part-timer at a packing company.3 Problems with Public Pensions Meanwhile, to an inquiry of the National Council on the Issues Concerning the Orphans Left Behind in China regarding public pensions, the Ministry of Health officials explained that ¥22,000 was
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the maximum benefit that the Ministry would pay to the orphans. Their answer assumed that the orphans would procure the rest of their living expenses by the welfare benefit. The Ministry officials also explained that the orphans must pay a surcharge penalty of ¥6,000 (US$55) per month for the period they missed their premium payments from April 1961 (when the pension system began) to the time when they began their premium payments if they would like to receive the full pension benefit of ¥66,000. The ¥6,000 monthly surcharge penalty meant that the repatriated orphans would have to pay from about ¥1,500,000 (US$13,636) to ¥3,000,000 (US$27,273) in total, depending on when they settled in Japan, in addition to the regular monthly premiums of ¥14,410 (US$131), in order to receive the full pension benefit.4 For instance, if an orphan was repatriated in April 1981, the orphan would have to pay a surcharge penalty of ¥1,440,000 (US$13,091) for the missed twenty years of premium payments. In comparison, if an orphan was repatriated in April 2001, the orphan would have to pay ¥2,880,000 (US$26,182), to make up for forty years of premium payments. Aimoto questioned this policy. He calculated the average monthly premiums for the public pension from April 1961 to March 1981, during which he had missed the premium payments. It was only ¥943 (US$8.57) per month. Then why should the orphans pay a ¥6,000 surcharge premium per month?5 “Shark Loans” by Government Aimoto made an inquiry on this to the Ministry of Health. The Ministry replied that ¥6,000 was the monthly average of the premium payments from April 1, 1961 to March 31, 1996 (one day before the measure took effect), with an annual 5.5 percent compound interest on them. Aimoto who was usually a calm person was indignant. He wrote that the Japanese government had delayed the orphans’ repatriation for four decades, and then it had imposed ¥1,440,000 to ¥2,880,000 penalty surcharges on them who had restarted their lives from zero in their forties and fifties. He questioned, “What kind of law is this? Is it what the government referred to as ‘assuming its postwar responsibility for the orphans (as stated in the 1994 Assistance Law)’? Is it what the government referred to as ‘assisting the repatriated orphans’ self- sufficiency’?” Aimoto stated, “These are ‘shark loans’ at the hands of the government. This is a harassment of the weak by the government.”6
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Shimizu Hiroo is one of the orphans who actually paid the enormous surcharge. He returned with his wife and three children to his hometown in Nagano prefecture on his own after his foster parents died in 1979. At that time, there was no public assistance for the repatriated orphans. He moved to Yokohama with the help of a friend. He went to a Japanese school for a year while living on welfare. Then he went to a job training school, while suffering from tuberculosis, and began working at an alloy factory in 1986. After retirement, he continued to work at the factory as an associate employee. Then he worked parttime in Chinatown. Realizing that he would not be able to make ends meet with the private pension alone, Shimizu paid the surcharge of over ¥1,300,000 (US$11,818).7 When Shimizu reached the age of sixty-five, he received ¥30,000 (US$273) private pension and the full ¥66,000 (US$600) public pension. That was all he had as income. However, his rent alone was ¥75,000, and even if he moved to a place with a lower rent, he could not sustain his livelihood, especially with the increasing medical bills of his wife. If he wanted to become a welfare recipient, he would have to first use up his savings to qualify. Then he would receive only a maximum of ¥25,940 (US$236) monthly welfare benefit, because his combined pension benefits of ¥96,000 would be subtracted as income from the maximum payable welfare benefit of ¥121,940 (US$1,109). Thus, regardless of the pension benefits, his total income would be ¥121,940, which is not much higher than his present income of ¥96,000. Besides, the surcharge payment he had made for the public pension would be totally wasted. His sense of insecurity for the future deepened day by day. Shimizu stated that if the government had repatriated him earlier, he could have made a living from the private pension alone.8 There was a male orphan who had actually used up all of his savings to pay the surcharge of about ¥2,000,000 (US$18,182) in March 2002, out of fear for his postretirement life. Thus, he would receive the full ¥66,000 (US$600) public pension four years later, at age sixty-five. Meanwhile, Ikeda Sumie realized in 1999 that her private pension would be ¥50,000 (US$455) after eighteen years of work in Japan, and her husband’s would be ¥10,000 (US$91). She thus decided to pay the surcharge. However, she could not afford to pay her surcharge of ¥1,206,000 (US$10,964). She thus borrowed ¥450,000 from the lawyer Kawai, and she paid Kawai back ¥10,000 every month afterward.9
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The orphans were also severely disadvantaged in private pensions due to the short years of employment in Japan. For instance, Nakai Reiko, who had worked full-time at a cleaning company, received no retirement allowance. She had only a ¥35,000 (US$318) private pension per month at the age of sixty. She did not want to depend on her children or on welfare. She did not know what to do with her future. In the case of a female surgeon, she could not practice medicine in Japan because her medical license was not accepted there. She therefore went to an acupuncturist training school and acquired a certificate as an acupuncturist. It took five years after her repatriation to open her office in Japan. However, upon retirement, her private pension was less than ¥30,000 (US$273) per month, and she had to pay back her loan debt for the school tuition. Her husband did not receive any private pension, and he could not pay off his loan debt for his training school tuition even if he received a welfare benefit. In contrast, her postretirement life was guaranteed in China, where a doctor who worked for over thirty years received a pension equaling the amount of the salary at the time of retirement. She just wished that the Japanese workplace had recognized her career in China.10 A female orphan returned to Japan in 1988, went to a cooking school for a year, and worked as a cook. When she became sixty years old, she was demoted to a part-timer’s status. She had back pain and high blood pressure, but she had no choice but to keep working, because her husband was unemployed. Their monthly household income consisted of a ¥70,000 (US$636) salary and a ¥22,000 (US$200) public pension. She stated that when she became unable to work, they would not be able to live. Another female orphan, who had worked as a janitor since 1992, earned ¥60,000 (US$545) per month. She passed the retirement age, but her employer let her keep working. Her health was failing but she still had to keep working, because she was raising her grandchild after her daughter’s death. If she retired, her monthly income would be only ¥25,000 (US$227) private pension and a ¥22,000 (US$200) public pension. She did not know how she could live when she was asked to retire.11 Utsumi Tadashi’s Retirement Utsumi Tadashi returned to Japan in February 1986 when he was forty- seven years old. He went to a job training school for a year,
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learned metal welding, and began working at a copier manufacturing factory. However, he could not communicate with his coworkers. They treated him as a foreigner and blamed him for all the problems at the factory. He still continued to work at the factory to raise his three children until retirement in 2001. All he received on retirement was a ¥250,000 (US$2,273) retirement allowance. Afterward, his sole income was a private pension of ¥58,333 (US$530) per month. His wife continued to work part-time at a cleaning shop in order to pay for the public housing rent of ¥30,000 (US$273). Without his wife’s ¥140,000 (US$1,273) monthly wages, they would not be able to make ends meet. His wife was ill and had undergone operations, but she kept on working. If they applied for the welfare benefit, they would have to dispose of their personal savings and life insurance policy, as well as his car and other “luxury” items. Utsumi’s misgivings about his future grew daily.12 Tanaka Bunji’s Retirement Tanaka Bunji retired from the liquor wholesale company in July 2001 because he could no longer move due to his back pains. His retirement allowance, after consecutive thirteen years of work, was ¥2 million (US$18,182). That was all the assets he had. His private pension was ¥55,000 (US$500) per month. His wife’s medical bill cost ¥15,000 (US$136) every month. He could not make ends meet after paying the rent and the utility bills. He could not find a new job because of his back pains. However, he did not want to depend on welfare, because it would deprive him of fundamental human rights. Tanaka and his wife moved into his daughter’s house. Then, he was obliged to become a welfare recipient in May 2003 when he used up his retirement allowance. Tanaka could not afford to visit China, but his deceased foster parents’ relatives felt that he was ungrateful not to attend their memorial services. Tanaka and his wife visited China for two weeks to attend the memorial service of his father-in-law, with prior notification to the local office. When they came back, the local office requested him to show his passport and ordered him to pay back the two weeks of his welfare benefit.13 With the private pension of ¥30,000–¥50,000 and the public pension of ¥22,000, the orphans simply could not sustain a living. The monthly income of ¥52,000–¥72,000 (US$473–US$655) was below subsistence level by any measure. Even the welfare benefit (“public assistance”) in the fiscal year 2004 was ¥121,940 (US$1,109) for the
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household of a retired couple, of ages sixty-eight and sixty-five in the metropolitan areas.14 In reality, ¥150,000 (US$1,364) was the minimum needed for a retired couple to lead a decent life in urban areas in 2002. As more orphans had retired, many were obliged to live on welfare even if they did not want to. They preferred to receive pensions, just like ordinary Japanese retirees. In hindsight, had the Ministry truly compensated the orphans’ unpaid premiums and paid them the full benefit of ¥66,000 when the 1994 Assistance Law was enacted (because there was no way for them to pay the premiums before repatriation), instead of ¥22,000, the orphans would not have to be driven into a corner. In the absence of any effective measures to alleviate their financial difficulties, the insecurity about their postretirement life haunted them. Volunteer Organizations Unite In March 1991, Shima Kiyoshi founded a volunteer group in Tokyo called the “Fuso-doshin-kai” (the Japan Friends Society; fuso is the name of a sacred tree in ancient China that was believed to grow in the east of China where the sun rises, and also refers to Japan) in order to make up for the inadequate public policy to assist the orphans. The group had helped the orphans with establishing domicile, finding their receivers, employment, public housing, and school. It later shifted focus to protecting the orphans’ human rights and to guaranteeing their postretirement life. In November 1993, the group submitted a petition to the Ministry of Health, requesting an increase in the public pension benefit to the orphans, with 4,600 signatures.15 Faced with a life-and-death situation, other volunteer organizations, such as the National Council on Issues Concerning the Orphans Left Behind in China and the Kanagawa Welfare Association to Assist the Repatriates from China, joined forces in November 1999. They submitted a petition to the Ministry, requesting the creation of programs to secure orphans’ jobs and guarantee their postretirement life. Then, in September 2000, Aimoto organized a group of 400 orphans in Kanagawa prefecture to request for postretirement benefit for the orphans. He named the group “the Society to Thank China and Foster Parents.” At its founding ceremony, an observer stated that many of the orphans’ foster parents were already dead, however, they would be heartbroken had they learned about the actual plight of their children in Japan.16
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In the spring of 2001, Aimoto and Sugawara Kosuke organized a petition movement toward the Japanese parliament, requesting legislation to provide a postretirement benefit for the Japanese left behind in China. After consulting with the orphans and administration officials concerned, Sugawara came up with a proposal to request ¥150,000 (US$1,364) pension per month, which was the minimum amount for a retired couple to sustain a decent living without depending on welfare. Together with the Japan Friends Society in Tokyo, the Society to Thank China and Foster Parents had collected 100,000 signatures and petitioned for the legislation to the lawmakers and the major political parties. The volunteers also organized public demonstrations. As many as 350 orphans participated in their first street demonstration in Tokyo in June 2001. Then 600 orphans marched in front of the Ministry of Health building in Tokyo on August 15, the fifty-sixth anniversary of the end of the war.17 Sugawara was determined to make the petition successful. Sugawara had high hopes in Prime Minister Koizumi because he had served twice as health minister. Koizumi’s constituency was District 11 of Kanagawa prefecture, where Sugawara lived. However, Prime Minister Koizumi’s secretary f latly told Sugawara that the legislation was out of the question. The issue was already settled by providing a monthly ¥22,000 public pension, and a welfare benefit if necessary. Sugawara was deeply disappointed with this inf luential secretary’s response. Sugawara and other volunteers also talked with the Ministry of the Health officials. However, the Ministry’s response was that the orphans should get the welfare benefit if necessary, and no new policy was necessary.18 Strangely, with the emergence of the petition movement, the local social welfare offices suddenly changed their attitudes. In the past, they had urged the repatriates to end their dependence on welfare and become self-sufficient as soon as possible. They told the orphans that welfare benefit was a privilege. It was only a temporary remedy. At this time, however, they told the repatriates that they should live on welfare after retirement. It was their entitlement. However, the orphans did not want to keep living on welfare that deprived them of freedom to visit their families in China. They realized that the Ministry was trying to kill the bill by resorting to the welfare program. They saw in the sudden change of position yet another case of the politics of convenience. Subsequently, a bill to provide a postretirement benefit for the Japanese left behind in China was submitted in the parliament by
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the opposition parties in 2001 and 2002; however, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rejected the bill.19 Why did the Ministry adamantly refuse to provide a postretirement benefit for the orphans to the extent that it reversed its earlier policy? The LDP’s pretext was that all the Japanese were more or less victims of the war, and therefore the government should not provide a benefit specifically for the orphans. It is true that many large cities, such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, were burned down by massive U.S. B-29 air strikes. About 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima and 74,000 people in Nagasaki fell to the atomic bombs. Nevertheless, the LDP’s logic was erroneous and inconsistent. The government had provided compensation to the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings through the legislation of the Special Measures Law Concerning the Atomic Bomb Victims in 1968 and the Law to Assist the Atomic Bomb Victims in 1994. The survivors of the Massive Tokyo air strikes also claimed that the Japanese government must compensate for the war damages inf licted on civilians, and requested compensation from the government.20 Generous and Numerous Military Pensions Moreover, the government provided a handsome pension for the Japanese war veterans and bereaved families. In August 1953, the government restored (and revised) the Military Pension Law that had been suspended by the SCAP- GHQ in February 1946. It paid the war veterans who had served in the Japanese military for more than twelve years a considerable pension, ranging from ¥1,800,000 to ¥8,300,000 annually, depending on their former ranks. As many as 1,600,000 war veterans received the military pension from this legislation. The fiscal budget for the pension exceeded ¥1,500 billion each year during the 1970s.21 Then, backed by the Japan War Bereaved Families Association, the government enacted a series of laws, including the Law to Assist the Bereaved Families of the War Wounded and the War Dead (April 1952), the Special Measures Law for the Bereaved Families of the War Veterans (December 1956), the Law to Provide Special Benefits to the Wives of the War Dead (March 1963), the Law to Provide Special Assistance to the War Wounded (August 1963), the Law to Provide Special Condolence Benefits to the Bereaved Families of the War Dead ( June 1965), the Law to Provide Special Benefits to the Wives of the
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War Wounded ( July 1965), and the Law to Provide Special Benefits to the Parents of the War Dead ( July 1967). While the war veterans and their bereaved families received generous compensation and pensions, the orphans who went through as much hardships as the soldiers at the warfront received nothing. Nevertheless, when the orphans asked for a postretirement benefit, because they could no longer sustain their lives, the government rejected it.22 Military Pension for the Manchukuo Army There was also discrimination in military pensions. The Manchukuo Army was a different organization from the Kwantung Army. It was not officially part of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). While such nominal distinctions might not matter to the war victims, it made an enormous difference in the soldiers’ status and compensation. The Manchukuo Army was created in 1932 in order to defend and maintain the security of Manchukuo vis-à-vis the anti-Japanese guerrilla activities in Manchuria. The protocol between Japan and Manchukuo in September 1932 declared that Pu Yi was the Commander in Chief of the Manchukuo Army. Nevertheless, it stipulated that the Manchukuo Army would act under the supervision of the IJA. An attachment to the protocol also provided that Manchukuo would assume the expenses of the Manchukuo Army.23 The Manchukuo Army’s core consisted of the inf luential Chinese warlords in Northeast China. It had originally about 130,000 personnel, made up of Hans, Koreans, Manchurians, and Mongolians. The Kwantung Army found it difficult to train the Manchukuo Army, made up of a hodgepodge of ethnic groups, and recruited Japanese youth to the latter. These officers were hired with the same conditions as their non-Japanese recruits in the Manchukuo Army. When Kwantung Army retreated to the southern border, it left the Manchukuo Army to confront the Soviet Army. The Manchukuo Army lost morale without supervision from the Kwantung Army, and self- destructed due to its internal rebellion. Hans and other ethnic soldiers capitulated without fighting, and rose up for the self-determination of their ethnic groups. Most of the Japanese officers of the Manchukuo Army died in action or fell to internal rebellions. The rest were captured by the Soviet Army and were taken to Siberia.24 The Japanese government excluded the veterans of the Manchukuo Army from the provision of military pensions. The pretext was that the
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Manchukuo Army belonged to an independent state, Manchukuo. The postwar government interpreted that the matter of the Manchukuo Army had to be dealt with by the Manchukuo government, and that Japanese laws could not deal with it. The Japanese military officers of the Manchukuo Army were considered members of a Foreign Legion. Manchukuo had ceased to exist and they had no government to turn to. It seems hypocritical of the Japanese government to consider Manchukuo as an independent state in the postwar period, in order to evade its responsibility for its colony. It should be recalled that the IGH Operations Staff Lieutenant Colonel Asaeda Shigeharu considered Manchukuo to be part of Japan when the Soviet Army attacked Manchukuo.25 In 1959, the former Japanese military officers of the Manchukuo Army started a petition to request military pensions. The government conceded in 1964 to pay them a military pension. Nevertheless, it limited the eligibility only to those who had enlisted in the IJA before joining the Manchukuo Army. The Japanese military officers who had directly enrolled in the Manchukuo Army were still excluded from the military pension, in addition to the local non-Japanese recruits. Moreover, the stipend for former Manchukuo Army officers was far less than that for those in the IJA at the comparable rank. They were the same human beings and had fought in the same war. Nevertheless, their lives were weighed in the monetary scale and were labeled with different price tags. The Manchukuo Army fought harder at the warfront than the Kwantung Army, but they were given far less compensation, or none. They were expendable, as were the Japanese farmer-settlers.26 Legislation for Victims of North Korean Abductions Meanwhile, the case of the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens presents a stark contrast to the orphan case in the ways in which the Japanese government dealt with their repatriation and resettlement. This Korean case involves the Japanese citizens who mysteriously disappeared from the northwestern coastal regions of Japan mostly between 1977 and 1983. It is believed that the North Korean government used them to teach its spies the Japanese language, as well as to steal their identities. The fact that they had been abducted by North Korean agents became known for the first time in 1988. A North Korean agent, Kim Hyon-hui (who used the Japanese pseudonym, Hachiya Mayumi), testified that one of the abducted Japanese women in 1978, Taguchi
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Yaeko, or Lee Eun-hye, gave her Japanese language training. Kim was one of two culprits accused of the Korean Airlines Flight 858 bombing in Myanmar in 1987 in order to sabotage the 1988 Seoul Olympic Summer Games. Another suspect committed suicide.27 Meanwhile, Yokota Megumi, who was abducted when she was thirteen years old, on her way home from school in 1977, became a cause célèbre of this abduction issue. Her parents had not given up searching for her and tirelessly appealed her case, both domestically and overseas, including to President George W. Bush in person. The North Korean government stated that Yokota had committed suicide in 1994 and provided her remains to the Japanese government. However, the DNA tests performed on her remains failed to establish her identity, making the family hope that she is still alive. Yokota would be forty-five years old in 2009.28 In September 2002, Prime Minister Koizumi visited Pyongyang for the first Japan-North Korea summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. The latter admitted that North Korea had abducted thirteen Japanese between 1977 and 1983. Nevertheless, the Japanese government list had at least sixteen. The North Korean leader agreed to return five victims (all abducted in July–August 1978). He then gave Koizumi death certificates for the remaining eight, which later proved to be forged. Upon repatriation in October 2002, the five abductees became instant heroes because of the sensational nature of the issue, and the national euphoria of their release from the closed country.29 The Japanese parliament swiftly enacted the Law to Assist the Victims of the North Korean Abductions in December 2002. Instead of making them become welfare recipients, like the orphans, the government provided the victims of the North Korean abductions with a monthly stipend of ¥170,000 (US$1,545), for a single-person household, and ¥240,000 (US$2,182), for a two-person household, for a five-year period, with no strings attached. In addition, the government paid in full, on their behalf, the public pension premiums for the period while they were in North Korea, so that they could receive a full pension benefit upon retirement. Further, the local government gave them jobs, housing assistance, and other benefits, on top of the generous monthly stipend and the other compensation from the national government.30 The orphans were dumbfounded by the stark disparity between the ways in which the government treated the two groups of repatriates from hostile countries. The orphans were obliged to remain
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in China after the war had ended in 1945. Their repatriation began only in 1981, and most of them were repatriated in the mid-1980s and the 1990s, and beyond. In contrast, the five abductees were taken to North Korea in 1978 and returned to Japan in 2002. The orphans were persecuted in communist China for four decades, and then were despised as “Chinese” upon repatriation. In contrast, the abductees lived in North Korea for twenty-four years, teaching Japanese to its elites (themselves being given special treatment), and came back as heroes. Nevertheless, the Japanese government treated orphans far worse than the repatriates from North Korea. The sheer gap in public assistance and compensation between the two groups deepened the sense of betrayal toward the government on the orphans’ part. One would be hard pressed to blame the orphans if they wanted the same compensation and financial assistance as the repatriated abductees (see chapter 14).31 Kinoshita Takao was stunned by the stark difference between the times it took for the two legislations, as well as by the “heaven-and-earth disparity” in the substance of the public assistance. While it took forty-nine years after the orphans had been left behind in China for the government to legislate the 1994 Assistance Law for the orphans (or thirteen years since their repatriation began), it took only fifty days after the abductees’ repatriation for the government to enact the law to assist them. Kinoshita wonders why the government treated the two groups of victims in hostile foreign lands so differently (see chapter 14). Yet, he states that one thing is clear. The responsibility for the abductions lay with the North Korean government, whereas that for the orphans rests with the Japanese government. The Japanese government cannot blame the orphan issue on the civil war in China, or the Cold War, any longer.32 In summary, the petition for a postretirement benefit was the orphans’ last plea to the Japanese government. They felt that their homeland had abandoned them almost three times. First, the wartime government abandoned them when the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria. Then the postwar government abandoned them, designating them as “wartime dead.” The government almost abandoned them for the third time by failing to repatriate them expeditiously and to provide public assistance for their settlement. The petition for a postretirement benefit was their last litmus test to determine whether the government really abandoned them for the third time. The orphans would not forgive the government if it abandoned them a third time. They would not consider Japan as their homeland if it did.33
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The volunteers and repatriated orphans worked tirelessly for the petition movement. Despite the massive mobilization, their voice was not heard. The orphans tried all the possible measures available, both at the executive and legislative branches of the government. However, nothing had changed in the government’s attitude toward the orphans. It was a last draw.
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T H I RT E E N
Class-Action Lawsuits
In December 2001, three Japanese “women left behind in China” filed a civil lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court, asking the Japanese government to acknowledge its responsibility for having abandoned them for decades. It requested compensation of ¥20 million (US$181,818) per person. Suzuki Noriko was one of three plaintiffs. Suzuki was categorized as a “woman left behind in China” although she was only sixteen years old when she was shot by the Soviet Army. Through her volunteer work at the Society for the Repatriates from China, Suzuki knew the pains and sufferings of the orphans. They had faced midlife crisis in a “foreign” society. Suzuki stood up on behalf of the orphans who could not speak Japanese, to establish a precedent. Suzuki stated that the orphans’ uncertain future had deepened their sense of insecurity. The retired orphans were obliged to revert to living on welfare, which contradicted the government policy of promoting their self-sufficiency. Suzuki was receiving ¥50,000 (US$455) combined pension benefits per month. Her husband did not receive any pension because his premium payments did not meet the required years. He ended up losing all of his premium payments. The two of them barely managed to make ends meet; even their children chipped in with ¥20,000 (US$182) every month. Suzuki stated that unless the government takes measures to guarantee the minimum subsistence living of the retired orphans, they could not live.1 Suzuki sued the government also for the sake of speaking up the truth about the Manchuria-Mongolia settlement. She had toiled in Manchuria, believing that the Kwantung Army would defend the farmer-settlers. She would like to know why the Kwantung Army abandoned them, and why they were left to fight the Soviet Army all
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Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
by themselves. The voices of the dying fellow settlers asking her to tell the truth about how they died if she returned to Japan alive still reverberated in her head. These voices compelled her to speak up. Suzuki had persevered slave labor in postwar China and could not return to Japan until thirty-three years after the end of the war. Yet her homeland was cold to her. Her husband was sick in bed after a long struggle in Japan. Having left his relatives and friends in China, her husband had endured solitude in Japan. Suzuki had survived in China only because of his family. It was her turn to take care of him in this land that was foreign to him. Suzuki stated, “The government owes us an apology. The lawsuit is necessary to recover our human rights and decent human lives lost for decades.”2 Nishida Rumiko Nishida Rumiko became another plaintiff because she could speak Japanese, unlike most of the orphans. Although Nishida was only eleven years old at the end of the war, she was categorized as a “woman,” because she knew her Japanese identity. Nishida spoke up on behalf of the voiceless farmer-settlers who had perished in the continent, as well as on behalf of the repatriated Japanese who had been obliged to live below subsistence level. The third plaintiff, Fujii Takeko, was thirteen years old at the end of the war, which was the very threshold age for the distinction between an “orphan” and a “woman,” according to the Japanese government definitions. She had suffered unspeakable humiliations in China. Nevertheless, she was denied the public assistance available to the orphans, because she was categorized as a “woman.” When the Law to Assist the Japanese Left Behind in China was legislated in 1994, she was sixty-one years old. Fujii and Nishida met Suzuki through the Society for the Repatriates from China. They wanted to ask the government why it categorized girls as “women,” treating them far worse than the orphans. They decided to sue the government on behalf of all the other women left behind in China, as well as on behalf of the orphans.3 Later, when the waves of the orphans’ class-action lawsuits reached shore nationwide, some repatriated women in Kochi and Saitama prefectures also filed class-action lawsuits. However, most of the 3,800 repatriated women did not join the movement. They remained silent because they were simply too old and sick to act, if not dead already. It should be noted that the three “women” who filed a lawsuit at the
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Tokyo District Court were not actually “women” in 1945, but girls. They were referred to as “women” only because the government defined them as such. In contrast, the real “women” were born in the 1910s or early 1920s. Most of the survivors had multitudes of illnesses, while many were bedridden. They did not speak out also because the military education taught them absolute loyalty and self- sacrifice toward the emperor and the nation.4 Moreover, the women remained silent because their experiences in Manchuria were too shameful to reveal. They had been subjected to gang rape by the Soviet Army or the Chinese mobs. They underwent abortions at the former Manchurian Medical University and other places. They had concealed these unbearable experiences from their Chinese families (most of their first Japanese husbands had died in action or were missing) or from their Japanese relatives upon repatriation. They could not bring themselves to confess these past experiences after all these decades of concealment. They also could not disclose the heart-wrenching acts of “disposing of ” their own children, even though they were ordered to do so by their settlement leaders and Japanese soldiers. They concealed these shameful experiences at the end of the war and began a new life, while mourning and atoning for their pasts privately. An aged woman said, “I still walk carrying a doll on my back and cry endlessly, thinking of my baby left in the mountains.”5 These were painful memories, and they could not bear to recount them (see chapter 14). Orphans File Class-Action Lawsuit in Tokyo The lawsuit by the three “women” became a precursor to a class-action lawsuit by the orphans in Kanagawa and Tokyo. Initially they were afraid that they might be imprisoned if they sued the government, recalling their years in China. They were also afraid that their welfare benefit might be cut off. They did not even have the means to pay the filing fee of ¥150,000 (US$1,364) for the lawsuit, or for transportation to attend public hearings. Nevertheless, the orphans stood up because it was a life-or-death matter to them. However, they could not do this alone without the volunteers’ help. Specifically, it was no exaggeration to say that, were it not for Sugawara Kosuke (seventy-seven years old), then the chairman of the Kanagawa Welfare Association to Assist Repatriates from China, the orphan’s class-action lawsuit would not have been possible. Sugawara became the driving force for the lawsuit, as the representative advisor to the plaintiffs.6
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The language barrier became a huge obstacle. Preparing for a lawsuit of the orphans who did not speak or write Japanese was a Herculean task. According to a poll on the orphans released by the Ministry of Health in September 2000, only 27.4 percent of the respondents could manage daily business in Japanese by themselves within a year of repatriation, 17.7 percent within two years of repatriation, 8.1 percent within three years of repatriation, and 13.7 percent took more than three years. As many as 32.7 percent of the repatriates did not learn Japanese well enough to manage daily business, even more than after three years of repatriation. Another poll showed that as many as 45.5 percent of the orphans could hardly understand the Japanese on TV and radio, whereas 37.5 percent understood half of it, and 17.0 percent understood most of the content. As for reading Japanese, 61.7 percent could hardly read Japanese, while 30.6 percent could read half the content, and 7.7 percent could read most. Worse, 72.4 percent could not write letters in Japanese, whereas 25.3 percent could write a little, and 2.3 percent could write adequately. Under these circumstances, volunteers organized meetings with Chinese interpreters and distributed documents with Chinese translations.7 Sugawara, for his part, tirelessly searched for lawyers who would be willing to take up an unprecedented and unprofitable lawsuit, and who would stand up for human rights, justice, and humanity. In the end, the sixteenth lawyer that Sugawara solicited, Onodera Toshitaka, who had dealt with postwar compensation cases before, agreed to organize a legal team for the orphans. Another lawyer, Suzuki Tsuneo, agreed to become the head of the legal team. In the end, the legal team had expanded from 30 to 183 lawyers. With Sugawara as the centripetal force, hundreds of orphans were mobilized for the common goal. They held a meeting in September 2002 to “commence a lawsuit to establish the responsibility of the government for abandoning children.” Sugawara’s voice broke in front of the 320 attendants when he stated that the deceased volunteers, such as Yamamoto Jisho, would be pleased if they were here.8 Meanwhile, local government clerks threatened the orphans by saying, “Even if you won the case, you will have to return the compensation to the government, because you are welfare recipients.” “All the welfare benefits you received in the past will be retroactively subtracted from your compensation.” All these threats were groundless. The orphans did not succumb to these threats this time, because they had no other choice. An observer wrote that it was extraordinary that the orphans, who were unaccustomed to Japanese- style group behavior, joined forces
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for the same cause. Nobody has ever thought that the orphans who could not speak Japanese would sue the government. In turn, Sugawara stated that it was deplorable that the orphans could not even hope to live a decent human life unless they sued the government.9 In December 2002, as many as 629 orphans filed a class-action lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court, requesting government compensation for its negligence to assume responsibility for implementing the orphans’ early repatriation and settlement assistance. The plaintiffs requested a compensation of ¥33 million (US$300,000) per person, totaling ¥21 billion (US$189 million). The number of plaintiffs, almost a quarter of the total repatriated orphans then, was impressive. In comparison, the requested compensation was moderate, considering the depth and the length of their tribulations. The orphans made banners in awkward Japanese and practiced their Sprechchor (chanting slogans) in Japanese. The day finally came. On December 20, about 800 orphans marched to the government office district in Tokyo on the way to the Tokyo District Court. Their Sprechchor turned from Japanese to Chinese before long.10 Rationale for Class-Action Lawsuits The plaintiffs claimed that they had been deprived of the “right to live humanly as ordinary Japanese” from their childhood to the present, as a result of the Japanese government’s illegal “policy to abandon its people.” First, their right to life was violated when the Kwantung Army abandoned them. They lost their identities, and lived in China where they suffered discrimination and persecution. The postwar government also denied their right to life by designating them as “wartime dead.” Upon repatriation, the government treated them as legal aliens and discriminated against them. In essence, the plaintiffs had been deprived of the comprehensive right to live as human beings in their homeland from the end of the war to the present. They would like at least in the final stage of their lives to have their fundamental human rights restored.11 Further, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the misguided national policies on the part of the Japanese government inf licted pains and sufferings upon the orphans. First, the government failed to repatriate the orphans expeditiously when the war was over because of political expediency. This would have constituted a violation of the international laws concerning the treatment of noncombatants, provided
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by the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The government then de facto obliterated the orphans by designating them as “wartime dead.” The government did not expedite their repatriation even after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. The government failed to provide adequate public assistance for settlement and self- sufficiency. The lawsuit was necessary to make the government acknowledge its wrongdoings and the illegality of these deeds. The government must account for these acts and should compensate the orphans for the damages it had inf licted on them.12 First Public Hearings at Tokyo District Court The first public hearing of the class-action lawsuit was held at the Tokyo District Court in April 2003. Ikeda Sumie (Xu Ming, fiftyseven years old), Plaintiff No. 1 of the class-action lawsuit in Tokyo, and Utsumi Tadashi (sixty-two years old) gave testimony. Ikeda stated that she joined the lawsuit because she wanted to establish the Japanese government’s responsibility for not having initiated the official search missions soon after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. Since Ikeda returned to Japan just before the official search missions began, she did not receive any public assistance. Her qualification as a schoolteacher in China did not mean anything, and she had to start all over again in Japan. Ikeda felt that had the government searched for the orphans immediately after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, the orphans would not have had to suffer the hardships and pains that she and her family went through.13 In turn, Utsumi passed out at the hearings as he recounted the scene of the Mashan Incident. It was a memory he could not bear even after six decades. Utsumi stated that he became one of the plaintiffs because he wanted to ask why the Japanese government did not allow him to return to Japan when he located his father. A further delay in his repatriation made the already difficult process of settlement in Japan even more difficult. With a scant pension, Utsumi had a hard time making ends meet, but he did not want to become a welfare recipient. When he visited China to see his sick foster sister, she said, “How happy you must be, living in Japan.” He wished that the orphans would win the lawsuit so that he could say “yes” to her. Utsumi labored to write in Japanese. There was a large handwritten table of Japanese alphabets hung in his room, where he prepared his deposition.14
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The second public hearing was held in June 2003. Among the plaintiffs’ testimonies, Sugano Rakno’s (sixty-one years old) testimony in Chinese was most poignant. Sugano grew up in an orphanage in Harbin. She hardly had any memories of her birthmother, but she remembered a song her mother used to sing to her. She sang it. Her clear voice reverberated in the courtroom: Haru ga kita, haru ga kita, doko ni kita, yama ni kita, sato ni kita, no nimo kita (Spring has come, spring has come, where has it come? To the mountain, to the village, to the field, it has come). Any Japanese would know this children’s song. Sugano’s husband committed suicide fifteen months after their repatriation. She hardly knew her birthparents. She had no foster parents. She did not find any kin in Japan and also lost her husband. She stated that the orphans had endured abuse and slander in China. They then suffered pains similar to hers in Japan. Sugano concluded her testimony by appealing to the judges to give a humane verdict so that the orphans could live in peace at least in their old age.15 Other Plaintiffs’ Testimonies Three more public hearings were held by the end of 2003, and two to four orphans gave testimony in Chinese each time, which were translated into Japanese by the court interpreters. Some of the orphans whose experiences were examined earlier also gave their testimonies. Tanaka Toshiko Tanaka Toshiko (sixty-two years old) had kept to herself the fact that Japanese soldiers had murdered her mother and her siblings, because it was too shocking for a five-year-old child. But she finally spoke out in order to question the Japanese military’s egoism and the Japanese government’s neglect. After retiring from a teaching job in China, Tanaka returned to Japan with her husband and their eldest son’s family in 2000. Soon she found out that she had colon cancer and fell into a critical condition. Her eldest daughter’s family and second son’s family
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Sato Kyoko Sato Kyoko (sixty-two years old) joined the class-action lawsuit because she wanted the orphans’ human rights, deprived of for decades, restored. She stated that the orphans were not treated as human beings even in their homeland. They were first deprived of their identity in Manchuria. Sato does not know her true identity to this day. The orphans were persecuted and tortured in China. Then, upon repatriation, they were deprived of their dignity and liberty in Japan. Sato questioned why the government not only did not help the orphans, but also mistreated them through the demeaning welfare benefit, while giving the United States enormous amounts of money for its war activities. While the Chinese foster parents had raised the orphans at the cost of endangering themselves, and even sent them to college, the Japanese government had neglected them and discriminated against them. Sato’s daughters asked her to come to live in the United States, but she decided to stay in Japan in order to establish the Japanese government’s responsibility toward the orphans.17 Beniya Torao Beniya Torao (sixty-five years old) became one of the plaintiffs because he wanted to establish the responsibility of the Japanese government for having driven countless settlers to their deaths without informing them of the Soviet Army invasion or the emperor’s acceptance of defeat. He joined the lawsuit also for the sake of atoning for the deaths of his parents and siblings. When he returned to Japan he learned from his eldest sister, who had remained in Japan, that he was the only survivor of his family in Manchuria. His father and two brothers were missing and were designated as “wartime dead.” The Soviet Army shot his elder sister to death in a village, while his mother managed to escape to Harbin but died of malnutrition there. Beniya placed the memorial tablets of the five members of his family on an alter at his home. The date of death on all the five tablets was August 27, 1945, and the cause of death was “war death.” In another male orphan’s case, he made an altar for his parents in his home
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moved to Japan to help her. The operation on her was successful, and she paid her medical bills through welfare benefit. Her children’s families did not receive any public assistance because they were adults. They desperately looked for jobs, but in vain. She wondered if her decision to settle in her homeland was a mistake.16
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and gives offerings twice a month. Since he does not know his parents’ names, their memorial tablet simply says “Father and Mother.”18
Saima Takashi (fifty-nine years old) joined the lawsuit so that the orphans could live a decent human life in the final stage of their lives. He tried to forget the status he had built up in China and toiled to build a new life in Japan. However, his aunt still despised him, and humiliated him by asking, “Why does the person who was a middle-school principal have to work as an office cleaner?” Among the many unreasonable government measures toward the orphans, Saima was most indignant about the receiver system. Why do the orphans need receivers to be repatriated to their own homeland? Saima also objected to the requirement that the orphans must settle near their kin or receiver. He did not have any friends in Nagano, whereas there were other orphans in Tokyo whom he had known in China. Saima felt that the government had treated the orphans as if they were foreign refugees. He felt that the government was imposing difficulties on them on purpose. He could not afford to go on sightseeing trips in Japan, let alone visit his families in China. He requested compensation so that the orphans would not have to depend on welfare that deprived them of fundamental human rights.19 Tanaka Bunji Tanaka Bunji (sixty-one years old) wanted the Japanese government to restore human dignity for the victims of its colonial policy. Tanaka had carried the liabilities of his father’s death since age four. He does not know his real identity to this day. He was repatriated to Japan only because Sugawara Kosuke became his receiver. Upon retirement, Tanaka for the first time had time to sit and read, and learned about the history of Manchuria-Mongolia settlement. He then solved his lifelong riddle as to why the Chinese murdered his father, while his foster parents were kind to him. He realized that his father’s death was the Chinese farmers’ reprisal for Japan’s unjust colonial policy.20 Shima Kiyoshi and Aimoto Rei Shima Kiyoshi (sixty-nine years old) felt that he had lived a life of atonement in China for forty years, as a scapegoat of Japanese imperialism.
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He endured reprisals for the atrocities committed by Japanese militarism. However, he retained his Japanese name and persevered with the hardships in China for the sake of his homeland. Therefore, he was most heartbroken with the fact that the Japanese repatriates were despised as Chinese and discriminated against in his homeland. All of the eighty members of the Japan Friends Society that Shima had created became plaintiffs of the lawsuit. Meanwhile, Aimoto Rei (sixty-two years old), who had organized the Society to Thank China and the Foster Parents, had devoted himself to preparing the class-action lawsuit, using his command of Chinese and Japanese languages. He wished that this lawsuit would succeed so that he could call Japan a true homeland that he had longed for so long.21 Defendant’s Position In turn, the thirty-one lawyers for the defendant, the Japanese government, argued that the plaintiffs’ claim that they had been deprived of their “rights to live humanly as ordinary Japanese” by the Japanese government’s illegal “policy to abandon its people” had no legal basis. They declared that no such rights were established in the National Compensation Law. They also argued that the plaintiffs failed to specify the “policy to abandon its people.” Accordingly, they argued, the plaintiffs’ claim could not constitute a damaged interest provided by the National Compensation Law. In addition, the defendant’s lawyers considered the plaintiffs’ claim that the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) should have taken appropriate measures to help the orphans settle in Japan in matters such as acquiring Japanese nationality, public housing, employment, and language to be ambiguous. They therefore regarded the claim as invalid. They further argued that the government had in fact assisted the orphans through budgetary measures (by providing repatriation travel expenses and selfsufficiency allowances) prior to the enactment of the 1994 Law to Assist the Japanese Left Behind in China, and then through the implementation of the Law thereafter.22 In response, Onodera Toshitaka, the deputy head of the plaintiffs’ legal team, asked the judges to consider the fact that the orphans were forced to suffer extremely cruel damages in China, and then had been deprived of their basic human dignity after their repatriation to this day. Onodera asked the judges to recognize these damages as a violation of human rights that was systematically created by the misguided government policy.23
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In March 2004, Sugawara Kosuke stood at the witness stand at the Tokyo District Court. The defendant’s lawyer stated that the delay in the orphans’ repatriation was caused by the disruption of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations. Sugawara replied that the Chinese government was willing to help repatriate the Japanese in the absence of the diplomatic relations, exemplified by the Beijing Agreement (1953) and the Tianjin Agreement (1956). Even the war criminals detained in China were repatriated before the “Wartime Death Decree” in 1959. Therefore, the Japanese government had plenty of opportunities to repatriate the orphans. Then the defendant’s lawyer stated that the orphans’ repatriation was delayed because the Chinese government did not have the information on the orphans. Sugawara replied that this was simply not true. The Chinese police had marked every orphan since their childhood, and kept an eye on them throughout. The defendant’s lawyer then stated that Manchukuo was an independent nation, and the Japanese government was therefore not responsible for the orphans. Sugawara replied that Manchukuo was Japan’s colony.24 Mushrooming of Class-Action Lawsuits The wave of the class-action lawsuit filed by the orphans in Kanagawa and Tokyo at the Tokyo District Court reached ashore nationwide. By the end of 2003, about 1,500 orphans (60 percent of the total 2,500 repatriated orphans) filed class-action lawsuits in nine local district courts. Then the tidal wave became a massive tsunami and engulfed 2,192 orphans (88 percent of the total repatriated orphans) in fifteen locales, from Sapporo and Sendai in the north to Kochi and Kagoshima in the south (see table 13.1 in appendix). It was truly remarkable that the orphans who could not speak Japanese gathered forces and mobilized a nationwide movement. It ref lected the depth of their despair and their dire need for government intervention. By the end of August 2005, the youngest of the orphans had become sixty years old. They had no time to lose.25
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FOU RT E E N
Verdicts
In February 2006, the Tokyo District Court gave a verdict for the lawsuit filed by the three Japanese “women left behind in China,” after four years of deliberation. It rejected the plaintiffs’ claim. The verdict recognized that the damages inf licted upon the plaintiffs were unique and different from those of other war victims. Nevertheless, it stopped short of determining whether the damages exceeded the threshold of the war damages that must be equally endured by all Japanese (which did not warrant government compensation), as rendered at the Japanese Supreme Court of Justice. In addition, the verdict acknowledged that the government had neglected its political responsibilities to facilitate their early repatriation and to assist their self-sufficiency. Nonetheless, it stated that the validity of policymaking and its implementation essentially rested within the discretionary judgment on the part of the executive government. It opined that the “hurdle was high” for recognizing the illegality envisaged in the National Compensation Law on the part of the government. It “fell short of one step” to acknowledge the illegality, because the plaintiffs had returned to Japan by 1988.1 Appeal to Tokyo High Court The plaintiffs felt betrayed. Suzuki Noriko did not understand why the court rejected their compensation while acknowledging most of their claims and facts. They appealed to the Tokyo High Court. Disheartened by the verdict, some of the other repatriated women mustered courage and came forward to support their appeal. Otosaka Yukiko, born in 1924, had felt that she was too old to join the lawsuit. However, she
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decided to tell of her own experiences in 2006. Given that the three plaintiffs were actually girls at the end of the war, at the ages of eleven, thirteen, and sixteen, Otosaka wanted the justices in court to know how much the real “women” had suffered. Otosaka had settled in Yilan prefecture in Sanjiang province in 1942 and married a farmer-settler there in 1944. Her husband was taken in the “uprooting conscription.” Only women, the elderly, the sick, and children were left behind in her settlement village. Tens of thousands of “war brides to the continent,” who had married Japanese military personnel, were also left behind. After the Soviet Army’s invasion, Otosaka’s settlement group embarked on a long evacuation journey, wandering in the mountains and drinking muddy water for days. She was carrying her husband’s grandmother on her back all the way, until the grandmother asked her to leave her behind. When Otosaka looked back, the grandmother waved her hand, directing Otosaka to go ahead with the group. Otosaka’s group arrived at an abandoned settlement village and stayed there. When Otosaka and two other women were burying a dead woman who had delivered a stillborn baby, Russian soldiers captured them.2 Speaking the Unspeakable Russians took the three women to a Soviet Army post in Fangzheng prefecture. There were already three other Japanese women and over a dozen Russian soldiers present in a school gym. The six Japanese women were then subjected to gang rape every day for one and a half months. They were the “comfort women” for the Soviet Amy. Otosaka and two others tried to escape but were seized by the guard. When the Soviet Army withdrew, they were taken back to a refugee camp. There the Japanese were ordered to walk to Harbin. Otosaka was too sick to go with them after the abuse. She thus missed the repatriation of 1946. She said in 2006, “I have never told this story before. I decided to tell because I might die tomorrow.”3 Otosaka was then abducted by a Chinese police guard, and she was forced to engage in slave labor in his house. She escaped from the house and met an older Chinese man. He told her that he would return her to her Japanese husband when he came. She married this Chinese man because she could not survive the subzero winter alone for a second time. Her new husband was poor but kind. One day, he told her a startling story. He saw the neighborhood children playing with the sculls and bones of the Japanese that had been weathered by the rain and the wind. He could not bear the scene. But he could not touch them,
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because he was Chinese. He suggested to Otosaka to do something about these remains.4 Otosaka asked the help of other Japanese women left behind in Fangzheng and of Fangzheng Prefecture People’s Government, which mobilized its people to collect the bodies. The Japanese women picked up the bodies in tears, with help from the local Chinese. They collected a total of 4,500 bodies. It took three days and three nights to burn them. Rumors of a plan to build a graveyard for these Japanese reached the Heilongjiang Province People’s Government, and Premier Zhou Enlai, in August 1961. This resulted in the creation of the Fangzheng Japanese Public Cemetery in May 1963. Several local Chinese objected to the cemetery and caused some damage to it. The Fangzheng Government hired a caretaker to guard the cemetery afterward. Otosaka visited the graveyard every day on her way to work in the fields. The Japanese women in Fangzheng held memorial service at the cemetery on August 15 every year.5 After the death of Otosaka’s Chinese husband, she married another Chinese. When the collective repatriation of the Japanese resumed in 1953, the Japanese government did not allow the women’s children or husbands to accompany their repatriation. Otosaka was pregnant then. The Chinese police urged her to have an abortion so that she could join the repatriation. Her husband also told her that she could go. However, she could not abandon this baby. She thus missed the chance of repatriation again. More than two decades later, Otosaka made a temporary homecoming in 1974. The visit lifted up her spirits a little because her Japanese husband was alive and came to see her. He had been repatriated after three years of interment in Siberia and was remarried. Were it not for the war, they would have been together. The trip made her longing for Japan stronger.6 Otosaka spoke standard Japanese despite that fact that she was from Yamagata in northeastern Japan, which is known for the Yamagata dialect. This was because there were many Japanese women left behind in Fangzheng. They spoke to each other in Japanese so as not to forget the Japanese language. Suzuki Noriko also made a conscious effort not to forget Japanese by singing Japanese songs while working in the fields, in anticipation of the day of repatriation. Nevertheless, the government claimed that these women had no intention of returning to Japan and did not help their repatriation. Otosaka returned to Japan by herself in 1978, borrowing money from relatives. She moved to Tokyo because she could not find any job in Yamagata. She had her Chinese family join her after saving up money for their trip. Otosaka did not receive
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any public assistance because she was a repatriated “woman.” Also, she has not been able to live in public housing to this day, despite repeated requests to the Tokyo government. In addition, she was unaware of the public pension system, did not pay premiums, and therefore received no pension.7 Another woman, Furusawa Kichi (eighty-one years old) was bedridden and could not join the lawsuit. Suzuki had been looking after her. Furusawa was a telephone operator for the Kwantung Army. The Army ordered her and about 100 other female employees to remain in Manchuria, while it withdrew to the south. Then, the Soviet Army detained them, raped them, and killed almost all of them to conceal its conduct. Furusawa escaped the murder only because a Chinese soldier rescued her. The Chinese demanded that she marry him, in return for saving her. That was how Furusawa was left behind in China. Suzuki requested that the Ministry of Health pay Furusawa a military pension because she was part of the military establishment. The Ministry rejected the request, saying that a “proof from a third person” (that Furusawa had worked for the Kwantung Army) was necessary.8 Verdict of Tokyo High Court The Tokyo High Court gave its verdict for the three female plaintiffs’ appeal in June 2007. Instead of endorsing the facts, damages, and the negligence of political responsibilities by the government, as acknowledged in the first verdict, the second verdict denied them all. It dismissed the plaintiffs’ appeal as groundless. The judges apparently did not take into account the new depositions of twenty women, including Otosaka, who spoke the unspeakable, for the sake of upholding justice. Some described the verdict as an “abandonment of justice.” The three plaintiffs stated at a press conference that they would appeal the case to the Japanese Supreme Court of Justice. However, Suzuki, the oldest of the three, was seventy-eight years old. Their time was running out.9 It should be noted that the Japanese court system is characterized as conservative, pro-status quo, and pro-government, at the cost of the independence of the judicial branch of government. The separation of the three branches of government is murky in the Japanese parliamentary-cabinet system. The Japanese courts have often acted in unison with the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), protecting the interests of the executive and legislative branches of the government. Other areas of litigation, including constitutional,
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environmental, and social cases, bore similar results to the case of the repatriates from China.
Meanwhile, in July 2005, preceding all the other fourteen district courts nationwide in which the orphans had filed their class-action lawsuits, the Osaka District Court gave its verdict to the thirty-two plaintiffs, the first group of the orphans’ class-action lawsuits filed in that court. Three major claims at issue were (1) the damages inf licted upon the orphans were war damages caused by illegal acts on the part of the government; (2) the government had neglected its responsibility for facilitating the orphans’ early repatriation; and (3) the government also had neglected its responsibility for assisting orphans’ self-sufficiency. The verdict determined that the damages inf licted upon the orphans constituted war damages that should be equally shared and endured by all the Japanese. Second, the verdict acknowledged that the Japanese policies had created the orphans, and that the government was legally responsible for facilitating their early repatriation. Nevertheless, it deemed that the government had fulfilled its legal responsibility, considering the international political situation at that time. It thereby rejected the plaintiffs’ claim. Further, the verdict determined that the government was not legally accountable for assisting the repatriates’ self-sufficiency, and therefore it had not violated the National Compensation Law. Accordingly, the court rejected all the three accounts of the plaintiffs’ claims and denied government compensation. Deeply disappointed, the orphans had to tie their hopes to the verdicts of other courts.10 Verdict of Kobe District Court Then, in December 2006, the Kobe District Court gave its verdict to the sixty-one plaintiffs (the original number of the plaintiffs was sixty-five but four had died or withdrew afterward). Contrary to the Osaka verdict, the verdict stated that the damages inf licted on the orphans were not war damages that should be equally endured by all the Japanese. They were caused by illegal actions on the part of the Japanese government. The verdict also determined that the Japanese government had neglected its legal responsibility for facilitating the orphans’ early repatriation, by imposing the guarantor requirement
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and other conditions. Unlike the Osaka verdict, it unequivocally stated that the government had a legal responsibility for assisting their selfsufficiency. It further determined that the government had failed to fulfill this responsibility by offering far less assistance to them than to the victims of the North Korean abductions (see chapter 12). To compensate their damages, the court ordered the government to pay ¥468 million (US$4.25 million) for the sixty-one plaintiffs; ¥7.67 million (US$69,747) per person. Although the amount of compensation was less than a quarter of the requested ¥33 million per person, the verdict gave high hopes to the orphans. They wished that it would set a precedent for lawsuits in the other district courts.11 Commenting on the Kobe verdict, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo stated that the government would have to examine the verdict carefully before it would decide whether to appeal the case. He also stated that the government had given special assistance to the victims of the North Korean abductions because it was an unprecedented crime committed by a nation. Prime Minister Abe further stated that the government should provide thoughtful assistance to the orphans, hinting that he would reconsider the policy toward them. Ide Magoroku testified as a plaintiffs’ witness at the Kobe trial. He realized that only seven plaintiffs could communicate in Japanese. Ide argued that the assistance for the orphans should not be less than that for the victims of the North Korean abductions. Given the enormous disparity between the financial and other public assistances to the abductees and those to the orphans, the plaintiffs appealed the case to the Osaka High Court, notwithstanding the victory in the District Court.12 Verdict of Tokyo District Court In January 2007, the Tokyo District Court issued its verdict for the forty plaintiffs, the first group of the orphans’ class-action lawsuits filed to that court, in December 2002. It was considered the pivotal verdict in the nation’s capital after the tie (one loss at Osaka and one victory at Kobe). The small courtroom could accommodate only forty auditors in the audience gallery, as the rest of the forty seats were assigned to the plaintiffs. Deceased orphans’ families stood outside with the orphans’ portraits, hoping to share the historic moment with the deceased. Nevertheless, the court rejected all the orphans’ claims and assigned the cost of the lawsuit, of ¥3 million (US$27,273) per person, to the
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plaintiffs. The verdict was brief and lasted less than a minute. The chief justice’s voice was too soft to be heard in the audience gallery, as if he did not want it to be heard. The plaintiffs did not understand the verdict in Japanese. When they did, through the interpreter, they moaned. It was a death sentence for them. One of the orphans said, “How much longer does the government wants us to suffer? It is bullying us to our graves. It is waiting for us to die.”13 The court did not provide a Chinese translation of the full text of the verdict despite the fact that only 7.7 percent of the plaintiffs could read Japanese. The verdict f latly dismissed the plaintiffs’ claim that the national policy of Manchuria-Mongolia settlement had created the orphans. It instead blamed the Soviet Army’s illegal declaration of war toward Japan for the creation of orphans. The verdict also categorically denied the claims that the government had legal responsibilities to facilitate early repatriation of the orphans and to assist their selfsufficiency, neglecting both responsibilities. The verdict concluded that what the orphans had gone through could not be distinguished from the war damages inf licted upon all the Japanese.14 The verdict at the Tokyo District Court turned the judicial clock backward for the orphans’ class-action lawsuits. Comparing the verdict at the Tokyo District Court with that of the Osaka District Court, while both the verdicts denied the plaintiffs’ claims overall, the Osaka verdict at least acknowledged the claims that the Japanese policy had created the orphans and that the government had the legal responsibility to expedite the orphans’ repatriation. In contrast, the Tokyo verdict uniformly denied all the plaintiffs’ claims. It became the harshest among all the verdicts given. The plaintiffs appealed the case to the Tokyo High Court in February 2007. Strangely, Prime Minister Abe stated in response to the verdict that the government should provide the orphans with additional assistance, regardless of the verdict. He then instructed Health Minister Yanagisawa Hakuo to draw up a new policy to assist them (examined below).15 Verdicts of Other District Courts Subsequently, other local district courts issued their verdicts. In March 2007, the Tokushima District Court gave its verdict to the four plaintiffs, denying their claims overall. In line with the Osaka District Court, the verdict acknowledged that the national policies created the orphans. It also stated that the government had the legal responsibility
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to expedite the orphans’ repatriation. Nevertheless, it determined that the government had taken necessary measures for their repatriation. It opined that these measures were not unreasonable, given the international and domestic situations at that time. Unlike the Osaka verdict, however, the Tokushima verdict held the government legally accountable for assisting the orphans’ self-sufficiency. It determined that the government measures to assist their self-sufficiency were inadequate. Yet, it judged that these measures were not significantly unreasonable, given the orphans’ political, social, and economic situations, which were different from those of the North Korean abductees. The court accordingly ruled that the government did not violate any legal responsibilities, and thereby denied the plaintiffs’ request for the government compensation.16 Then, later in March, the Nagoya District Court gave its verdict to the 168 plaintiffs (twelve were bereaved families), the second largest group after the lawsuits at the Tokyo District Court. Following the suit with the Tokushima verdict, the Nagoya District Court acknowledged the government’s legal responsibilities to expedite repatriation as well as to assist self- sufficiency. Nevertheless, it judged that the measures the government had taken were not significantly unreasonable and, therefore, the government had not violated any legal responsibilities. Filled with a sense of disbelief and despair, an orphan said, “I wonder why we have to keep suffering to the end of our lives.” In turn, Kitahara Hisafumi at the Ministry of Health stated, “The government’s claims were vindicated by the verdicts at Tokushima and Nagoya. Prime Minister Abe instructed the Ministry to draw up a new policy to assist the orphans, regardless of the verdicts” (examined below).17 By the summer of 2007, the district courts in Hiroshima, Sapporo, and Kochi had given their verdicts. All dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims overall. In all, eight district courts, out of a total of fifteen, had given their verdicts thus far. With the exception of the Kobe District Court, all the courts rejected the plaintiffs’ claims and denied government compensation. In summary, by refusing to acknowledge its legal responsibilities, the Japanese government failed to recognize the reasons why the orphans, who could not speak Japanese, had to sue the government. It also failed to understand the reasons why the women left behind, who had dedicated their lives for the sake of the nation, had to sue their own government. Overall, it failed to acknowledge the reasons why these aged and underprivileged repatriates had to muster their scarce resources and sue the government.18
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Meanwhile, the cases for the Chinese former “comfort women” and forced laborers, who had sued the Japanese government, were analogous to the orphans’ lawsuits. In April 2007, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled against the Chinese former “comfort women” and forced laborers, establishing a precedent for dozens of similar lawsuits by the Chinese and Korean war victims contested in the lower courts. The two landmark verdicts were also intended to head off the U.S. House resolution on the “comfort women,” submitted in January 2007, during Prime Minister Abe’s visit to Washington, D.C. in April. The two verdicts overall denied compensation to the plaintiffs, while acknowledging that they had been coerced by the Japanese military or industry. The Supreme Court determined that the plaintiffs had lost their right to seek individual legal claims on the Japanese government and companies because China renounced war reparations from Japan in the SinoJapanese Joint Declaration in 1972. In contrast, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the renunciation of war reparations in 1972 concerned only war reparations between the two governments, which did not deprive the individuals of rights to claim compensation.19 The verdicts on the Chinese war victims were consistent with those for the Japanese orphans and women left behind in China. What they had in common was that the conservative LDP-led government—all three branches of government—refused to acknowledge the wrongdoings of the military regime and the postwar administrations. In the case of the “comfort women,” when the U.S. House of Representatives submitted a resolution to demand an official apology from the Japanese government, Foreign Minister Aso Taro stated that the text of the resolution draft contradicted the objective facts. Then, in March 2007, Prime Minister Abe denied the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA)’s direct role in creating the “comfort facilities.” He stated that there was no need for him to apologize even if the resolution were passed.20 Final Appeal to Government Meanwhile, the orphans in six class-action lawsuits appealed to the high courts. However, it was costly and time- consuming to continue the trials while they were aging and ailing. In response to the Abe cabinet’s proposal to devise new assistance to the orphans, notwithstanding the outcomes of the lawsuits, the National Liaison Council
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on the Orphans Left Behind in China (an organization formed by the plaintiffs) had gathered the orphans’ opinions nationwide. It drew up their last request to the government and submitted it to Prime Minister Abe and Health Minister Yanagisawa in April 2007. What the orphans wanted was not lump sum compensation (they had asked for it only because a class- action lawsuit had to take the form of requesting compensation). What they really needed was a policy to guarantee a decent postretirement life, which would end their dependence on welfare.21 Specifically, the Council requested the creation of a public pension to provide a monthly benefit of ¥170,000 (US$1,545) for a single household, and ¥240,000 (US$2,182) for a two-person household; the same benefit that the victims of the North Korean abductions received. The Council also requested the provision of a comparable pension for the repatriated women. In addition, the Council requested the creation of Japanese language classes for the orphans, which would also be open to those who had returned to Japan on their own without participating in the official search missions. Other requests included the faster repatriation of the remaining orphans, creation of bilingual job training centers, and provision of scholarships for the third-generation orphans’ admission to high school and college. Meanwhile the Nagano prefecture had begun providing all the 264 repatriated orphans residing in its jurisdiction a monthly stipend of ¥30,000 (US$273) in 2004.22 Ruling-Party Project Team’s Proposal Subsequently, the ruling-party project team came up with a new policy to assist the orphans’ postretirement living. The proposal stipulated that the government would (1) pay a full public pension of ¥66,000 (US$600) per month to all the orphans, (2) pay a public assistance benefit of up to ¥80,000 (US$727), and (3) provide medical and housing assistance. The proposal stated that the government would not subtract the public pension benefit from the proposed benefit, as income, as it did for the welfare benefit.23 Actually it already had done so in a deceptive way: The maximum benefit for public assistance then was roughly ¥146,000. Thus, the proposed benefit for the orphans was the exact amount after subtracting the public pension benefit from the maximum payable public assistance (¥146,000 minus ¥66,000). If the government were to actually subtract the public pension benefit from the proposed benefit, their net benefit would be only ¥14,000, which would
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be a negligible amount. It would also constitute a “double-counted” deduction. In addition, the proposal stated it would deduct “only” 70 percent of the private pension benefits and other income from the new benefit. However, if it would deduct as much as 70 percent of their other income, including the private pension benefits, “only” seems to be a misnomer. The orphans received only small private pension benefits, and yet the government was going to deduct 70 percent of the private pension and other income from the proposed benefit. Moreover, the proposal still imposed a monthly income inspection requirement. One wonders why the inspection was necessary. The orphans had little or no income to sustain their living. That’s why they had to sue the government. The orphans felt that the imposition of the income inspection would make the new benefit no different from the welfare benefit. With the orphans’ strong objections, the project team reduced the income inspections to once a year. The proposal also waived the costs of the lawsuits claimed by the defendant’s lawyers from the plaintiffs.24 In the end, the plaintiffs’ lawyers decided to accept the project team’s proposal in July 2007. Onodera Toshitaka, the deputy head of the plaintiffs’ legal team for the Tokyo lawsuit, said, “I consider the proposal acceptable, because it encompasses most of the orphans [examined below]. It would satisfy their ultimate objective of securing their postretirement life.” Another lawyer, Yasuhara Yukihiko, said, “The project team’s concession to reduce the income inspection from monthly to annually made the proposal acceptable.”25 Abe Cabinet’s Contradictory Stance toward Orphans Prime Minister Abe’s policy toward the orphans seems contradictory. The Japanese judicial branch, characterized by being conservative, pro-status quo, and pro-government, acted in unison with the Abe cabinet, and ruled against the orphans (with the exception in Kobe). Nonetheless, the Abe cabinet decided to give in substance what the orphans demanded. Neither Prime Minister Abe, Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo, nor Health Minister Yanagisawa responded to an inquiry by this author on this policy stance toward the orphans. Only the small section at the Assistance Bureau of the Ministry of Health, “the room in charge of the orphans and others” (“others” mainly refers to the women left behind), responded to the inquiry by referring to the Ministry’s Private Advisory Council’s opinions on this. The Council
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opined that the Japanese left behind in China still had difficulties, even after repatriation, for reasons that were not of their own making. However, the government should not provide them with compensation for war damage, because “it would create disparities with other war victims.”26 The Ministry of Health was still concerned with the spillover effect of the orphan issue to the other war victims’ compensation issues. Therefore, the Abe cabinet did not acknowledge the government’s responsibility toward the orphans in the class-action lawsuits. As a corollary, the Japanese government, ironically, could provide generous assistance to the victims of the North Korean abductions, because it was not responsible for creating them. In contrast, the Japanese government, paradoxically, would not provide adequate assistance to the orphans, because it was responsible for creating them. Nevertheless, recognizing the enormous disparity between the financial assistance given to the two groups of repatriates from hostile countries, the Abe cabinet was obliged to provide assistance nearly equivalent to that of the abductees to the orphans, but not in the form of national compensation. This in turn suggests that, were it not for the repatriation of the abductees from North Korea, there is no telling when or whether the orphans would be given the new financial assistance.27 The Abe cabinet’s contradictory policy stance toward the orphans also derives from the internal mechanisms of the LDP. The party is backed by right-wing organizations, such as the Japan War Bereaved Families Association, which is a powerful lobbying group for the LDP, similar to the National Rif le Association for the Republican Party in the United States. These conservative lobbies endorse politicians who visit the Yasukuni Shrine to pay tribute to the war dead and war heroes. They do not like to see war victims, domestic or foreign, sue the Japanese government, demanding apologies and compensation for the wartime regime’s acts of aggression. Consequently, LDP politicians had to walk on a tightrope, balancing the internal pressures from the right-wing organizations and the external pressures from foreign governments of war victims and from governments that condemn human rights violations, such as the U.S. government.28 Being the first postwar-born Japanese leader, Prime Minister Abe had to show his conservative supporters that he was neither liberalminded nor lenient on war victims. Accordingly, he opted for being more nationalistic than Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro, who was actually not enthusiastic about the Yasukuni Shrine visits until he assumed the office. In contrast, Prime Minister Abe was a frequent
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and faithful visitor to the Shrine before assumption of office. Caught between the two pressures, however, Prime Minister Abe made his visits to the Shrine discrete after assuming the premiership. It was revealed in April 2009, when the new Prime Minister Aso Taro made an offering of a sacred masakaki tree to the Shrine for its spring ritual, that Prime Minister Abe had also made a similar offering to the Shrine in April 2007.29 Prime Minister Abe also had to maintain a delicate balancing act in the case of the “comfort women” issue. After he denied the IJA’s direct role in the controversy, international pressures mounted. It was disclosed in November 2007 that the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Thomas Schieffer, had warned the Abe cabinet officials in March 2007 that the U.S. government would not support Japan on the North Korean abduction issue unless Prime Minister Abe ameliorated his position on the “comfort women” issue. Consequently, Prime Minister Abe endorsed the “Kono statement,” in which LDP Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei acknowledged the IJA’s coercive role in the issue and apologized in 1993. Nevertheless, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed its resolution in July 2007, Prime Minister Abe stopped short of apologizing. The Dutch and Canadian Lower Houses passed similar resolutions in November, followed by one by the European Parliament in December 2007.30 Prime Minister Abe could not apologize because of internal pressures. Had he offered a formal apology to the victims, following the U.S. House resolution, it would have incurred the anger of the Japanese right-wing groups. He could not afford that, after the disastrous defeat in the House of Councillors (HC, the upper house of the Japanese parliament) general elections in July 2007, giving the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) a landslide victory. The defeat in the HC general elections, as well as his denials of the IJA’s direct role with the “comfort women” and in the civilian mass suicides in the Battle of Okinawa, put Prime Minister Abe on the defensive. His personal political life was in disarray with the exposure to international censure and the damaging defeat in the national elections.31 In addition, Prime Minister Abe needed a face-saving exit on the orphan issue because his cabinet was in political pandemonium, embroiled with a series of fiascos and scandals. The Ministry of Health had lost the records of 50 million pension accounts (40 million private and 10 million public accounts) in a nation with a population of 127 million. The Ministry’s public trust was further marred by the ongoing lawsuits by the victims of the medically-induced hepatitis C virus
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(HCV) infection. Worse, the suicide in May 2007 of the Abe cabinet’s first agricultural minister, Matsuoka Toshikatsu, involved in misappropriations of government funds, ushered in a series of resignations of his political appointees. Just to mention two cases, the resignations included Akagi Norihiko, who had succeeded to Matsuoka’s post, and Defense Minister Kyuma Fumio, who stated that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not have been helped, which was a politically incorrect view and taboo in Japan.32 Under these circumstances, Prime Minister Abe could not afford losing in the orphans’ nationwide class-action lawsuits, which would “disgrace” the past Japanese administrations. Yet, he had to disarm the criticism of the Chinese government that the Japanese government did not help the orphans’ repatriation and settlement, obliging them to live in demeaning and inhuman conditions. In addition, the Chinese government was not happy with the Japanese Supreme Court rulings that were against the Chinese former “comfort women” and forced laborers, as well as the LDP cabinet members’ recurring visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. In a delicate balancing act, Prime Minister Abe decided to give what the orphans wanted in substance through an executive action, while not giving them victories in their lawsuits. These reasons explain the seemingly contradictory policy of the Abe cabinet that ruled against the orphans in their class-action lawsuits, while conceding in providing what they wanted. By saving the face of the government through winning the lawsuits, Prime Minister Abe was able to make concessions to the orphans in substance. Thus, the Abe cabinet appeased the orphans, won the orphans’ class-action lawsuits (with the exception in Kobe), and evaded acknowledging the responsibility toward the orphans and a formal apology. Prime Minister Abe abruptly resigned two days after he made the opening speech at the parliament in September 2007, due to stressrelated illness. The hothouse-grown third-generation seshu-giin, or “hereditary parliamentarian” (his father was Foreign Minister Abe Shintaro and his maternal grandfather was Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke) could not take it any longer. The Abe cabinet legislated a couple of nationalist-leaning laws, including the Peoples’ Voting Law (enabling a national referendum on revising the Japanese Constitution), a revision of the Basic Law of Education (adding the phrase “patriotism”), and the law promoting the status of the Self-Defense Agency to be the Defense Ministry. Nevertheless, the cabinet that began with the slogans, “to build a beautiful nation” and “to exit the postwar regime” (meaning to end the “masochistic” view of history and no more apologizing), ended in 366 days.33
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Prime Minister Fukuda, the new leader, was a moderate consensusbuilder. He did not subscribe to nationalist-leaning ideology, and unequivocally pledged not to visit the Yasukuni Shrine at the onset. The Fukuda cabinet facilitated the revision of the Assistance Law. The parliament passed the bill to revise the 1994 Law to Assist the Japanese Left Behind in China in November 2007. The revised law would provide financial assistance for the repatriates from China, encompassing not only 2,500 orphans but also 3,800 Japanese women left behind. The law would pay them a maximum of ¥146,000 (US$1,327) monthly stipend—the combined benefit of the full ¥66,000 public pension and the ¥80,000 public assistance benefit—to a single-member household, and higher benefits to larger-member households. The law took effect in January 2008. With the establishment of the revised law, the classaction lawsuits pending in ten district courts and six high courts at that time, involving 2,200 orphans, were expected to end through withdrawals of the lawsuits or through amicable agreements.34 Subsequently, the issue of public pensions for about 150 naturalized orphans surfaced. They were the repatriates who had been forced to undertake naturalization, notwithstanding the fact that most of them had their Japanese domiciles intact. The Ministry of Health would not be able to pay the unpaid premiums for them from a mere technical standpoint, because of their legal status as naturalized citizens. In order not to disadvantage them, the Fukuda cabinet, in consultation with the Ministry of Justice, decided to invoke a special measure to allow them to change their domiciles, in a simpler fashion than usual, so that the Ministry of Health could pay up their unpaid premiums, and then pay them full pension benefits.35 The government was still consumed with bureaucratic red tape and technicalities, while the orphans were in urgent need to receive pension benefits. In order to receive full pension, these naturalized orphans will have to go through yet another change in their legal status after all the troubles they had gone through with their nationality and citizenship. Prime Minister Fukuda’s Formal Apology Prime Minister Fukuda met the representatives of the plaintiffs in the orphans’ class-action lawsuits in December 2007 and officially apologized to them as a prime minister for the first time. Fukuda stated,
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“The government assistance policy was insufficient. I am sorry that you have suffered unimaginable hardships. I hope that you will live happier lives through the implementation of the revised law.” Ikeda Sumie stated, “I felt as if I was finally accepted as a Japanese by the Japanese government.” Then, the eighteen repatriated women, between the ages of 75 and 95 years, in Saitama and Tokyo became the first group that withdrew their class-action lawsuit, as the revised law would provide comparable assistance and benefits to the repatriated women, as well. Subsequently, the forty plaintiffs of the first Tokyo class-action lawsuit withdrew their appeal case from the Tokyo High Court. In addition, about 170 plaintiffs of the lawsuit in Nagoya decided to withdraw their appeal from the Nagoya High Court in February 2008. Other plaintiffs in other cities were expected to follow suit.36 Nevertheless, the orphan issue is not yet over. The plaintiffs’ lawyers of the Nagoya lawsuits stated, “We decided to end their lawsuits because the government promised to provide substantial assistance through the legislation. We will watch carefully how the government implements the law.” In turn, Suzuki Tsuneo, the head of the plaintiffs’ lawyers of the Tokyo lawsuits, stated, “I am heartbroken because we have to leave the Tokyo verdict, filled with misunderstandings and distortions of facts, as it is. I deeply regret that we have failed to establish the responsibilities of the government.” In February 2009, the Supreme Court rejected the two appeals, which had not been withdrawn, despite the revision of the Assistance Law. Thereby, all the class-action lawsuits that began in December 2002, mobilizing 90 percent of the repatriated orphans, came to a close in February 2009.37 Textbook Issue Concerning Battle of Okinawa Meanwhile, the Fukuda cabinet tried to rectify another “history issue,” involving the IJA’s role in civilian mass suicides in the Battle of Okinawa, which erupted during the Abe administration (see chapter 1). In October 2007, the Fukuda cabinet instructed the Ministry of Education to re-revise the passage in question regarding the revision of the high school textbooks on the Battle of Okinawa. However, the Ministry fought its “turf battle,” resisting “political intervention.” The Ministry in December 2007 decided to authorize textbook publishers to recognize the “involvement” of the IJA in the mass suicides. However, it only authorized them to use the description that “civilians were driven to commit mass suicides,” but not the description that “the
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IJA coerced civilians to commit mass suicides.” Moreover, the Ministry did not retract the textbook revision authorization itself, which it had made in March 2007. Consequently, the responsibility for the IJA in the civilian mass suicides was left ambiguous. This case again demonstrated that there is a stark disparity between the war victims’ actual experiences of the events and the government’s interpretations of the events. This was a step backward for the civic groups that tried to pass down true accounts of the war history and to restore human rights for the war victims. This gave the Chinese another excuse to say, “No wonder Japan does not teach history.”38 Then, in March 2008, the Osaka District Court ruled for the defendants, the Nobel Literature Prize laureate Oe Kenzaburo and the Iwanami-shoten that had published Okinawa noto (Okinawa Note, 1970), concerning the IJA’s role in the civilian mass suicides in the Battle of Okinawa. A former military officer and a brother of another deceased officer had sued them in August 2005, claiming that they did not order civilians to commit mass suicide and requesting the suspension of the publication of the book. The court gave a favorable verdict to the civilian war victims on the sixty-third anniversary of the tragic event. In turn, the plaintiffs’ lawyers planned to appeal the case.39 Japanese Immigration in Dominican Republic To complicate the orphan issue further, there is another immigration issue involving Japanese repatriates from Manchuria. After the defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, the most essential commodities for the postwar recovery of Japan were fuel (coal) and food (rice). With the repatriation of Chinese and Korean coalminers (who had substituted for the Japanese men conscripted during the war) to their homelands, the Japanese government sent the Japanese repatriates, veterans, and others, who had lost their life bases in their hometowns, to coalmining towns. In addition, in order to increase food production, the government implemented an “emergency settlement policy.” It made the repatriates from Manchuria and others resettle in the military lands, imperial lands, and wildernesses deep in the mountains. These repatriates became the foundation to build the postwar recovery of Japan. However, the coalmining industry declined as oil replaced coal, with ensuing labor strikes. The emergency settlement policy also failed completely, because the lands they were assigned to were totally infertile in the harsh climate. The Japanese government repeated the same mistakes as in the Manchuria-Mongolia settlement.40
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Moreover, the government sent these failed farmer-settlers to the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean in 1956–1959 (another kimin policy of exiling unwanted people). About 1,300 Japanese responded to the government call that it would give them rich land free of charge. However, the land was infertile. The settlement ended with a complete disaster, and many settlers returned to Japan in 1961. This settlement policy repeated the pattern of the Manchuria-Mongolia settlement, of an insufficient prior feasibility study and irresponsible bureaucratic management. The settlers sued the Japanese government in 2000. At the settlement’s fifty-year anniversary in 2006, the Tokyo District Court rejected all the plaintiffs’ claims, while acknowledging the government’s responsibility. It determined that they had lost their rights to claim the damages stipulated in the National Compensation Law because the emigration project took place more than twenty years earlier.41 An LDP member of the House of Councillors (the less powerful upper house, which is not as bound by party discipline as the LDP members of the House of Representatives), Otsuji Hidehisa, became an advocate for this case. He persuaded Prime Minister Koizumi to apologize for the misguided settlement policy in 2006. Otsuji f lew to Santo Domingo and delivered Koizumi’s “message of apology.” Otsuji also submitted a bill to give the plaintiffs a onetime settlement payment. The parliament enacted the bill, resulting in the withdrawal of the lawsuit. As of 2009, about 900 Japanese, including the fourth generation, live in the Dominican Republic. Among them, 200 moved to Japan to engage in seasonal migratory work (dekasegi). The settlers began compiling a record of their settlement in 2006 and planned to publish it in 2009.42 Aftermath of Japanese Immigration in Brazil and Peru Meanwhile, another misguided Japanese immigration policy to Brazil and Peru also haunted Japan. Brazil has the largest Japanese population in Latin America, with 1.5 million. Japanese Brazilians celebrated the 100-year anniversary of their immigration to Brazil in 2008. About 250,000 Japanese immigrants worked on coffee plantations diligently, and successfully settled in Brazil, creating the infrastructure for the Japanese corporations to build their local subsidiaries since the 1960s. The hyperinf lation and economic downward spiral in Brazil in the 1970s, however, prompted “reverse immigration” to Japan, where the
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economy was booming. Facing a growing industrial labor shortage, the Japanese government even revised the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 1990, issuing work visas to descendants of the Japanese immigrants in Latin America, up to the third generation. These Nikkei ( Japanese) Brazilians migrated to Japan to engage in 3K (kitsui, kitanai, kiken, or difficult, dirty, and dangerous) work. These guest workers from Latin America became the largest group of foreign blue-collar workers in this otherwise immigrant-averse country. This is a “reverse immigration” of convenience by the Japanese government. As of 2008, over 300,000 Nikkei Brazilians reside in Japan, where temporary factory workers were needed, such as in Aichi prefecture (Toyota and VW Japan), Shizuoka prefecture (Yamaha and Honda), and Tochigi prefecture (Sanyo and Fujitsu).43 In turn, Peru has the second largest Japanese population in Latin America, with about a half million, or 3 percent of the total population of Peru. Peru’s President Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) is a secondgeneration Japanese. With the economic downturn in Peru, about 58,000 Nikkei Peruvians also have migrated to Japan since the late 1980s to engage in manual labor. During World War II, both Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Peruvians suffered persecution and damage akin to those inf licted on the Japanese-Americans on the west coast—such as asset seizures, arrests, and forcible relocation—because Brazil and Peru sided with the Allied Powers. Then, upon resettlement in Japan, these Nikkei Brazilians and Nikkei Peruvians encountered derogation and discrimination similar to those the repatriated orphans from China experienced, because they did not speak Japanese and did not behave like Japanese, although they were ethnically Japanese.44 Reversal of “Reverse Immigration” Another twist of their fate came with the economic downturn in Japan. Japan was hit by a deep recession in the 1990s, referred to as the “lost decade,” and then by the worldwide recession in 2008. In order to reduce the three-year high unemployment rate of 4.4 percent, the Japanese government this time is encouraging these guest workers to go back home, by offering them a financial incentive that is hard to resist. The government would pay the cost of airfare back to Latin America for the whole family—$3,000 per adult and $2,000 for each dependent, and they can keep the change. However, there is a catch to the provision. Those who accept the provision may not reapply for a
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work visa ever again, nor their children. Spain, with an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent, has adopted a similar program. However, foreign workers there could reclaim their residency and work visas to Spain after three years.45 Because many of the immigrants have already lost their jobs, they cannot afford to stay in Japan, and were considering accepting this offer. At least 100 workers in Hamamatsu in Shizuoka prefecture have so far agreed to leave Japan under this program. Critics note the myopic nature of this policy of convenience. Japan needs foreign workers in areas such as farming and nursing of the elderly, because of the decreasing population in working-age generations. Critics consider this program a threat to what little progress Japan has made in opening its economy to foreign workers. Yet, a former health minister, Kawasaki Jiro, stated that it was an opportune time to overhaul Japan’s immigration policy. He doubts that Japan should ever become a multiethnic society.46 The Japanese sakoku (seclusionist) mentality is looming large again. The Japanese government is trying to get rid of blue-collar “foreign” workers, whom it had invited less than two decades ago. This is a reversal of the “reverse immigration” involving Japanese immigration in Latin America by the Japanese government. With an offer too good to refuse, the government is sending back descendants of Japanese immigrants in Latin America that it had sent as settlers a century ago. This time, the government is abandoning the descendants. They can never return to their ancestral homeland on work visas again.47 Thus, history repeats itself. The descendants of the Japanese immigrants in Latin American are also expendable. They cannot help but feel betrayed by the Japanese government, just as the repatriated orphans from China did. They all have been toyed with by the Japanese government’s kimin policy (to abandon unwanted people).
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Conclusion: Orphan Issue and Sino-Japanese Relations
As noted earlier, it is a little known fact that the highest death toll of Japanese civilians in World War II occurred in Manchuria. Out of 1,550,000 Japanese civilians in Manchuria, 245,000 died. The tragedy for Manchuria was that the civilian victims were concentrated among the farmer-settlers. The Kwantung Army’s last minute “uprooting conscription,” which continued as late as August 9, 1945 (the day that the Soviet Army invaded Manchuria), left women, children, and the elderly defenseless in the settlement villages. Consequently, out of 270,000 farmer-settlers in Manchuria, 78,500 died.1 These farmer-setters were toyed with by the Japanese government through the prewar period, the wartime period, and the postwar period. The orphan issue, the product of the folly of the Manchuria-Mongolia settlement policy, has not been resolved to this day. Japanese “Historical Amnesia” Japan’s postwar period began with its conscious effort to forget the war, whereas other countries, such as China, began theirs by remembering their war experiences. Through this conscious government policy, the Japanese have forgotten the tragedy in Manchuria and the orphan issue. Japanese have forgotten that the war did not end in Manchuria on August 15, 1945, the official date of the end of the war. The fighting continued in Manchuria, “North Korea,” and South Sakhalin afterward. The Kwantung Army surrendered to the Soviet Army in Manchuria
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only on September 3. The Kwantung Army surrendered to the Soviet Army in “North Korea” on September 9. Moreover, the last sizable ground battle, involving civilians, took place in Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, not on Okinawa Islands, as has generally been thought. While the fighting ended on August 23 on Sakhalin, the Soviet Army invaded the Kuril Islands after that ceasefire agreement, and occupied the entire Islands on September 5. Most of the Japanese have forgotten these facts. This “historical amnesia” on the part of the Japanese resulted in the “history issues” with China and Korea.2 Refugees in the World From a larger historical perspective, the Japanese war orphans and women left behind in China went through some of the most horrific war experiences in human history. They experienced simultaneously every possible atrocity both civilians and soldiers would ever encounter in battlefields in an enemy country—caught right in the middle of indiscriminate shooting, massacre, plunder, and group rape, as well as incurring near fatal injuries (being shot or stabbed by bayonets) to themselves, and becoming displaced persons in an enemy country. The world has witnessed numerous cases of crimes against humanity, including Apartheid, the Holocaust, pogroms, and other cases of ethnic cleansing, as in Bosnia, Darfur, Iraq, Rwanda, and Turkey, as well as cases of genocide involving ideological conf lict and civil war, as in Cambodia, China, and the Soviet Union. What was uniquely tragic about the case in Manchuria was that the Japanese civilians were not only massacred by the Soviet Army and Chinese militia groups. They were also involved in countless cases of mass suicide, committed on the order of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and of the settlement leaders under the instructions of the IJA. Mothers “disposed of ” their infants and took cyanide. The elderly men who were not conscripted shot children and women to death, and then committed harakiri or shot themselves (if they still had bullets left). This mass suicide, coerced by the IJA, makes the case of Manchuria distinct from other cases. Worse, the war for the Japanese survivors of this extraordinary carnage did not end with the end of the war. Due to the unexpected twist of international politics at play in the region, they continued to live in a hostile territory. Japan did not conclude a peace treaty with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) until 1978. After the “hundreds-of-miles death march” to Harbin and other major cities in August-September
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1945, the survivors were subjected to more massacres, mass suicide, plunder, and gang rape, while fighting hunger, epidemics, and extreme cold in makeshift refugee camps. They were not even refugees in a legal sense. The simple definition of a refugee is a person “who has suffered human rights violations, and who has f led across the borders of his/her home country to seek protection elsewhere,” or a “person who is in a foreign jurisdiction because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution,” or words to this effect, as stipulated in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1966 Protocol.3 Orphans as “Internal Displaced Persons” In turn, the Japanese war orphans’ status in Manchuria (current Northeast China) was that of so-called “internal displaced persons” who could not relocate themselves to safe asylum in a foreign territory. They were trapped in a hostile country for more than three decades until the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty, and even afterward. In comparison, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees were taken to refugee camps in Thailand organized by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), or were admitted to third countries, such as Canada, France, and the United States. Japan also began receiving Indochinese refugees after it legislated the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 1981. It has officially recognized 410 people as refugees, and has accepted 8,656 Vietnamese refugees (including family members), 1,357 Cambodians, and 1,306 Laotians for settlement in Japan by the end of 2005.4 Interrogation and Persecution in China Meanwhile, many Japanese war orphans left behind in China experienced symptoms of what is now known as posttraumatic depression syndrome (PTDS) that war veterans in Vietnam and Iraq experienced. The orphans grew up in a hostile country and suffered from political and societal discrimination. Then, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, they were accused of being foreign spies and were persecuted. They were subjected to interrogation and torture, similar to that inf licted on the prisoners in the Guantánamo Bay Prison during the last Bush term. Countless orphans and Japanese women were forced to make false confessions, were executed, or committed suicide.
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Conclusion
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In fact, it was reported in July 2008 that the Guantánamo Bay prison and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency employed the interrogation techniques devised by the Chinese communists in the early 1950s to coerce false confessions.5 Then, upon much protracted repatriation, the orphans were treated as legal aliens and had been discriminated against as Chinese in their homeland. These experiences in China and in Japan make the orphan issue uniquely compelling. Deprivation of Fundamental Human Rights Overall, the orphans’ lives were characterized by the continuous deprivation of fundamental human rights. They lost their parents and their identities. They lived in infamy, as counterrevolutionaries and foreign spies, in a country preoccupied with ideological conf licts of historic dimension. In turn, their own government designated them as “wartime dead” and obliterated their existence. Is there any worse deprivation of human rights than the arbitrary designation of a living person as dead, except for taking a life itself? Even after repatriation, their basic human rights were compromised, whereas war veterans were handsomely compensated for what they had done in China. Overall, the Japanese orphans went through multitudes of tribulations for over six decades in a foreign land, as well as in their homeland, during wartime as well as in times of peace. Here lies the extraordinary nature of the orphan issue. In retrospect, the misguided government- sponsored immigration to Japan’s colony in 1932 turned into a complex immigration and settlement issue five decades later, which should have been a straightforward repatriation of overseas settlers to Japan. However, the orphans’ repatriation was delayed and protracted, entangled with the deadlock in Sino-Japanese relations against the backdrop of the Cold War. Their repatriation several decades later turned into an immigration issue for what Kinoshita Takao calls Nikkei Chugokujin (“Japanese- Chinese”) in Japan. The Japanese government and society treated these repatriates as “foreign immigrants,” engaged them in the undesirable 3K jobs, and obliged them to live on welfare, making their settlement in Japan almost unbearable.6 The orphans were only partially vindicated when many of them became septuagenarians, and after exhausting every possible measure to appeal to all three branches of the government. It remains to be seen whether they would conclude that they were truly glad that they
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Ongoing Issues: Un-repatriated and Unrecognized Orphans The revised law was a leap forward. However, the issue is far from over. First, there are still un-repatriated and unrecognized orphans. As of January 2009, the Ministry of Health has recognized 2,815 orphans, including those who still live in China and those who have been repatriated to Japan. Out of this number, only 1,282 have found their Japanese identities (45.5 percent). As of July 2008, a total of 2,520 orphans’ households (2,524 orphans, as four orphans’ spouses are also orphans; 9,257 persons including their family members) had been repatriated to Japan after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations in September 1972. In addition, 3,840 women’s households (11,126 persons including their family members) had been repatriated in the same period (see table 15.1 in appendix).7 As of January 2009, the Ministry officially recognized 285 orphans still left behind in China. However, several hundreds of unrecognized orphans still remain in China. In November 2008, a female orphan met three prospective cousins in Japan and found out that she was Takahashi Sadako (at age seventy-three) from Yamagata prefecture. This was the first case in four years that an orphan’s identity was found during the search visit. It took Takahashi sixty-three years to find her kin since her parents and siblings were shot to death during evacuation. Takahashi stated that she would like to return to Japan permanently if all her six children could accompany her repatriation.8 Japanese and Koreans Left Behind in Sakhalin The Ministry of Health also extended assistance to the Japanese and Koreans left behind in Sakhalin, an island north of Hokkaido, held by Russia since the end of World War II. The Soviet Union invaded South Sakhalin on August 11, 1945 (“Operation August Storm”) and
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had returned to their homeland. The Japanese government narrowly escaped complete disaster by revising the ineffectual 1994 Law to Assist the Japanese Left Behind in China, and almost saved face. The victims chose substance over formality, because it was a matter of life or death for them. Unfortunately, this left the illegality of the government conduct unestablished.
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took control of the entire Sakhalin Island, as well as the entire Kuril Island chain. It is estimated that about 20,000 Japanese civilians were killed by the Soviet Army on the island. After Japanese surrender, most of the 400,000 Japanese residents on the island were deported, but some were left behind, creating the situation akin to those left behind in China.9 Another tragic aspect of this issue was that 43,000 out of a total of 150,000 Koreans, who were forcibly sent to the island as laborers, were denied repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted to keep them as coalminers, while the Japanese government only allowed repatriation of the Koreans who were married to Japanese, or whose parents were Japanese. They could not return to their homeland either, because the Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations with what became South Korea. These Japanese and Koreans were buried in the strained relations among Japan, the two Koreas, and the Soviet Union/Russia. The project to repatriate the Koreans began in 1989 by the Korea Red Cross and the Japan Red Cross, and 407 Korean households (a total of 817 persons including their families) were permanently repatriated to South Korea by March 2000. However, some Koreans still remain on the island. Meanwhile, the Japanese repatriation began in 1990, and seventy-three households (a total of 201 persons) returned to Japan from Sakhalin and other Russian territories by July 2007.10 Assessment of Orphan Issue and Sino-Japanese Relations Assessing the orphan issue in international relations, it is a direct product of the second Sino-Japanese War, also involving Soviet policy toward Manchuria. It is a byproduct of the Sino-Japanese relations, which was entangled in U.S. policy toward the two Chinas and the U.S.-Japan alliance during the Cold War. The orphan issue is also a product of the policies, or the lack thereof, on the part of the Japanese government. The cancellation of Japanese repatriation when the PRC was established might have been unavoidable. In comparison, its cancellation in 1958 might have been avoided had the Kishi cabinet taken a more conciliatory stance toward the PRC. The blatantly anti-PRC stance on the part of the Kishi cabinet was a severe blow to the orphans, as the administration went as far as designating them as “wartime dead,” and cancelled Japanese repatriation altogether. It should be noted, however, that this was the time when the second Taiwan Strait Crisis and the Cuban Revolution occurred.
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The Japanese government did not initiate the repatriation of the orphans even after the two countries normalized their diplomatic relations in 1972. The orphan issue was sidelined, as Sino-Japanese relations were embroiled in the U.S.- China-Soviet strategic triangle. However, after the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty in 1978, it would have been difficult for the Japanese government to blame international constraints for further delays in the orphans’ repatriation. Strained Sino-Japanese relations afterward were as much a manifestation of the denial of history on the part of the Japanese government as of the continuing Cold War in East Asia. Consequently, when the “textbook issue” intensified in 1982, the official search mission was cancelled. Hypothetically, Japanese policy-makers could have used the orphan issue for leverage to keep the bilateral relations somewhat smoother than they had been, if not to improve them, by expressing appreciation for the Chinese government’s cooperation with the orphans’ search and repatriation. In fact, the orphans’ repatriation was hailed as the “proof of peace and friendship” between China and Japan when the official search missions began in 1981. Nevertheless, the Japanese government exasperated the Chinese officials in charge of the orphans, with further delays in repatriation and insufficient assistance to their settlement. It managed to make the orphan issue a foreign policy issue between the two countries, giving China yet another excuse to complain. Dedication of Volunteers Here, the dedication of volunteers who filled the void of bureaucratic inertia, opening the way to the official search missions, should not be forgotten. Volunteers also tirelessly helped the orphans’ repatriation and settlement in the absence of government initiative. In contrast, Japanese government was a force of obstruction, treating the orphans as legal aliens and imposing unreasonable immigration requirements on their repatriation in recourse to the bureaucratic red tape. As noted earlier, volunteers felt that the Japanese government actually did not want to repatriate the orphans, and imposed its responsibilities on the orphans’ kin and the volunteers. These volunteers felt that the Japanese government was sadistic. In retrospect, were it not for the volunteers, the orphan issue would have been buried much longer. Kinoshita states, “It is an undeniable fact that the orphans’ repatriation was inconceivable without the volunteers. Some of the volunteers used up their private
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assets to help the orphans and the women left behind, and even lost their lives for them. I wonder how many orphans know about this, let alone the government officials.”11
In turn, the second- and third-generation orphans have the potential to become a resource for improving Sino-Japanese relations. How could it be possible to turn the negative legacy into a positive asset? The orphans’ offspring have the potential to become a bridge for building Sino-Japanese friendship, because they know the two cultures and societies. However, they will not become such a bridge automatically. They have complex feelings toward Japan. In order to alleviate their misgivings about Japan, the government should devise more effective public assistance measures, while the Japanese at large must stop despising the repatriates from China and accept them as they are. Only when they feel positive about the homeland of their parents and their grandparents would they be willing to act as such intermediaries. If these conditions are met, the second- and third-generation orphans could be a strong bridge between China and Japan. In July 2008, a Chinese writer living in Japan, Yan Yi, was chosen as the 139th Akutagawa Award recipient, the first nonnative individual ever to receive this prestigious literature prize since its inception in 1935. Yan was born in Harbin in 1964, came to Japan as a student in 1987, and worked for a Chinese-language newspaper in Japan. Her novel, Toki ga nijimu asa (Morning Smeared Out by Time), portrays the life of a Chinese who married a Japanese orphan’s daughter and immigrated to Japan. It describes his family’s struggle with settlement in Japan until his children accepted Japan as their homeland.12 That the exclusive literary circle gave the highest award to this work is akin to sending a signal that Japanese society had accepted the orphans. It is also intriguing that the inaugural Akutagawa award was given to a story about Japanese emigrants to Brazil. Seventy-three years later, the award was given to a story about an orphan family’s settlement in Japan. The literary world, as well as Japanese overseas settlements, came full circle. Japanese War Veterans’ Trips of Atonement Meanwhile, some Japanese war veterans have revisited China, tracing back the trails of their march of folly decades ago, in order to atone for
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their deeds. Although these rank-and-file veterans were functionaries of the Japanese military establishment, and committed the acts of atrocity under their supervisors’ directives, many of them were guiltridden and decided to make trips of atonement privately. They not only revisited the villages where they were stationed and apologized to the local residents, but also tried to compensate for Japanese acts of aggression by donating money and building schools. At first, the local people were skeptical of their initiatives, but they came to realize the sincerity of their efforts. Japanese Buddhist priests also visited China to hold a memorial service at the “Massacre of Nanking” Memorial Hall. Their sixth visit to Nanjing occurred in 2007 on the seventieth anniversary of the incident. An old Chinese man who lost his uncle in the incident stated, “We are still hurt, but I am glad that the Japanese priests came all the way to join the service.” In addition, Yamazaki Hiroshi, a 100year-old veteran, remained in China and became a doctor in Jinan in Shandong province, in order to atone for Japanese acts of aggression during the war. As of July 2009, Yamazaki was still treating poor villagers without any charge. His life is akin to that of PFC Mizushima in the novel, Biruma no tategoto (Burmese Harp), in which the protagonist remained in Burma (current Myanmar), as a Buddhist monk, to pray for the war dead.13 These acts of atonement on the part of the Japanese veterans and priests are remarkable, because the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) political leaders, including Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, were in denial of Japan’s past and were in favor of rewriting history. These conservative Japanese leaders claimed that Japan had apologized enough, referring to remarks such as those by Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro in 1993 and by Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi in 1995 (see table 1.1 in appendix). Nevertheless, the dispute over the level of atrocity during the “Rape of Nanking” and the LDP leaders’ repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine spoiled some politicians’ efforts to liquidate Japan’s past guilt with China. Given that, it is significant that senior veterans initiated acts of atonement on their own. Final Assessment The Japanese war orphans left behind in China have been toyed with by the tragic twists and turns of domestic and international politics since their childhood. Their paradoxical lives are also mirror images of their parents’ lives. The orphans returned to Japan thinking that they
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could live in an “economic miracle,” just as their parents had immigrated to Manchuria thinking that they could live in a “royal paradise.” The orphans were abandoned by the postwar government and lived below subsistence level in their homeland, just as their parents were abandoned by the wartime government and perished in Manchuria. In addition, the orphans were separated from their children upon repatriation, just as their parents were separated from their children in Manchuria. While the orphans’ children were discriminated against as Chinese and legal aliens in Japan, their parents’ children (the orphans themselves) were persecuted as Japanese demons and foreign spies in China. These orphans are the unfortunate byproducts of the Japanese wartime policy and postwar international politics of East Asia. They survived massacre during the war, endured persecution and torture in China, and persevered discrimination in Japan. Throughout their lives, the orphans had been deprived of fundamental human rights, including their own identities. Their sufferings dragged on for over six decades. Driven into a corner, after exhausting appeals to the executive and legislative branches of the government, they filed class-action lawsuits as a last resort. Yet, the judicial branch rejected their last plea (with the exception of the Kobe District Court). The Abe cabinet refused to admit the illegal acts of the wartime regime and of the postwar administrations, and avoided a formal government apology and compensation. The series of orphans’ class-action lawsuits were judgments on the modern history of Japan, in which 245,000 civilians died in Manchuria. The judicial judgment was an integral part of the issue of how the nation should reconcile with the negative legacy of its history. In this sense, the orphan issue is an epitome of the “war responsibility” issues of Japan. The way the postwar Japanese government dealt with the orphan issue symbolized its attitude toward the war victims, including the “comfort women,” forced laborers, and non-Japanese soldiers. As Ide Magoroku stated, the fact that the orphan issue still has to be discussed over half a century after the end of the war suggests that there is a deep problem with Japan. The judicial judgment was a litmus test for Japan, and Japan failed it.14 Signs of Spring in Sino-Japanese Relations In May 2008, Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Japan, the first Chinese head of state to visit Japan in a decade, ref lecting Prime
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Minister Fukuda Yasuo’s more conciliatory stance toward China than that of his predecessors. In contrast to the ill-received visit of President Jiang Zemin, President Hu eschewed elaborating on the “history issues” and emphasized future cooperation between the two nations. President Hu even remarked that Japan’s yen loans had played a positive role in Chinese modernization, adding that China would forever be grateful for the Japanese economic assistance. President Hu and Prime Minister Fukuda agreed that the two countries would have regular summit meetings and further promote their “strategically reciprocal relations” with a future-oriented perspective.15 Although the summit meeting was largely symbolic and achieved little in substance, it was the first step in a positive direction. As a giant panda in Ueno Zoo had died of old age six days before his visit, President Hu offered to loan a pair, not just one panda (the loan of a panda pair costs US$1 million per year, though). Visiting Waseda University, Prime Minister Fukuda’s alma mater, President Hu stated that the younger generations should carry on the friendship between the two nations. He then announced that China would invite 100 students of the university for an exchange program. President Hu also traveled to Nara, Japan’s ancient capital. He visited the Toshodai Temple to pay tribute to its founder, a Chinese priest named Jianzhen (Japanese name, Ganjin, 688– 763) during the Tang dynasty, who propagated Buddhism in Japan.16 Jianzhen and Abe no Nakamaro Jianzhen tried to sail to Japan five times after 743, but in vain. Emperor Xuanzong did not want him to leave China, and his disciples foiled his attempts to leave. He lost his eyesight during the fifth attempt. In his sixth attempt in 753, while Japanese Ambassador Fujiwara no Kiyokawa (706–778) abided by Emperor Xuanzong’s order not to let Jianzhen join the Japanese mission’s return home, his deputy secretly (supposedly) let him aboard the second ship. Fujiwara and Abe no Nakamaro, an earlier “Kentoshi” (Imperial Japan’s emissary to Tang dynasty China) who had been in China for over thirty-five years since 717, were on the first ship. Abe had passed the Tang dynasty’s highest-level civil-service examination, and rose up the ranks to be a governor-general serving Emperor Xuanzong. An American historian, Joshua A. Fogel, refers to the time when Abe served the Tang court as “truly a high point in Sino-Japanese relations[.]”17 Abe wrote in 753 the poem quoted at the beginning of this book. He was ready to go home.
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Conclusion
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
The two ships were hit by a storm. The second ship, with Jianzhen aboard, managed to sail to Japan in over a month. Jianzhen arrived at Nara in 754, met Retired Emperor Shomu and his daughter, the reigning Empress Koken. He founded the Toshodai Temple in 759. He was then naturalized in Japan and never returned to China. Meanwhile, the first ship, with Fujiwara and Abe aboard, was shipwrecked and drifted to the shores of present Vietnam (then part of China). The crew was attacked by native people, but Fujiwara and Abe survived. The great Chinese poet Li Bai thought that his Japanese friend, Zhaoheng (Abe’s Chinese name), was dead and wrote a poem to mourn his death.18 Fujiwara and Abe eventually went back to the capital Chang’an (current Xian) in 755. They never returned to Japan. Abe’s refined poem, written in 753, was known for its intense longing for homeland, and was chosen in the Kokin wakashu (first imperial anthology of poems) in 905, as well as in the Hyakunin isshu (anthology of one poem of one hundred famous poets) in Japan.19 Abe’s poem echoes the resounding voices of thousands of orphans who have dreamed of their homeland for decades, looking toward the east where Japan was located at sunrise and moonrise. Had the orphans known of such a pioneering Japanese, it would have encouraged them, and his poem would have consoled their souls. Contemporary “Abe no Nakamaros” Twelve-hundred-ninety-one years after Abe’s visit to China, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) announced in April 2008 that it would commence the Sino-Japanese Youth Friendship Exchange Year program. It would sponsor the first mission, made up of 200 Chinese high school students. They would visit local schools, interacting with Japanese students, and visit various educational facilities during a weeklong stay in Japan. The Ministry expected that four thousand students from China and Japan would participate in this exchange program in the next four years.20 It is a first step in the right direction, and would be a great investment for future Sino-Japanese relations. It is to be hoped that the Sino-Japanese Youth Friendship Exchange Year will usher in contemporary Kentoshi missions, and reciprocal Chinese missions. It is also to be hoped that many of the future generations of the orphans will become contemporary “Abe no Nakamaros” and play an active role as a bridge between China and Japan.
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Conclusion
217
In conclusion, the orphan issue transcends specific individual issues, representing the war responsibility issues of the Asia-Pacific War. No matter how the LDP politicians and their conservative administrations tried to deny it, the issue constitutes an integral part of the unfinished business of the “postwar settlement issues” that Japan has to face. Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), who formed a new cabinet in September 2009, ending the reign of power of the LDP, is sympathetic toward victims of Japan’s acts of aggression during the Asia-Pacific War. Prime Minister Hatoyama declared to Chinese President Hu at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September 2009 that he would essentially follow the 1995 “Murayama statement,” in which Prime Minister Murayama had apologized for Japan’s wartime acts of aggression.21 The orphans have carried the liabilities of the Japanese march of folly for their entire lives. They still live with that dark part of history every day. They are the living witnesses of Japan’s wrongdoings during the wartime administrations. Their wartime and postwar eras will not end until they can feel that their human rights and human dignity have been restored. Similarly, Japan cannot “exit the postwar era” until the orphans and the other war victims are redeemed. In reality, however, nothing can compensate the sufferings inf licted on orphans for over six decades. Their lost decades will never come back. Their pains and sorrows will never heal. The Japanese government owes it to the orphans to guarantee a secure life for the rest their lives. Ensuring this is the minimum mandate of the Japanese government for the orphans. The assistance for their “hardware settlement,” such as employment and language education, still needs to be addressed. On the other hand, the solution of the “software settlement” not only involves policy improvement, but also requires a change in the mindset of the Japanese people at large. It hinges on whether the Japanese can learn to coexist peacefully with people of foreign backgrounds, especially from other parts of Asia. After all, that was what the wartime government told the Japanese to achieve in Manchuria: gozoku kyowa (cooperation among five races). From a larger perspective, the legal, political, and social intolerances in accepting heterogeneous elements, which had blocked the orphans’ successful settlement and assimilation in Japan, also confronts Japan’s passage to becoming a great “soft power” nation. Japan was considered to have potential for becoming a great “soft power” nation, given the
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Challenge for the Future
Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria
constitutional limitations on the use of military force in solving international disputes, and with its commercial, economic, and technological inf luences overseas. Nevertheless, the country has not yet been able to turn that potential into a reality. Masaru Tamamoto argues that the Japanese have much to offer the world in terms of soft power, beyond manufacturing and organizational techniques. However, so long as their political leaders are trapped in confusion on the meaning of 1945, and the Yasukuni Shrine remains a diplomatic sore spot, the acceptance of any Japanese political ideas abroad is unlikely. In addition, Joseph S. Nye Jr. notes that Japan lacks some of the essential requirements to be a great soft power, because the country is not open to foreign ideas, nor to foreign immigrants.22 The orphans are calling for changes in Japanese policy and attitude that will “resuscitate” the abandoned people. Their endless journey is putting into question the very foundations of Japan as a nation. History will judge Japan’s postwar policy toward the victims of its wartime conduct in the light of the verdicts pronounced on the orphans’ classaction lawsuits, as well as on the actual policy the future administrations will implement for them. It is hoped that the day will come when the orphans’ posterity will feel proud of their Japanese ancestry. This is one of the yardsticks that will mark the end of Japan’s postwar era. Until then, Japan cannot even become an “ordinary nation.” This is the great challenge of the twenty-first century for the Japanese government and the Japanese people. Furusato wa toki ni arite omou mono (Hometown is to be thought of from far away) —Muro Saisei (1889–1962)23
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Table 1.1 Sino-Japanese Relations and Orphan Issue (1946–2009) Cabinet
Major foreign policy and issue
Yoshida (1946–1954)
Early-stage collective repatriation San Francisco Peace Treaty Beijing Agreement: latestage collective repatriation Tianjin Agreement: collective repatriation Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration Repatriation of POWs detained in Siberia Promoted trade with PRC
Hatoyama (1954–1956)
Ishibashi (1956–1957) Kishi (1957–1960)
Ikeda (1960–1964) Sato (1964–1972) Tanaka (1972–1974)
Miki (1974–1976) Fukuda (1976–1978)
PRC National Flag Incident Wartime Death Decree Revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty Sino-Japanese LT Trade Agreement Agreement on the reversion of Okinawa with the United States Sino-Japanese Joint Declaration Normalized diplomatic relations “Hegemonic clause” issue for Sino-Japanese peace treaty Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty
Orphan issue
Considered orphans naturalized as Chinese Considered orphans naturalized as Chinese
Designated orphans as “wartime dead”
Considered orphans to be “wartime dead” Considered orphans to be “wartime dead” Began to collect orphans’ information
Health Ministry’s open search began Health Ministry’s open search with volunteer groups
Continued
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A PPE N DI X
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Appendix
Table 1.1 Continued Major foreign policy and issue
Ohira (1978–1980) Suzuki (1980–1982)
Called U.S. Japan’s “ally” for first time Denied that U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was a military alliance Textbook issue Yasukuni Shrine issue Called Japanese archipelago “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for United States Liberalized imports of U.S. beef and oranges
Nakasone (1982–1987)
Takeshita (1987–1989) Uno (1989–1989) Kaifu (1989–1991) Miyazawa (1991–1993) Hosokawa (1993–1994)
Hata (1994–1994) Murayama (1994–1996) Hashimoto (1996–1998) Obuchi (1998–2000)
Mori (2000–2001) Koizumi (2001–2006)
Abe (2006–2007)
Resumed Yen-loan to China after Tiananmen Massacre “Comfort women” issue Peacekeeping Operations Cooperation Law Stated that Japanese war in Asia was “war of aggression,” and admitted Japan’s responsibility
Apologized for Japan’s wartime acts of aggression (“Murayama statement”) Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited Japan President Jiang demanded apologies from Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Obuchi in Tokyo Stated that Japan was “nation of the gods” Visited Yasukuni Shrine annually Obliged to visit China Massive anti-Japanese demonstrations Visited China before visiting United States Denied IJA’s role in “comfort women” issue
Orphan issue
Health Ministry’s search missions began Cancellation of search mission at China’s request Orphans’ foster parents issue Created “receiver system” Ended search missions Began supplementary search missions
Introduced “special receiver system”
Legislated Law to Assist Japanese Left Behind in China
Health Ministry ended supplementary search missions
Rejected orphans’ request to provide post-retirement public assistance
Ruled against orphans’ classaction lawsuits (with exception in Kobe)
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Cabinet
Appendix
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Table 1.1 Continued Major foreign policy and issue
Orphan issue
Textbook issue on Okinawa Made offering to Yasukuni Shrine Pledged not to visit Yasukuni Shrine Visited China President Hu visited Japan Visited China (2008, 2009) Made offering to Yasukuni Shrine twice Declared he wolud follow the 1995 “Murayama statement”
Fukuda (2007–2008)
Aso (2008–2009) Hatoyama (2009–)
Proposed to provide new public assistance Legislated Revision of the Assistance Law Apologized to orphans
Sources: Asahi shimbun, Mainichi shimbun, and Tokyo shimbun.
Table 6.1 Official Missions to Search for Orphans’ Kin in Japan (1981–1987) Mission 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Date Mar. 1981 Feb. 1982 Feb. 1983 Dec. 1983 Feb. 1984 Dec. 1984 Feb. 1985 Sep. 1985 Nov. 1985 Feb. 1986 Jun. 1986 Sep. 1986 Oct. 1986 Dec. 1986 Feb. 1987 Total
Number who visited
Number who found identity
Percentage
47 60 45 60 50 90 90 135 135 130 200 200 100 42 104
29 45 24 37 26 39 36 41 33 34 79 64 33 15 28
61.7 75.0 53.3 61.7 52.0 43.3 40.0 30.4 24.4 26.2 39.5 32.0 33.0 35.7 26.9
1,488
563
37.8
Source: Koseirodosho, “Koji kankei tokei-ichiran” (Statistics on Orphans), http://www.sien-center.or.jp/ about/ministry/list.html, January 31, 2009.
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Appendix
Mission 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Date Nov. 1987 Feb. 1988 Jun. 1988 Feb. 1989 Feb. 1990 Nov. 1990 Nov. 1991 Nov. 1992 Nov. 1993 Nov. 1994 Oct. 1995 Oct. 1996 Oct. 1997 Nov. 1998 Nov. 1999 Total
Number who visited
Number who found identity
Percentage
10 13 12 9 12 4 6 4 5 5 7 4 3 5 2 101
20.0 26.0 34.3 15.8 26.1 10.8 12.0 12.1 15.6 13.9 10.4 9.3 6.8 18.5 10.0 16.1
50 50 35 57 46 37 50 33 32 36 67 43 45 (1)* 27 20 628 (1)*
* Out of the number, one person was removed from orphan’s status after the mission. Source: Koseirodosho, “Koji kankei tokei-ichiran” (Statistics on Orphans), http://www.sien-center.or.jp/ about/ministry/list.html, January 31, 2009.
Table 13.1 Orphans’ Class-Action Lawsuits (2002–2006) Where it was filed* Sapporo District Court Sendai District Court
Yamagata District Court Tokyo District Court
Nagano District Court Nagoya District Court
Kyoto District Court
Number of plaintiffs 80 5 5 20 21 37 34 629 321 126 16 67 12 139 32 39 90 18 1
When it was filed Nov. 2003 May 2004 May 2005 Jul. 2005 Dec. 2005 Apr. 2006 Jun. 2006 Dec. 2002 Sep. 2003 Oct. 2004 Jun. 2005 Apr. 2004 Dec. 2005 Sep. 2003 May 2004 May 2005 Sep. 2003 Jul. 2004 Oct. 2005
Subtotal
85
83 34
1,092 79
210
109
Continued
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Table 6.2 Supplementary Search Missions (1987–1999)
Appendix
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Table 13.1 Continued
Osaka District Court
Kobe District Court
Okayama District Court
Hiroshima District Court Tokushima District Court Kochi District Court
Fukuoka District Court
Kagoshima District Court
Number of plaintiffs 111 29 4 57 6 2 16 6 4 1 51 8 4 45 1 1 32 44 27 27 21 3
When it was filed Dec. 2003 Apr. 2004 Jun. 2005 Mar. 2004 Jul. 2004 May 2005 Feb. 2004 Jul. 2004 Feb. 2005 Jun. 2005 Sep. 2003 Apr. 2004 Oct. 2003 Oct. 2003 Nov. 2004 Dec. 2005 Dec. 2004 May 2005 Jul. 2005 Feb. 2006 Aug. 2003 Jul. 2005
Total
Subtotal
144
65
27 59 4
47
130 24 2,192
*Listed from northeast to southwest, according to Japanese custom. Sources: Asahi shimbun, Mainichi shimbun, and Tokyo shimbun.
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Where it was filed*
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Appendix
Table 15.1 Japanese Permanent Repatriation from China (1972–2008) Number of orphans’ households
Number of orphans and family members
Number of women’s households
Number of women and family members
1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
0 0 1 9 12 13 20 24 26 37 30 36 35 56 159 272 267 218 181 145 120 115 100 91 110 108 94 65 53 38 22 14 15 13 10 11
0 0 5 30 43 56 74 80 110 172 120 154 155 258 645 1,094 1,097 831 604 463 353 285 245 259 325 407 380 266 216 164 90 54 64 63 44 51
19 70 181 170 100 60 80 118 147 156 126 132 98 113 122 105 98 125 145 133 163 203 222 308 239 132 66 43 33 30 15 23 22 16 17 10
57 143 378 485 316 199 206 390 486 509 434 472 320 368 369 330 256 343 325 287 297 353 625 970 811 507 242 174 106 108 51 45 41 37 47 39
Total
2,520*
9,257
3,840
11,126
*Four orphans’ spouses were also orphans; therefore, the total number of the repatriated orphans was 2,524. Source: Koseirodosho, “Chugoku kikokusha no nendobetsu kikokujokyo” (Annual Data on Repatriation from China), http://www.sien-center.or.jp/about/ministry/reference_02. html, July 31, 2008.
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Year
Prelims 1. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Manshukokushi (History of Manchukuo), Vol. 1 (Soron), Tokyo: Man’mo doho- engokai, 1970, 781–782. 2. Wakatsuki Yasuo, Sengo hikiage no kiroku (Record of Postwar Repatriation), Tokyo: Jijitsushinsha, 1991, 250–251. 3. Koseisho 50-nenshi henshuiinkai, Koseisho 50-nenshi (50-year History of Ministry of Health), Tokyo: Kosei mondai-kenkyukai, 1988, 887–890. 4. Irène Nèmirovsky, Suite Française (trans., Sandra Smith), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006; Elie Wiesel, Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day, New York: Macmillan, 2008; and H. G. Adler, The Journey (trans., Peter Filkins), New York: Random House, 2008.
1
Introduction
1. Ki no Tsurayuki et al., eds., Kokin wakashu (Imperial Anthology of Poems), Vol. 9, No. 406, 905. See also chapter 15 on Abe. 2. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi- shobo, 1992, 11. 3. Koseirodosho, “Chugoku zanryu-koji kanren shiryo” (Data on Orphans Left Behind in China), http://www.kikokusha-center.or.jp/kikokusha/kiko_jijo/chugoku/mhwdata/index_f. htm, January 2008. 4. For background, see Chalmers A. Johnson, “The Pattern of Japanese Relations with China, 1952–1982,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 3, Fall 1986, 401–428 and Ming Wan, Sino-Japanese Relations: Interaction, Logic, and Transformation, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2006, 201–232. 5. See Ezra F. Vogel, Ming Yuan, and Akihiko Tanaka, eds., The Golden Age of the U.S.- ChinaJapan Triangle, 1972 to 1989, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002. 6. Koseirodosho, “Koji kankei tokei-ichiran” (Statistics on the Orphans), http://www.siencenter.or.jp/about/ministry/html, January 31, 2009. 7. Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989 and George Hicks, The Comfort Women, New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. 8. Allen S. Whiting, China Eyes Japan, Berkeley, CA: University California Press, 1989. 9. “Yasukuni shiryo kohyo” (Declassified Yasukuni Documents), Tokyo shimbun, March 39, 2007.
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NOT E S
Notes
10. Ibid. 11. “Momoku no 90- sai moto-ianfu shogen ketsui” (Blind 90-Year Old Former Comfort Woman Decided to Testify), Tokyo shimbun, June 27, 2007. 12. “Shudan jiketsu honshitsu tsutawarazu” (Essence of Mass Suicide Is Concealed), Tokyo shimbun, March 31, 2007 and “Shudan jiketsu naze kakusuno” (Why Hide Mass Suicide?), Tokyo shimbun, October 1, 2007. 13. For details, see Gilbert Rozman, ed., Japan and Russia: The Tortuous Path to Normalization, 1949–1999, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 14. For details, see Wan, 201–232. 15. Erik Eckholm, “Japanese Leader, Visiting China, Is Mildly Rebuked on Army Role,” New York Times, October 9, 2001. Emphasis added by the author. 16. Ibid. 17. Martin Fackler, “Japan Leaders First Diplomatic Bow Is to Asian Neighbors,” New York Times, October 4, 2006. 18. “Abe- shusho Bei karamo tsugeki” (Prime Minister Abe Also Attacked by United States), Tokyo shimbun, August 1, 2007. 19. Ronald Dore, “Abe- shusho jinin no ‘ko’ ” (“Merit” of Prime Minister Abe’s Resignation), Tokyo shimbun, September 16, 2007. 20. Joseph Kahn, “Japan Aims to Enlist China in Fight Against Global Warming,” New York Times, December 29, 2007. 21. “Aso- shusho, Yasukuni-jinja shunki reitaisai ni masakaki o hono” (Prime Minister Aso Made Offering of Sacred Tree for Yasukuni Shrine’s Spring Ritual), Asahi shimbun, April 22, 2009.
2
Background: Illusory Empire and Great Migration Campaign
1. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Manshukokushi (History of Manchukuo), Tokyo: Man’mo doho- engokai, 1970, Vol. 1 (Soron), 106–111. 2. Minoguchi Kazunori, Kaitakudan no Manshu (Manchuria Settlement), Tokyo: Shinsei-shuppan, 2005, 283–284. 3. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 83–85. 4. Ide, 47–55 and Peter Duus, “Japan’s Wartime Empire: Problems and Issues,” in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, xii. 5. Hasegawa Yuichi, “Hainichi imin-ho to Manshu . Burajiru” ( Japanese Expulsion Act and Manchuria . Brazil), in Miwa Kimidata, ed., Nichibei kiki no kigen to hainichi imin-ho (Origin of U.S.- Japan Crisis and Japanese Expulsion Act), Tokyo: Ronsosha, 1997, 44–79. 6. Ibid. and Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Sobo (Weed People), Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1972. 7. Duus, xiv–xxi. 8. Haraguchi Kunihiro, “1924-nen no imin mondai” (Immigration Issue in 1924), in Miwa, 4–35. 9. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, 426–427. 10. Ibid., 427–428 and Vol. 2 (Kakuron), 10. 11. Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 23 and Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, 352–398. 12. Manshu kaitakushi-kankokai, Manshu kaitakushi (History of Manchuria Settlement), Tokyo: Manshu kaitakkushi-kankokai, 1966, 827–828.
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226
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
227
Ibid. and Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Vol. 1, 649–650. Manshu kaitakushi-kankokai and Duus, xiii. Duus. Ide, 192–194. Ibid., 194–195. Ibid. Kinoshita, 24–25. Ide, 196–197. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 199–201. Ibid., 201–202. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi-shobo, 1992, 38. Ibid. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 104–106. Ibid., 106–109. Endo, 38. Ide, 160–168. Ibid., 168–172. Ibid., 180–182. Sakamoto, 36. Kanagawa shimbunsha henshukyoku-hodobu, ed., Manshu rakudo ni kiyu (To Perish in Manchurian Paradise), Kanagawa: Kanagawa shimbunsha, 2005, 159–160. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Vol. 1, 773–774. Ibid., 781 and Man’mo doho- engokai, Man’mo shusenshi (History of Manchuria-Mongolia at the End of the War), Tokyo: Man’mo doho- engokai, 1962, 32. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Vol. 1, 625–629. Ide, 187–188.
3
Ill-Fated Diaspora of Japanese Farmer-Settlers
1. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 230–232. 2. Ibid., 233–234. 3. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi- shobo, 1992, 11–14. 4. Ibid., 14–16. 5. Kanagawa shimbunsha henshukyoku-hodobu, ed., Manshu rakudo ni kiyu (To Perish in Manchurian Paradise), Kanagawa: Kanagawa shimbunsha, 2005, 162–165. 6. Ibid., 166–167. 7. Ibid., 167–168. 8. Endo, 39–40. 9. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 57–59. 10. “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 2, Tokyo shimbun, September 11, 2007. 11. Ibid. and Endo, 203. 12. Endo, 203 and 217. 13. Ibid., 203–204. 14. Okubo, 24–28. 15. Ibid., 126–131.
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Notes
Notes
16. Ibid., 131–133. 17. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa imamo nao 2007 (2)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 2, Sekai, June 2007, 215–216. 18. Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 26–27 and author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008. 19. Ibid. 20. Author interview with a repatriate from China, August 5, 2008. 21. Ide, 2004, 10–11.
4 Early Postwar Era: Repatriation of Japanese and International Politics 1. Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951, Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1989, 38–60; U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Displaced Persons: Administration,” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId =10005418, 2008; and Patricia Cohen, “Desperate Letters: Newly Discovered Letters Written by Anne Frank’s Father, Otto, Chronicle His Anguished Efforts to Get His Family Into the United States,” New York Times, April 2, 2007. 2. “Hope for a Harvest of Tolerance from Anne Frank’s Tree,” New York Times, April 17, 2009. 3. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Aftermath of the Holocaust,” http://www. ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005129, 2008 and Gil Loescher, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present, New York: The Free Press, 1986, 1–24 and 120–169. 4. Theodor Schieder, ed., Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern- Central-Europe, (trans.), Bonn: Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims, Vol. IV, 1960; and James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation 1944–1950, London: A Little, Brown Book, 1997, 29–36. 5. Nina Bernstein, “Holocaust Refugees Faced a Struggle to Survive, Then One to Succeed,” New York Times, March 9, 2008. 6. Sewell Chan, “Nazi Refugees’ Son Explores Complex Feelings,” New York Times, April 23, 2009. 7. Japan Association for Refugees, “Indoshina nanmin” (Indochinese Refugees), http://www/ refugee.or.jp/en/, 2009. 8. Koseisho 50-nenshi henshuiinkai, Koseisho 50-nenshi (50-Year History of Ministry of Health), Tokyo: Kosei mondai-kenkyukai, 1988, 881–890. 9. Ibid. 10. Koseisho 20-nenshi henshuiinkai, Koseisho 20-nenshi (20-Year History of Ministry of Health), Tokyo: Kosei mondai-kenkyukai, 1960, 687. 11. Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 24–25 and Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008. 12. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Manshukokushi (History of Manchukuo), Vol. 1 (Soron), Tokyo: Man’mo doho- engokai, 1970, 808–809. 13. Kato Kiyofumi, “Rekishi toshiteno Manshu hikiage” (Repatriation from Manchuria in Historical Perspective), Hikiage 60-shunen kinenshi ( Journal to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of Repatriation), Tokyo: Kokusai zenrin-kyokai, 2007, 13. 14. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 20–22. 15. Ibid.
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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
32.
33.
34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
229
Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 202. Kato, 15. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, 867–868. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi- shobo, 1992, 217–218. Kato, 18–19. Kinoshita, 107. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, 779–781. Kato, 23–24. Ibid. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, 816–817. Ibid., 809–810. Ibid., 810–814. Kato, 28–29. Ide, 207–208. Kinoshita, 108–109. Ide, 213–214; John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 371–372, 410–414, and 484–489; and Yoshihide Soeya, Japan’s Economic Diplomacy with China, 1945–1978, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, 5–7 and 20–24. Dower, 39, 55–58, and 484–489; Yoshida Shigeru, Sekai to Nihon (World and Japan), Tokyo: Bancho- shobo, 1963, 145–147 and 250–251; and Chalmers Johnson, “The Pattern of Japanese Relations with China, 1952–1982,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 3, Fall 1986, 403–405. Ide, 214; Soeya, 33–35; and Sayuri Shimizu, Creating People of Plenty: The United States and Japan’s Economic Alternatives, 1950–1960, Kent, OH: The Kent Ohio State University Press, 2001, 56–58. Ide, 215–217. Ibid., 217 and Soeya, 33–35. Ide, 218–220 and Soeya, 33. Endo, 41. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 66–67 and Asano Shin’ichi and Dong Yan, Ikoku no fubo (Fathers and Mothers in a Foreign Country), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2006, 147–153. Soeya, 35–36; Shimizu, 67–68; Dower, 410–414 and 484–489. Shimizu, 52–58; Yoshida,144; and Yoshida Shigeru, Kaiso junen (Recollections of Ten Years), Vol. 1, Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1957, 270. Shimizu, 125–128; Soeya, 8–9 and 36–37; and Hatoyama Ichiro, Hatoyama Ichiro kaikoroku (Memoirs of Hatoyama Ichiro), Tokyo: Bungei- shunjusha, 1957, 116–117. Shimizu, 100–101; Soeya, 45–59 and 80–105; and Endo, 41. Soeya, 9–10 and 38–39; and Ide, 225–226. Soeya, 39 and Ide, 226–228. Koseisho 50-nenshi henshuiinkai, 1457–1459. Calculation was based on the exchange rate of US$1 = ¥360. Koseisho 20-nenshi henshuiinkai, 686–687 and Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa imamo nao 2007 (4)” (Weed People Still [Exist]), series 4, Sekai, August 2007, 142. Endo, 41–42. Soeya, 10–11 and 47–59; and Ide, 2004, 228. Soeya, 106–133; Kokubun Ryosei, “1972-nen taisei o koeta Nitchu-kankei o motomete” (To Seek Sino- Japanese Relations Beyond 1972 System), Gaiko foramu, October 2002, 16–23; and Kataoka Tetsuya, “Nihon yo, domei o kyozetsu surunoka” ( Japan: Are You Rejecting [the U.S.-Japan] Alliance?), Voice, September 2003, 88–98.
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Notes
50. Hatoyama, 174–177 and 193–203 and “Shiberia yokuryu: Shinshiryo 76-man-nin bun hakken” (Internment in Siberia: New Documents Found Concerning 760,000 Detainees), Tokyo shimbun, July 23, 2009. For details, see Donald C. Hellmann, Japanese Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics: The Peace Agreement with the Soviet Union, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
21. 22. 23. 24.
Plight of Orphans During Postwar Era
Author interview with a female orphan, July 31, 2008. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 59–60. Ibid., 60–61. Suzuki Kenji, Chichi haha no kuni yo (Country of Fathers and Mothers), Tokyo: Otsukishoten, 2005, 45. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 150–151. Ibid., 123–124. Okubo, 95–96. Ibid., 96–97. Ibid., 97–99. Suzuki, 72. Ibid. Sakamoto, 110–111. Ibid. Okubo, 133–134. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 179. Okubo, 135–136. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa imamo nao 2007 (2)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 2, Sekai, June 2007, 217–218. Ibid., 218–219. Sakamoto, 162–163. Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai, Manshu Yasuoka-bunson: 70-nen no rekishi to kioku (Yasuoka Branch Village in Manchuria: 70-Year History and Memory), Yasuoka-mura, Nagano-ken: Yasuoka-bunson henshuiinkai, 2007, 438–456. Ibid., 404–408. Ibid., 403–404. Asano Shin’ichi and Dong Yan, Ikoku no fubo (Fathers and Mothers in a Foreign Country), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2006, 143–145. Ibid. and Ide, 2004, 26.
6
Initial Searches for Orphans: Volunteer Groups and Official Missions
1. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi-shobo, 1992, 42–43. 2. Ibid., 43–44. 3. Ibid., 45. 4. Ibid., 45–46. 5. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008 and Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryukoji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 36 and 113.
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5
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
231
Endo, 88. Ibid., 89. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 234. Ibid., 235–236. Ibid., 235–239. Ibid., 239–241. Kanagawa shimbunsha henshukyoku-hodobu, ed., Manshu rakudo ni kiyu (To Perish in Manchurian Paradise), Kanagawa: Kanagawa shimbunsha, 2005, 153–154. Ibid., 155–156. Ibid., 158–160. Ibid., 160–161 and 168–169. Ibid., 171–180. Endo, 46. Author interview with Kinoshita, and Kinoshita, 36–37. Ibid. and Endo, 46–47. Koseirodosho, “Koji kankei tokei-ichiran” (Statistics on Orphans), http://www.sien- center. or.jp/about/ministry/list.html, January 31, 2009. Ide, 205–206. Endo, 185. Koseirodosho. Ibid. Author interview with Kinoshita. Ibid. Ide, 221–223. Ibid., 223.
7 Barriers to Repatriation: Reestablishing Identity and Domicile 1. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008 and Okubo Maki, Chugoku zanryu Nihonjin ( Japanese Left Behind in China), Tokyo: Kobunken, 2006, 71–72. 2. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 126. 3. Ibid., 120. 4. Author interview with Kinoshita. 5. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi-shobo, 1992, 93–94. 6. Ibid., 94–95. 7. Okubo, 2006, 16–22. 8. Ibid., 22–30. 9. Ibid., 30–36. 10. Ibid., 37–45. 11. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 165–166. 12. Okubo, 2006, 47–59. 13. Sakamoto, 168. 14. Ibid., 168–169. 15. Okubo, 2006, 105–108. 16. Ibid., 108–111. 17. Endo, 144–146.
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Notes
18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
Notes
Ibid., 146–147. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 241–243. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 244–245. Endo, 130–132. Ibid., 133–134 and Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Manshukokushi (History of Manchukuo), Vol. 1 (Soron), Tokyo: Man’mo doho-engokai, 1970, 815–817. For background, see Andrew Scobell, Lessons of History: The Chinese People’s Liberation Army at 75, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2003. Endo, 134–135. Ibid., 135–140. Ibid., 119–120. Ibid., 120–122. Ibid., 122–124. Ibid., 124–125. Author interview with Kinoshita, and Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 116–117.
8 Barriers to Repatriation: Guarantor/Receiver Requirement 1. “Nihon wa Chugoku-kikokusha niwa maboroshi no tengoku” (Japan Is a Disillusioned Heaven to the Repatriates), Guangming Daily (Japanese ed.), May 29, 1983. 2. Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 118. 3. Ibid., 119 and Kent E. Calder, “Japanese Foreign Economic Policy Formation: Explaining the Reactive State,” World Politics, Vol. 40, No. 4, July 1988, 517–541. 4. Kanagawa shimbunsha henshukyoku-hodobu, ed., Manshu rakudo ni kiyu (To Perish in Manchurian Paradise), Kanagawa: Kanagawa shimbunsha, 2005, 182–184. 5. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi-shobo, 95–98. 6. Ministry of Justice, “The Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act,” http:// www.immi-moj.go.jp/english/index.html, 2005. 7. Ibid. 8. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 51–52. 9. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008. 10. Noguchi Ofumi, Darenimo ienai Chugoku zanry-koji no kokoro no uchi (Inside the Hearts of Orphans Left Behind in China That Cannot Tell Anyone), Tokyo: Soshisha, 2005, 220–221. 11. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 34–36. 12. Ibid., 36–37. 13. Ibid., 37–39. 14. Okubo Maki, Chugoku zanryu Nihonjin ( Japanese Left Behind in China), Tokyo: Kobunken, 2006, 347–348. 15. Ibid., 165 and 347–348. 16. Okubo, 2004, 147–148. 17. Author interview with Kinoshita. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.
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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
233
Kanagawa shimbunsha henshukyoku-hodobu, ed., 182–185. Author interview with Kinoshita. Letters of Ouchi Keigo to the author, January 1, 2008 and May 2, 2009. Okubo, 2004, 219–221. Kinoshita, 35–36. Author interview with Kinoshita. Ibid. Ibid. and Kinoshita, 44. Endo, 50. Ibid., 50–51 and Asano Shin’ichi and Dong Yan, Ikoku no fubo (Fathers and Mothers in a Foreign Country), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2006, 170–171. Endo, 51. Ibid., 51–52; Asano and Dong, 172–173; and Norimitsu Onishi, “Japan’s ‘Atonement’ to Former Sex Slaves Stirs Anger,” New York Times, April 25, 2007. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 243–244. Endo, 99–100.
9
Japanese Women Left Behind in China
1. Chugoku zanryu-fujin kyosei kikoku ([ Japanese] Women Left Behind in China Made Forcible Homecoming), Asahi shimbun, September 6, 1993. 2. Letters of Ouchi Keigo to the author, January 1, 2008 and May 2, 2009. 3. Okubo Maki, Chugoku zanryu Nihonjin ( Japanese Left Behind in China), Tokyo: Kobunken, 2006, 132. 4. Zanryu-fujin kyosei kikoku (Forcible Homecoming of the Women Left Behind in China), Mainichi shimbun, September 7, 1993. 5. Ibid. 6. Koseisho 50-nenshi henshuiinkai, Koseisho 50-nenshi (50-Year History of Ministry of Health), Tokyo: Kosei mondai-kenkyukai, 1988, 887–889. 7. Okubo, 133–135. 8. Ibid., 136–137. 9. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 82–83. 10. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008; and Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think about the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 40–41. 11. Ibid., 122. 12. Okubo, 138–144. 13. Suzuki Kenji, Chichi haha no kuni yo (Country of Fathers and Mothers), Tokyo: Otsukishoten, 2005, 124–127. For exploitation of girls in silk thread factories, see Patricia E. Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. 14. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi- shobo, 1992, 203–204. 15. Ibid., 204 and “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 2, Tokyo shimbun, September 11, 2007. 16. Ibid. 17. Endo, 204–205. 18. Kinoshita, 114–117. 19. Okubo, 139–146.
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Notes
Notes
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
Letters of Ouchi Keigo and Mainichi shimbun. Ibid. Okubo, 157. Ibid., 175–178. Ibid., 178–179. Ibid., 159–162. Ibid., 163–165. Ibid., 165–166. Suzuki, 26–30 and “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 3, Tokyo shimbun, September 13, 2007. 29. Ibid.
10 Orphans’ Struggles for Settlement 1. Author interview with a local government official, July 28, 2008 and Koseirodosho, “Koji kankei tokei-ichiran” (Statistics on Orphans), http://www.sien-center.or.jp/about/ministry/ list.html, January 31, 2009. 2. Koseirodosho, “Chugoku zanryu-hojin ni kansuru ryakushi” (Brief History of Japanese Left Behind in China), http://www.sien- center.or.jp/about/whats/t- chart.html, April 2008. 3. Noguchi Ofumi, Darenimo ienai Chugoku zanryu-koji no kokoro no uchi (Inside the Hearts of Orphans Left Behind in China That Cannot Tell Anyone), Tokyo: Soshisha, 2005, 220–221. 4. Author interview with an orphan’s acquaintance, August 7, 2008. 5. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2003, 151. 6. Koseirodosho, 2009. 7. Koseisho, “Chugoku kikansha seikatsu jittai chosa kekka” (Results of Poll on Living Conditions of Repatriates from China), http://www.kikokushacenter. or.jp/kikokusha/kiko_ jijo/ chugoku/mhwdata/index_f.htm., September 2000. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008. 11. Author interview, July 28, 2008. 12. Author interview with Kinoshita, and author interview with a volunteer group member, July 25, 2008. 13. Koseirodosho, “Seikatsu-hogo seido no gaiyo” (Outline of Public Assistance System), http:// www.mhlw.go.jp/bunya/seikatsuhogo/seikatsuhogo.html, April 2004. 14. Ibid. 15. Sakamoto, 2–3. 16. Philip Brasor, “You Have to Appear to be a Complete Loser in Japan to Get Benefits,” Japan Times, September 2, 2007. 17. Sakamoto, 188. 18. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 102–103. 19. Ibid., 104–105. 20. Ibid., 103–104. 21. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa imamo nao 2007 (2)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 2, Sekai, June 2007, 216–220. 22. Ibid., 220–221. 23. Sakamoto, 163. 24. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 19–20. 25. Ibid., 18–19.
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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.
235
Ibid., 19–20. Okubo, 141–147. Ibid., 148–150. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi-shobo, 1992, 156–159. Ide, 2004, 249–252. Ibid., 254–260 and Endo, 163. Wang Min, Nitchu 2000- nen no furikai (2,000 Years of Misunderstanding between China and Japan), Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 2006, 82–84. Endo, 87 and 92. Author interview with Kinoshita, and Okubo, 223. Ide, 2004, 254. Ibid., 23.
11
Struggles of Orphans’ Spouses and Offspring
1. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008. 2. Endo Mitsuo, Chugoku zanryu-koji no kiseki (Tracks of Orphans Left Behind in China), Tokyo: San’ichi-shobo, 1992, 160–161. 3. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 171–173. 4. Ibid., 173. 5. Okubo Maki, Chugoku zanryu Nihonjin ( Japanese Left Behind in China), Tokyo: Kobunken, 2006, 75–76, and 88–89. 6. Ibid., 89. 7. Author interview with Kinoshita. 8. Ibid. 9. Koseirodosho, “Chugoku zanryu-hojin ni kansuru ryakushi” (Brief History of Japanese Left Behind in China), http://www.sien- center.or.jp/about/whats/t- chart.html, April 2008. 10. Koseisho, “Chugoku kikansha seikatsu jittai chosa kekka” (Results of Poll on Living Conditions of Repatriates from China), http://www.kikokusha-center.or.jp/kikokusha/kikokujijo/ chugoku/mhwdata/index_f.htm, September 2000. 11. Sakamoto, 152. 12. Ibid., 184. 13. Ibid., 124–125. 14. Endo, 208–210. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 211. 17. Ministry of Justice, “Nyukan hakusho” (Immigration White Paper), http://www.immi-moj.go.jp/ index.html, 2008. 18. Endo, 154–155. 19. Okubo, 90–92. 20. Ibid., 93–96. 21. Ibid., 96–98. 22. “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 3, Tokyo shimbun, September 13, 2007. 23. Ibid. 24. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 269–270. 25. Ibid., 261–267 and 280. 26. Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 115–133.
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Ide, 276–282. Ibid., 275–276. Kinoshita, 80. Ministry of Justice, “Nyukan hakusho” (Immigration White Paper), http://www.immi-moj. go.jp/index.html, 2008.
12
New Obstacles: Retirement and Pensions
1. Koseirodosho, “Koteki-nenkin seido no gaiyo” (Summary of Public Pension System), http:// www.mhlw.go.jp/topics/nenkin/zaisei/01/01–04.html#01–04- 01, January 2008. The pensions are paid every two months; however, the amount is given on a monthly basis here. 2. Ibid. 3. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2003, 118. 4. Ibid., 119. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 120. The Ministry used to a more complicated method, but this was the basic formula. 7. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 121–122. 8. Ibid., 122. 9. Ibid., 197 and Okubo Maki, Chugoku zanryu Nihonjin ( Japanese Left Behind in China), Tokyo: Kobunken, 2006, 117. 10. Sakamoto, 152 and 187. 11. Ibid., 2–3. 12. Okubo, 2004, 39–41. 13. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa imamo nao 2007 (2)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 2, Sekai, June 2007, 219–221. 14. Koseirodosho, “Seikatsu-hogo seido no gaiyo” (Summary of Public Assistance System), http:// www.mhlw.go.jp/bunya/seikatsuhogo/seikatsuhogo.html, April 2004. 15. Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 128. 16. Ibid., 134. 17. Okubo, 2004, 225–227. 18. Ibid., 227. 19. Ibid., 226–228. 20. “Tokyo daikushu kara 63-nen” (63 Years Since Massive Tokyo Air Strikes), Tokyo shimbun, March 11, 2008. 21. Koseisho 20-nenshi henshuiinkai, Koseisho 20-nenshi (20-Year History of Ministry of Health), Tokyo: Kosei mondai-kenkyukai, 1960, 692–703 and Koseisho 50-nenshi henshuiinkai, Koseisho 50-nenshi (50-Year History of Ministry of Health), Tokyo: Kosei mondai-kenkyukai, 1988, 1459–1465. 22. Ibid. 23. Manshukoku- gun kanko-iinkai, ed., Manshukoku- gun (Manchukuo Army), Tokyo: Ranseikai, 1970, 5–7 and 40–47. 24. Ozawa, Chikamitsu, Hishi Manshukoku- gun: Nikkei gunkan no yakuwari (Secret History of Manchukuo Army: Role of Japanese Military Officers), Tokyo: Kashiwa- shobo, 1976, 271–284. 25. Ibid., 308–312 and Manshukoku- gun kanko-iinkai, 757–759 and 920–925. 26. Ibid. 27. MOFA, “Kitachosen ni yoru Nihonjin rachi mondai” (North Korean Abductions of Japanese), http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/area/n_korea/abd/rachi.html, June 2008.
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27. 28. 29. 30.
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28. Ibid. and The Group of Seven Individuals, “Do You Dare Overlook the Hell Named North Korea?” New York Times, April 28, 2009. 29. “Hatsu no Nitcho shuno-kaidan” (First Japan-North Korea Summit Meeting), Asahi shimbun, September 18, 2002 and “Kitachosen no Nihonjin rachi-higaisha 5-nin kikoku” (Five Victims of the North Korean Abductions Returned to Japan), Asahi shimbun, October 16, 2002. 30. Okubo, 2004, 228. 31. Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 96–97. 32. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008. 33. Okubo, 2004, 224.
13 Class-Action Lawsuits 1. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa imamo nao 2007 (4)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 4, Sekai, August 2007, 141–142. 2. “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 2, Tokyo shimbun, September 11, 2007. 3. “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 3, Tokyo shimbun, September 13, 2007. 4. Ibid.; Ide.; and Tokyo shimbun, September 11, 2007. 5. Tokyo shimbun, September 13, 2007; “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 1, Tokyo shimbun, September 10, 2007; and Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2004, 333–334. 6. Okubo Maki, A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland), Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004, 224 and 229. 7. Koseisho, “Chugoku kikokusha seikatsu jittai chosa-kekka” (Results of Poll on Living Conditions of Repatriates from China), http://www.kikokusha-center.or.jp/kikokusha/kiko_jijo/ chugoku/mhwdata/2000/12.htm, September 2000. 8. Okubo, 227–229. 9. Ibid., 4–5 and 229–230. 10. Ibid., 3–4. 11. Suzuki Kenji, Chichi haha no kuni yo (Country of Fathers and Mothers), Tokyo: Otsukishoten, 2005, 151–152. 12. Ibid. 13. Okubo Maki, Chugoku zanryu Nihonjin ( Japanese Left Behind in China), Tokyo: Kobunken, 2006, 120–121. 14. Okubo, 2004, 23–24 and 41–42; and Suzuki, 92–93. 15. Sakamoto Tatsuhiko, Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland), Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003, 171 and 174. 16. Okubo, 2004, 62. 17. Ibid., 105. 18. Suzuki, 20–23, 52–54, and 122–123. 19. Okubo, 2004, 149–150. 20. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa ima mo nao 2007 (2)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 2, Sekai, June 2007, 217. 21. Sakamoto, 120 and 164. 22. Okubo, 2004, 231–233. 23. Ibid. 24. Kanagawa shimbunsha henshukyoku-hodobu, ed., Manshu rakudo ni kiyu (To Perish in Manchurian Paradise), Kanagawa: Kanagawa shimbunsha, 2005, 187–195. 25. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa ima mo nao 2007 (1)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 1, Sekai, May, 49–50.
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1. “Chugoku zanryu-fujin sosho Tokyo chisai hanketsu” (Tokyo District Court’s Verdict for Lawsuit of Women Left Behind in China), Asahi shimbun, February 16, 2006. 2. “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 1, Tokyo shimbun, September 10, 2007. 3. Ibid. 4. Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa ima mo nao 2007 (4)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 4, Sekai, August 2007, 148–149. 5. Ibid. 6. Tokyo shimbun. 7. Ibid. 8. “Sokoku no kabe” ([High] “Walls” in Homeland), series 2, Tokyo shimbun, September 11, 2007. 9. “Chugoku zanryu-fujin sosho kososhin hanketsu” (Verdict for Appeal Trial for Lawsuit of Women Left Behind in China), Asahi shimbun, June 22, 2007. 10. “Chugoku zanryu-koji shudan sosho hanketsu” (Verdict For Class-action Lawsuits of Orphans Left Behind in China), Mainichi shimbun, July 7, 2005. 11. “Chugoku zanryu-koji shudan sosho hanketsu” (Verdict for Class-action Lawsuits of Orphans Left Behind in China), Yomiuri shimbun, December 1, 2006. 12. “Chugoku zanryu-koji shudan sosho hanaketsu” (Verdict for Class-action Lawsuits of Orphans Left Behind in Chin), Asahi shimbun, December 2, 2006 and Ide Magoroku, “Sobo wa ima mo nao 2007 (3)” (Weed People Still [Exist] in 2007), series 3, Sekai, July 2007, 148–151. 13. “Chugoku zanryu-koji shudan sosho hanketsu” (Verdict for Class-action Lawsuits of Orphans Left Behind in China), Asahi shimbun, January 31, 2007. 14. Ibid. 15. “Zanryu-koji ni tsuika shiensaku” (Additional Assistance Policy for Orphans Left Behind), Asahi shimbun, January 31, 2007. 16. “Baisho sosho Tokushima chisai” (Compensation Lawsuit at Tokushima District Court), Asahi shimbun, March 23, 2007. 17. “Zanryu-koji Nagoya mo haiso” (Orphans Left Behind Lost Also in Nagoya), Chunichi shimbun, March 29, 2007. 18. “Chugoku zanryu-koji ‘Sapporo’ ‘Kochi’ mo haiso” (Orphans Left Behind in China Lost Also in “Sapporo” and “Kochi”), Asahi shimbun, June 15, 2007. 19. Norimitsu Onishi, “Japan Court Rules Against Sex Slaves and Laborers,” New York Times, April 28, 2007. 20. “Bei- gikai no ianfu ketsugian” (U.S. Congress Draft Resolution on Comfort Women), Tokyo shimbun, June 22, 2007. 21. “Chugoku zanryu-koji zenkoku renrakukai, seifu ni yobosho teishutsu” (National Liaison Council on Orphans Left Behind in China Submits Request to Government), Tokyo shimbun, April 12, 2007. 22. Ibid. 23. “Chugoku zanryu-hojin ni taisuru aratana shiensaku” (New Assistance Policy Toward Japanese Left Behind in China), Tokyo shimbun, July 1, 2007. 24. Ibid. 25. “Zanryu-koji, shiensaku o judaku” (Orphans Left Behind Accepted Assistance Policy), Asahi shimbun, July 9, 2007. Emphasis added by the author. 26. Letter to the author, May 2009 and Private Advisory Council on the Assistance to the Japanese Left Behind in China, “Chugoku zanryu-hojin ni taisuru shien no arikata ni tsuite” (Assistance to Japanese Left Behind in China), June 12, 2007, 2. 27. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008. 28. “Abe- shusho Bei karamo tsugeki” (Prime Minister Abe Also Attacked by United States), Tokyo shimbun, August 1, 2007.
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29. “Aso-shusho, Yasukuni-jinja shunki reitaisai ni masakaki o hono” (Prime Minister Aso Made Offering of Sacred Tree for Yasukuni Shrine’s Spring Ritual), Asahi shimbun, April 22, 2009. 30. “Rachi- shien dekinu, keikoku” ([U.S.] Warns “Won’t Help [ Japan] with Abduction Issue”), Tokyo shimbun, November 8, 2007. 31. Tokyo shimbun, August 1, 2007. 32. “Kyuma boei- daijin jinin” (Defense Minister Kyuma Fumio Resigns), Asahi shimbun, July 4, 2007. 33. “Abe- shusho ga jii hyomei” (Prime Minister Abe Expressed His Intention to Resign), Asahi shimbun, September 12, 2007. 34. “Zanryu-koji shien kaiseiho ga seiritsu” (Revised Law to Assist Orphans Left Behind Established), Asahi shimbun, November 28, 2007. 35. “ ‘Kika’ mo nenkin mangaku shikyu” (To Pay a Full Pension Also to “Naturalized” [Orphans]), Asahi shimbun, December 2, 2007. 36. “Shusho, zanryu-koji ni shazai” (Prime Minister Apologized to Orphans Left Behind), Asahi shimbun, December 5, 2007; and “Zanryu-koji sosho shuketsu” (Lawsuits of Orphans Left Behind Will End), Asahi shimbun December 13, 2007. 37. December 13, 2007 and “Zanryu-koji sosho shuketsu” (Lawsuits of Orphans Left Behind Ended), Tokyo shimbun, February 28, 2009. 38. “Okinawa-sen kyokasho kentei mondai” (Textbook Authorization Issue on Battle of Okinawa), Tokyo shimbun, December 27, 2007. 39. “Okinawa noto sosho” (Okinawa Note Lawsuit), Tokyo shimbun, March 28, 2008. 40. Kato Kiyofumi, “Rekishi toshiteno Manshu hikiage” (Repatriation from Manchuria in Historical Perspective), Hikiage 60-shunen kinenshi (Journal to Commemorate the 60-Year Anniversary of Repatriation), Tokyo: Kokusai zenrin-kyokai, 2007, 31–32. 41. “Dominika Nihonjin iju 50-shunen kinenshi, 8-gatsu ni hakkan e” (50-Year Record of Japanese Settlement in Dominica to Be Published in August), Asahi shimbun, April 18, 2009. 42. Ibid. 43. Kajita Takamichi, Tan’no Kiyoto, and Higuchi Naoto, Kao no mienai teijuka: Nikkei Burajirujin to kokka . shijo . shimin nettowaku (Faceless Settlement: Japanese Brazilians and Nation . Market . Citizen Network), Nagoya: Nagoya- daigaku shuppankai, 2005, 4–21. 44. Kaigai Nikkeijin kyokai, “Kaigai Nikkeijin- su” (Number of Japanese Overseas), http:// www.jadesas.or.jp/aboutnikkei/index.html, 2007. 45. Hiroko Tabuchi, “Goodbye, Honored Guest,” New York Times, April 23, 2009. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid.
15
Conclusion: Orphan Issue and Sino-Japanese Relations
1. Manshukokushi hensan-kankokai, Manshukokushi (History of Manchukuo), Vol. 1 (Soron), Tokyo: Man’mo doho- engokai, 1970, 781–782. 2. Kato Kiyofumi, “Rekishi toshiteno Manshu hikiage” (Repatriation from Manchuria in Historical Perspective), Hikiage 60-shunen kinenshi ( Journal to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of Repatriation), Tokyo: Kokusai zenrin-kyokai, 2007, 33–34. 3. Gil Loescher, Alexander Betts, and James Milner, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), London: Routledge, 2008, 1–11 and 43–45. 4. Japan Association for Refugees, “Indoshina nanmin” (Indochinese Refugees), http://www/ refugee.or.jp/en/, 2009.
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Notes
Notes
5. Scot Shane, “China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo: Communist Techniques,” New York Times, July 2, 2008. 6. Author interview with Kinoshita Takao, July 30, 2008 and Kinoshita Takao, Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today), Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003, 45–55. 7. Koseirodosho, “Koji kankei tokei-ichiran” (Statistics on Orphans), http://www.sien- center. or.jp/about/ministry/list.html, January 31, 2009. 8. Ibid. and “Kokyo no Yamagata mitai” (Want to See My Hometown Yamagata), Tokyo shimbun, November 20, 2008. 9. Koseirodosho, “Karafuto-to kikokusha no nendobetsu kikokujokyo” (Annual Data on Repatriation from Sakhalin and Elsewhere), http://www.sien-center.or.jp/about/ministry/karafuto. html, July 31, 2008. 10. Ibid.; “Saharin doho no eikyu kikoku jitsugen” (Realization of Permanent Repatriation of Fellow Koreans in Sakhalin), Mindan shimbun, http://www.mindan.org /shinbun/000223/ topic/topic_d.htm, February 23, 2000; and “Russia’s Sakhalin Island Koreans Make Bittersweet Homecoming after 60 Years,” International Herald Tribune, November 8, 2007. 11. Author interview with Kinoshita, and Kinoshita, 89. 12. “Ikiru tesaguri kyoretsu, Akutagawa- sho (Akutagawa Award for the Strength to Grope for Life), Asahi shimbun, July 16, 2008. 13. “Nitchu no soryo ga ‘wahei hoe’ ” (Japanese and Chinese Priests Held “Peace Memorial Service”), Tokyo shimbun, December 14, 2007; “100-sai no imamo chiryo de shokuzai” (Still Atoning through Treating [Chinese Villagers] at Age 100), Tokyo shimbun, July 22, 2009; and Takeyama Michio, Biruma no tategoto (Burmese Harp), Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1948. 14. Ide Magoroku, Owarinaki tabi (Endless Journey), Tokyo: Iwanami- shoten, 2004, 334. 15. Martin Fackler, “In His Visit to Japan, China Leader Seeks Amity,” New York Times, May 8, 2008. 16. “Ko- shuseki, Nara homon” (President Hu Visits Nara), Asahi shimbun, May 10, 2008. 17. Joshua A. Fogel, Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, 17–19. Jianzhen’s life is depicted in Inoue Yasushi, Tempyo no iraka (Roof Tiles of Tempyo), Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1957. 18. Ibid. Abe’s life is portrayed in Tsujihara Noboru, Tobe Kirin (Fly, Kirin!), Tokyo: Yomiuri shimbunsha, 1999. 19. Ibid. 20. MOFA, “The Sino-Japanese Youth Friendship Exchange Year,” http://www.mofa.go.jp/ announce/event/2008/4/1179255_932.html, April 2008. 21. “Hatoyama- shusho Chugoku Ko- shuseki to kaidan” (Prime Minister Hatoyama Talks with Chinese President Hu), Tokyo shimbun, September 22, 2009. 22. Masaru Tamamoto, “How Japan Imagines China and Sees Itself,” World Policy Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 4, Winter 2005/06, 63 and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The Soft Power of Japan,” Gaiko Forum (English ed.), Vol. 4, No. 2, Summer 2004, 3–7. 23. Muro Saisei, “Shokei-ijo” (Small Scenes), No. 2, Kikuchi Kan . Muro Saisei-shu (Collected Works of Kikuchi Kan and Muro Saisei), Gendai Nihon bungaku-zenshu, Vol. 27, Tokyo: Chikuma- shobo, 1955, 221.
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Bibliography I
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I I
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Books Amako, Satoshi and Sonoda, Shigeto. eds. Nitchu koryu no shihan-seiki (A Quarter Century’s Sino-Japanese Interactions). Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimposha, 1998.
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Ishikawa, Tatsuzo. Sobo (Weed People). Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1972. Izutsu, Kikue. Tairiku no hanayome ([War] Brides to the Continent). Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2004. Kajita, Takamichi, Tan’no, Kiyoto, and Higuchi, Naoto. Kao no mienai teijuka: Nikkei Burajirujin to kokka . shijo . shimin nettowaku (Faceless Settlement: Japanese Brazilians and Nation . Market . Citizen Network). Nagoya: Nagoya-daigaku shuppankai, 2005. Kanagawa shimbunsha henshukyoku-hodobu. ed. Manshu rakudo ni kiyu (To Perish in Manchurian Paradise). Kanagawa: Kanagawa shimbunsha, 2005. Kato, Kiyofumi. Mantetsu-zenshi (History of South Manchuria Railway). Tokyo: Kodansha, 2006. Kinoshita, Takao. Chugoku zanryu-koji mondai no ima o kangaeru (To Think About the Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China Today). Tokyo: Choeisha, 2003. Kobayashi, Koji. Manshu-imin no mura (Settlement Villages in Manchuria). Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 1977. Kojima, Noboru. Manshu-teikoku (Manchurian Empire). 3 vols. Tokyo: Bungei-shunjusha, 1987. Kojima, Tomoyuki. Gendai Chugoku no seiji (Contemporary Chinese Politics). Tokyo: Keiogijuku-daigaku shuppankai, 1999. Kokubun, Ryosei. Gendai Chugoku no seiji to kanryosei (Contemporary Chinese Politics and Bureaucracy). Tokyo: Keiogijuku-daigaku shuppankai, 2004. ———. Chugoku seiji to Higashi Ajia (Chinese Politics and East Asia). Tokyo: Keiogijukudaigaku shuppankai, 2004. Komiya, Kiyoshi. Manshu memori mappu (Memory Maps of Manchuria). Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 1990. Minoguchi, Kazunori. Kaitakudan no Manshu (Settlement Missions in Manchuria). Tokyo: Shinsei-shuppan, 2005. Miwa, Kimitada. ed. Nichibei kiki no kigen to hainichi imin-ho (Origin of U.S.-Japan Crisis and Japanese Expulsion Act). Tokyo: Ronsosha, 1997. Mori, Kazuko and Zhang, Yunling. eds. Nitchu-kankei o do kochiku suruka (How to Construct Sino-Japanese Relations). Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2004. Murakami, Shigeyoshi. Yasukuni-jinja (Yasukuni Shrine). Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1986. Nakajima, Tazuru and Naka, Shigehiko. Shizumanu yuhi (The Sun That Never Sets). Nagano: Shinano mainichi shimbunsha, 2004. Nakamura, Kaoru. Kato Kanji no sekai (The World of Kato Kanji). Tokyo: Fuji-shuppan, 1984. Nakamura, Yukiko.”Masan-jiken” (“Mashan Incident”). Tokyo: Soshisha, 1983. Nakano, Kenji. Chugoku zanru-koji mondai (Problem of Orphans Left Behind in China). Tokyo: Joho kikaku shuppan, 1987. Noguchi, Ofumi. Darenimo ienai Chugoku zanryu-koji no kokoro no uchi (Inside the Hearts of Orphans Left Behind in China That Cannot Tell Anyone). Tokyo: Soshisha, 2005. Ogawa, Tsuneko. Sokoku yo (Homeland!). Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1997. Okubo, Maki. A waga sokoku yo (Ah! My Homeland). Tokyo: Hassakusha, 2004. ———. Chugoku zanryu Nihonjin ( Japanese Left Behind In China). Tokyo: Kobunken, 2006. Ozawa, Chikamitsu. Hishi Manshukoku-gun: Nikkei gunkan no yakuwari (Secret History of Manchukuo Army: Role of Japanese Military Officers), Tokyo: Kashiwa-shobo, 1976. Ran, Shinzo. ed.”Chugoku kikokusha” no seikatsu sekai (Lives of “Repatriates from China”). Kyoto: Korosha, 2000. Saito, Rokuro. Shiberia no banka (Elegy of Siberia). Tokyo: Shusen shiryokan shuppan-bu, 1995. Sakamoto, Tatsuhiko. Tsumetai sokoku (Cold Homeland). Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 2003.
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Bibliography II
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Kato Kiyofumi. “Rekishi toshiteno Manshu hikiage” (Repatriation from Manchuria in Historical Perspective). Hikiage 60-shunen kinenshi ( Journal to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of Repatriation). Tokyo: Kokusai zenrin-kyokai, 2007, 7–34. Kokubun Ryosei. “1972-nen taisei o koeta Nitchu-kankei o motomete” (To Seek Sino-Japanese Relations Beyond 1972 System). Gaiko foramu, October 2002, 16–23.
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Page numbers in bold face denote photographs or tables. “12 angry women,” 115–18, 123, 124–7, 128 3K (kitsui, kitanai, kiken) or 3D (difficult, dirty, and dangerous) work, 131, 203, 208 Abandoned Sado Settlement Incident, 22–3, 30–1, 35, 46, 67–8, 79, 139 Abe no Nakamaro (Zhaoheng), 1, 215–16 Abe Shinzo, 7–8, 135, 190–8, 213 Abe cabinet, 193, 195–8, 200, 214, 220–1 Abramowitz, Morton, 59 Agency to Assist Repatriation, 43 Agency to Repatriate Veterans, 43 Aimoto Rei, 160–1, 165–6, 182 Akutagawa Ryunosuke, 14, 127 Akutagawa Award, 14, 212 Alien Registration Law, 93, 103, 115 Allied Powers, 19, 39–41, 42, 44, 50, 203 Anne Frank, 39–40 Aoki Satoko, 125–6 Araki Michiko, 126–7 Asaeda Shigeharu, 17–20, 45–7, 71, 169 Asaeda report, 45–6 Asakawa Kan’ichi, 13 Asia-Pacific War, 4, 9–10, 201, 217 Asia Peace Fund for Women, 5, 113
Aso Taro, 8, 193, 197 Aso cabinet, 221 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, xi, 19, 58, 167, 198 Law to Assist the Atomic Bomb Victims, 167 Special Measures Law Concerning the Atomic Bomb Victims, 167 Basic Law of Education (revision), 198 Battle of Leyte, 17 Battle of Okinawa, xi, 5, 23, 197, 200–1, see also “textbook issue” Beijing Agreement (1953), 53–4, 55, 58, 137, 154, 183, 219 Beniya Torao, 35–6, 67–8, 85–6, 139, 180–1 Biruma no tategoto (Burmese Harp), 213 Blagoveshchensk, 31, 64, 70, 125 blood appraisal tests, 82, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99 Boli prefecture, 22, 30, 36, 68, 76, 139–40 Brazil; Japanese immigration to, 13–14, 202–4, 212 British Mandate of Palestine, 40 Calder, Kent E., 102 California Alien Land Acts, 13 Cambodian refugees, 41–2, 104, 206–7
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I N DE X
Index
certificate of Japanese orphan, 90–1, 102, 109 Changchun, 47, 118, see also Xinjing (Changchun) Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang), 11 Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin), 11, 12 Cheju ( Jeju) Island, 29 Chiang Kai-shek, 45, 51 Chiburi village settlement, 15 Chinese and Korean forced laborers, 153, 193, 201, 214 Japanese Supreme Court ruling, 193, 198 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 46–50, 69, 89, 92 CCP Army, 44, 48–9 CCP Youth Pioneers, 64, 68 Chino Seiji, 75, 81, 91, 103 civil war in China, 46, 48–50, 59–60 Cold War, 2, 6, 9, 47, 50, 52, 59, 60, 171, 208, 210–11 collective repatriation of Japanese from China (1953), 52–4, 70, 76, 88, 95, 117–18, 127, 187, 219, see also Beijing Agreement (1953) “comfort women” issue, 4–5, 7, 113, 186, 193, 197, 198, 214, 220, 221 Japanese Supreme Court ruling, 193, 198 U.S. House resolution, 193, 197 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its Protocol, 207 definition of refugee, 207 Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) Lists, 54 counterrevolutionary, 64, 70, 208 Cultural Revolution, see Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Dalian, 25, 43–4, 48–50, 58, 118 dekasegi (seasonal migratory work), 202–4 Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), 5, 110, 197, 217
Deng Xiaoping, 8, 69 displaced persons (DPs), 20, 39–40, 42, 61, 206, 207 DP camps, 39–40 domicile, 56–7, 85–7, 90–1, 93–4, 97–9, 101–3, 107, 109–12, 137, 139, 149, 165, 199 Dominican Republic; Japanese immigration to, 202 Dongan Station Incident, 23, 36 double family diaspora, 99, 137, 143, 214 Dower, John W., 51, 54 Dulles, John Foster, 51, 54 Duus, Peter, 9, 13, 17 Eisenhower administration, 54 Emperor Akihito, 6, 220 Emperor Hirohito, 19, 180 Emperor Xuanzong, 215 Endo Mitsuo, 29–30, 58 Fangzheng, 37, 69, 186–7 Fangzheng Japanese Public Cemetery, 187 February 26 Incident, 12 Fogel, Joshua A., 215 foot-binding, 66, 88 foster parents, 32, 35–6, 53–4, 61–9, 71–2, 76–7, 81–2, 86–9, 92–4, 96–9, 105, 112–14, 121, 126, 135–6, 139, 149–50, 162, 164–5, 179–81 Fund to Assist the Orphans Left Behind in China, 112–13 Fujii Takeko, 174 Fujimori Alberto, 203 Fujita Tomino, 121 Fujiwara no Kiyokawa, 215–16 Fukuda Takeo, 8 Fukuda cabinet, 219 Fukuda Doctrine, 8 Fukuda Yasuo, 7–8, 195, 199–200, 214–15 Fukuda cabinet, 200, 221 Furusawa Kichi, 188
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Fuso-doshin-kai ( Japan Friends Society), 165–6, 182, see also Shima Kiyoshi gaichi ( Japanese-held exterior territories), xi, 14, 44 Gegenmiao Incident, 34 Geneva Conventions (1949), 177–8 Germans expellees, 40–1 “gozoku kyowa” (cooperation among five races), 14, 33, 217 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 12 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 61–7, 69, 118, 207 Guantánamo Bay Prison, 207–8 guarantor (requirement for repatriation), 85–6, 99, 101, 103–6, 115–16, 120, 126, 138–9, 147, 189–90, see also “receiver” system Gunji Hiko, 75, 93 Hanishina settlement, 22–3, 35, 67, 139 Harbin, 20, 28–30, 43, 65, 68–9, 77, 92, 95–6, 123, 139, 146, 160, 179–80, 186, 212 “hundreds-of-miles death march” to Harbin, 20, 28–9, 206 Hata Hikosaburo, 20, 45 Hataho settlement, 21, 34, 66, 78 Hatoyama Ichiro, 54–5, 59 Hatoyama cabinet, 55, 59, 219 Hatoyama Yukio, 55, 217 Hatoyama cabinet, 221 Hegang, 70, 139 “hegemonic clause” issue, 2, 73, 219, see also Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty Heihe, 29, 31, 64–5, 70, 125 Hirota cabinet, 16 “history issues,” 3–7, 200–1, 206, 215 Hoashi Kei, 52, 54 Holocaust, xii, 39–41, 206 Home Ministry (Naimusho), 44
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Hosokawa Morihiro, 110, 115–17, 213 Hosokawa coalition cabinet, 110, 117, 124, 220 House of Councillors (HC), 52, 114, 197, 202 House of Representatives (HR), 52, 54, 56, 110, 114, 202 Hu Jintao, 8, 214–15, 217 Huludao, 49–50, 57 Ide Magoroku, 17, 45–6, 50, 51, 83, 143, 190, 214 ijime (school bullying), 152–3 Ikeda Hayato, 58 Ikeda cabinet, 219 Ikeda Kentaro, 22–3 Ikeda Masanosuke, 54 Ikeda Sumie (Xu Ming), 139, 147, 152–3, 162, 178, 200, see also Xu Ming (Ikeda Sumie) Imai Isamu, 113 Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, 103, 115, 203, 207 deportation of illegal immigrants, 155, 156–7 offenders, 151 Immigration Control Bureau, 80, 86–7, 90–1 Imperial General Headquarters (IGH), 11, 17–20, 45–7, 169 General Staff War Council Division, 17, 20 Supreme War Council, 20 Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), xii, 4–5, 7, 12–13, 117–18, 168–9, 193, 197, 200–1, 206 Inner Mongolia, 57, 62 Inomata Masaru, 28–9, 76–7, 94 Institute to Assist Repatriation, 42–3 International Red Cross (IRC), 52 Inukai Tsuyoshi and his cabinet, 12 Ishikawa Tatsuzo, 14 Ishiwara Kanji, 12 Iyasaka village settlement, 15
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Index
Japan Bar Association, 113–14 Japan-China Federation on Issues Concerning the Orphans, 75, 93, 98, see also Gunji Hiko Japan-China Friendship Association, 52–3, 56, 79 Japan-China Friendship Bridge Society, 75–6, 80, 87, see also Yamamoto Jisho Japanese orphans left behind in China definition of, 1–2, 128 identified orphans, 76, 80–2, 91–2, 94, 96, 98, 105, 107–8, 209 repatriation of, see repatriation of Japanese orphans from China unidentified orphans, 63, 81–2, 87, 102, 106–7, 108, 111, 180, 181, 209 Japanese women left behind in China, 97, 105, 114, 115–28, 140, 155, 173–5, 185–8, 199–200 definition of, 2, 115, 128, 174–5 repatriation of, see repatriation of Japanese women from China Japan National Detainees Association, 45 Japan Peace Liaison Council, 52–3 Japan Red Cross, 5, 52–3, 210 Japan-Soviet relations Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration, 59, 219, see also Hatoyama Ichiro Japan-Soviet Neutrality Pact, 17, 19 Northern Territories issue, 5–6 Japan War Bereaved Families Association, 167, 196 Jiamusi, 15, 28, 37, 68, 118, 139, 143 Jiang Zemin, 6, 215, 220 Jianzhen (Ganjin), 215–16 Johnson, Chalmers, 51 Kainuma Yoji, 21 Kanagawa Welfare Association to Assist the Repatriates from China, 109, 165, 175, see also Sugawara Kosuke Kaneko Fumio, 141 Kato Kanji, 12, 16 Kato Kiyofumi, 46 Kawai Hiroyuki, 91, 103, 162
Kentoshi (Imperial Japan’s emissary to Tang dynasty China), 215–16 Khabarovsk, 20 Khmer Rouge, 42 Kim Hyon-hui (Hachiya Mayumi), 169–70 kimin (people abandoned by government) policy, 14, 202, 204 Kim Jong-il, 170 Kinoshita Takao, 80, 108, 111–12, 171, 208, 211–12 Kishi Nobusuke, 55–7, 58, 73, 198 Kishi cabinet, 56–7, 58, 59, 73, 112, 210, 219 Kissinger, Henry, 59 Kobai-no-kai (Red Plum Society), 141, see also Murakami Yoneko Koizumi Jun’ichiro, 6–7, 166, 170, 196, 202 Koizumi cabinet, 220 Kojima Fumiko Incident, 86–7, 102 Konoe cabinet (first), 13, 16 Kono Yohei, 197 “Kono statement,” 197 Kora Tomi, 52 Korea, see North Korea, South Korea Korean Airlines Flight 858 bombing, 170 “Korean residents in Japan,” 104, 153 Korean War, 2, 50, 65, 76, 122 Korea Red Cross, 210 Kosha settlement, 22–3, 30–1 Kunitomo Tadashi, 120–1, 123–4 Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT), 46–9, 58 KMT Army, 44, 48–9, 118 Kuril Islands, 43, 206, 210 Kwantung Army, xi, 11–13, 15, 17–25, 29–30, 33, 35, 37–8, 45–7, 49, 77–8, 83, 89, 122, 168–9, 173, 177, 188, 205–6 Kyuma Fumio, 198 labor reform camp, 68, 69 Law Concerning Promotion of Smooth Repatriation and Assistance to SelfSufficiency After Permanent
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Repatriation of the Japanese Left Behind in China and Others, 109–11, 124, 148, 159, 161, 165, 171, 174, 182, 208, 220 revision of, 199–200, 209, 221 Law to Assist the Victims of the North Korean Abductions, 170–1 legal alien (repatriates’ status), 80, 85–6, 103, 111–12, 114, 115, 148, 177, 208, 211, 214 Liao Chengzhi, 55 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 3, 110, 167, 188, 193, 196–8, 202, 213, 217 Li Dequan, 52 Liu Shaoqi, 69 LT trade agreement, 55, 219 MacArthur, Douglas, 42 Manchukuo, 1, 11–13, 15, 16, 18–19, 24–5, 33, 46, 47, 78, 79, 168–9, 183 Manchukuo Army, 24–5, 46, 47, 64, 168–9 Manchuria-Mongolia Settlement (Missions), 15, 74–5, 83, 173, 181, 191, 201, 202, 205 Young Women’s Volunteer Corps, xxi, 22, 38 Youth Volunteer Corps, 2, 16, 17, 25, 38, 75, 121 Youth Volunteer Corps Training School, 16 Youth Volunteer Reserve Corps, 17 Manchurian Incident (September 18 Incident), 11, 13, 70 Manchurian Medical University, 175 Manchurian Settlement Corporation, 37 Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 6–7, 13, see also Sino-Japanese War (second) Mashan Incident, 21–3, 34, 66, 178 Massacre of Nanking, see Rape of Nanking Massive Tokyo Air Strikes, xi, 167 Matsumura Kenzo, 55, 58 May 15 Incident, 12 military pension, 126, 167–9, 188
259
Military Pension Law, 167–9 Law to Assist the Bereaved Families of the War Wounded and the War Dead, 167 Law to Provide Special Assistance to the War Wounded, 167 Law to Provide Special Benefits to the Parents of the War Dead, 168 Law to Provide Special Benefits to the Wives of the War Dead, 167 Law to Provide Special Benefits to the Wives of the War Wounded, 167–8 Law to Provide Special Condolence Benefits to the Bereaved Families of the War Dead, 167 Special Measures Law for the Bereaved Families of the War Veterans, 167 military police (MP), 24, 77–8, 126 Ministry of Colonial Affairs (Takumusho), 12, 14–15, 71, 80 Ministry of Education, 4–5, 141, 153–4, 200–1 Ministry of Finance, 75, 112 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), 8, 19, 53, 86, 112, 182, 216 Ministry of Greater East Asian Affairs, 12 Ministry of Health and Welfare (Koseisho), 1–2, 4–5, 42–3, 48, 74–5, 79, 80–2, 90–2, 94–5, 99, 102, 105–8, 110–12, 113, 115–16, 119–20, 124, 127–8, 129–31, 133–4, 137, 139, 142, 147, 148, 149, 150, 159–62, 165–6, 176, 182, 188, 192, 196, 197–8, 199, 209 Assistance Bureau, 57, 74, 79–80, 124, 195 Repatriation Assistance Bureau, 43, 57, 74 Room in charge of the orphans and others, 128, 195 Ministry of Justice, 80, 85–6, 90–1, 94, 103–4, 106–7, 112, 115, 156–7, 199
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Index
Mishan, 36, 126, 137, 150 Miyakoshi Kisuke, 52, 54 Mizuho village settlement, 15 Mizuho Settlement Incident, 47 Morita Eiko, 64, 150 Mudanjiang, 31, 37, 69, 76, 79, 87–90, 92, 93, 95, 97 Mukden (Shenyang), 11, 43, 51, see also Shenyang Murakami Yoneko, 140–1, 146 Murayama Tomiichi, 213, 217 Murayama cabinet, 220 “Murayama statement,” 217, 220, 221 Nagano Hirohisa, 151 Nagano prefecture, 14–15, 22, 38, 70–1, 83, 85–7, 121, 139–40, 162, 181, 194 Nakagawa Tami, 119 Nakai Reiko, 63–4, 131, 149, 163 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 46 Nakasone cabinet, 220 National Compensation Law, 182, 185, 189, 202 National Council on Issues Concerning the Orphans Left Behind in China, 75, 99, 160, 165 Nationality Law 1985 revision, 149 blood principle, 86, 118, 148, 149–50 paternal principle, 118, 148, 149 naturalization applied to Japanese settlers in Manchuria, 45–7, 50, 53, 55, 57, 73, 219 naturalization forced upon Japanese repatriates from China, 85–6, 199 nekosogi doin (uprooting conscription), xi, 18, 23, 28, 35, 186, 205 Ningan, 78, 92, 93, 97, 98, 160 Nishida Rumiko, 127–8, 174 Nishimura Toshio, 20 Nitobe Inazo, 13 Nixon, Richard, 2, 58–9, 73 Nofu Yoshizo, 21
Nomonhan Incident (Battle of Nomonhan), 25 Northeast Region (former Manchuria), 1, 48–9 Northeast Region Liaison General Meeting to Save the Japanese, 47 North Korea, 4, 8, 43, 62, 205–6 “abduction of Japanese” issue, 8, 169–71, 192, 196, 197 public assistance to victims of abductions, 170–1, 190, 194 Nye, Joseph S., Jr., 218 Obuchi Keizo, 6, 220 Obuchi cabinet, 220 Oder Neisse Line, 40 “odo-rakudo” (royal paradise), 14, 18, 20, 214 Oe Kenzaburo, 201 Okinawa noto (Okinawa Note) lawsuit, 201 Okazaki Katsuo, 53 Okinawa, 5, 206, 221, see also Battle of Okinawa reversion of, 58, 219 Okumura Katsuzo, 53 Onodera Toshitaka, 176, 182, 195 Osaka Settlement Promotion Centers for the Repatriates from China, 104 Otosaka Yukiko, 185–8 Otsuji Hidehisa, 202 Ouchi Keigo, 110, 124 overseas development aid (ODA), 59 pensions private pensions (kosei-nenkin), 140, 159–60, 162, 163–5, 178, 195, 197 public pensions (kokumin-nenkin), 3, 134, 159–66, 170, 194–5, 197, 199 surcharge penalty payment, 161–2 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 65, 95 People’s Public Corporation, 92 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 2, 50–1, 52, 54–6, 60, 206, 210
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China (PRC) Red Cross, 52, 113 PRC International Trade Promotion Committee, 52, 55 PRC National Flag Desecration Incident, 56, 219 people’s trials, 62, 63, 68, 70, 122 People’s Voting Law, 198 Peru; Japanese immigration to, 13, 202–4 pogrom, 39, 206 “political reformation” (1993), 110, 117 posttraumatic depression syndrome (PTDS), 207 Potsdam Agreement, 40–1 Potsdam Declaration, 19, 44 prisoners of war (POWs), 46, 48, 52, for Japanese POWs in Siberia, see under Siberia public assistance, see seikatsu-hogo Pusan (Busan), 24 Pu Yi, xix, 11, 46, 168 Pyongyang, 24, 46, 170 Qing Dynasty, 11, 13 Qiqihar, 86–7, 119, 125 Rape of Nanking, 122, 213 “reactive state” model, 102 “receiver” system, 101, 106–9, 110, 111–12, 114, 116–17, 126, 131, 135, 137, 142, 181, 220 “special receiver” system, 108–9, 110, 116–17, 120, 124, 125–7, 130, 138, 165, 220 Red Guards, 70, 89 reeducation labor camp, 64, 69 repatriation of Japanese orphans from China permanent repatriation, 3, 63, 85, 86, 101–5, 107, 137, 138–9, 140–2, 209, 224 temporary homecoming, 105–6, 139 repatriation of Japanese POWs from Siberia, see under Siberia repatriation of Japanese women from China
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permanent repatriation, 79, 116, 119–20, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 140, 209, 224 temporary homecoming, 55, 79, 93, 118, 119–20, 123, 125, 187, see also Tianjin Agreement Republic of China (ROC), 2, 51, 55, 56 “reverse immigration,” 202–4 Ryokufu-kai, 52 Saima Takashi, 107, 139–40, 181 Saito Rokuro, 45 Sakhalin Island, 42–4, 205–6, 209–10 Japanese and Koreans left behind on, 43 repatriation of Japanese and Koreans from, 209–10 sakoku (seclusionist) mentality, 154, 204 San Francisco Peace Treaty, 50–1, 219 San Francisco system, 51 Sato Eisaku, 58 Sato cabinet, 58, 219 Sato Kyoko, 64–5, 135–6, 180 Schieffer, John Thomas, 197 school bullying, see ijime search missions for orphans’ kin in Japan by Japanese government cancellation of, 81, 101, 211, 220 regular missions, 1–3, 61–2, 74, 77, 80–1, 90, 91, 95, 98, 101, 107–8, 112, 115, 135, 137, 139, 147, 149, 178, 194, 211, 220, 221 supplementary missions, 3, 62, 81–2, 220, 222 seikatsu-hogo (“public assistance” or welfare benefits), 125, 126–7, 133–6, 140, 146, 159, 162–6, 173, 175–6, 178, 180, 194, 208 Self-Defense Agency, 198 Self-Sufficiency Training Centers for the Repatriates from China, 127, 131–3, 137, 146 seshu-giin (hereditary parliamentarian), 198 Shanghai Communiqué, 59 Shenyang, 49, 64, 126, see also Mukden
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Index
Index
Shima Kiyoshi, 36–7, 69–70, 137–8, 165, 181–2 Shimazu Tadatsugu, 52 Shimizu Hiroo, 86, 162 Shimizu Sayuri, 54 Shinoda Kinji, xxii, 70–1 Shinshu, see Nagano prefecture Shinshu dialect, 31, 76, 138 Shun’yo-kai (Spring Light Society), 120–1, 123, 126, see also Kunitomo Tadashi Siberia, 43, 70, 119, 168 internment of Japanese in, 2, 20, 43, 46, 59, 70, 74, 89, 105, 187 repatriation of Japanese POWs from, 59, 74, 89, 97, 105, 187, 219 see also apan-Soviet Joint Declaration Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations normalization of diplomatic relations, 9, 51, 65, 73, 79, 85, 89, 95, 97, 105, 118, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 128, 135, 178, 209, 211, 219 seirei keinetsu (politically cold, economically hot) relations, 6 Sino-Japanese Joint Declaration, 58, 193, 219 Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty, 2–3, 8, 73, 78, 207, 211, 219 Sino-Japanese private-sector trade agreement, 51 first agreement, 52 second agreement, 54 third agreement, 55 Sino-Japanese War first Sino-Japanese War, 13, 16 second Sino-Japanese War, 7, 13, 16, 27, 210 Sino-U.S. rapprochement, 51, 73 Social Welfare Bureau, 134–6, 166 Society for the Repatriates from China, 122–3, 151, 173–4, see also Suzuki Noriko Society to Assist the Orphans Left Behind in China to Acquire Nationality, 103
Society to Thank China and Foster Parents, 165–6, 182, see also Aimoto Rei South Korea, 4, 42, 48, 76, 103–4, 210 South Manchuria Railway Company, 11, 16, 24, 47, 65, 86–7 Soviet Army invasion of Manchuria, xi, 1, 17–19, 23, 25, 27, 31–3, 36–7, 41, 46, 70, 87, 95, 117, 119, 121, 171, 180, 186, 206 Soviet declaration of war against Japan, 16–19, 191 Special Measures Law Concerning the Un-Repatriated, 56–7, see also Wartime Death Decree “special receiver” system, see under “receiver” system “subordinate independence,” 51, 54–5, 59 Sudetenland, 40 Sugano Ranko, 146, 179 Sugawara Kosuke, 77–8, 89, 91, 102–3, 109, 137, 166, 175–7, 181, 183 Sun Shijian, 104 Support and Exchange Centers for the Repatriates from China, 124, 129, 132–3 Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), 42, 51 General Headquarters (GHQ), 42, 48, 167 Suzuki Noriko, 32–4, 121–3, 173–4, 185, 187–8 Suzuki Takao, 94, 113 Suzuki Tsuneo, 176, 200 Taguchi Yaeko (Lee Eun-hye), 169–70 Taiwan, 16, 42, 44, 58–9 Taiwanese in Manchuria, 16, 46, 87 Taiwan Strait Crisis (second), 210 Takahashi Etsuko and Noriko, 95–6 Takahashi Hideya, 92–4, 105, 140, 151–2 Takahashi Korekiyo, 112 Takahashi Sadako, 209
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Takano Tsuneko and Yasuyuki, 97–8 Takasaki Tatsunosuke, 47, 55, 58 Takayama Sumiko, 30–1, 79 Takegawa Hideyuki, 76, 87, 142 Takekoshi Rie, 116, 117–18, 123–4, 126 Tamamoto Masaru, 218 Tanaka Bunji, 36, 68–9, 136–7, 164–5, 181 Tanaka Kakuei, 58–9, 74, 110 Tanaka cabinet, 219 Tanaka Makiko, 110 Tanaka Toshiko, 32, 62–3, 179–80 Tanemura Sako, 17 “textbook issue,” 4, 5, 81, 101, 200–1, 211, 220, 221, see also Battle of Okinawa Tianjin, 51, 87 Tianjin Agreement (1956), 55, 58, 119–20, 183, 219 Tian Lizhi, 150–1 Togo Shigenori, 44 Tojo cabinet, 16 Tokorozawa Settlement Promotion Centers for the Orphans Repatriated from China, 106, 124, 130–4, 137, 138 Tokyo Bar Association, 94, 113–14 Tomiya Kaneo, 12–13 Tonghe, 28–9, 76, 118 Tonghua, 18, 24 “Toyo heiwa” (peace in the Orient), 14 Truman, Harry, 39, 48–9, 51, 54 United Nations, 2 General Assembly, 217 Japan’s admission to, 55, 59 Security Council, 55 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 42, 207 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 39 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 116
263
uprooting conscription, see nekosogi doin U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), 50 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 50, 208 U.S.-China-Soviet strategic triangle, 2, 9, 73, 211 U.S. Immigration Act (1924), 13 Asian Exclusion Act, 13 National Origins Act, 13 U.S.-Japan alliance, 2, 59, 210 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, 50, 55–6, 59, 219, 220 Utsumi Tadashi, 34–5, 66–7, 105–6, 163–4, 178 Vietnamese refugees, 41–2, 104, 207, 216 Vietnam War, 41–2, 73, 207 Vladivostok, 121 Wakatsuki Reijiro and his cabinet, 11 war brides to the continent (Manchuria), 117–18, 186 war reparations of Japan, 44–5, 51, 59, 193 “wartime dead” designation, 57–8, 73–5, 97, 112, 115, 171, 177–8, 180, 208, 210, 219 Wartime Death Decree, 56–7, 85, 101, 139, 183, 219 Watanabe Kozo, 102 welfare benefits, see seikatsu-hogo (“public assistance” or welfare benefits) Wen Jiabao, 8 Xinjing (Changchun), 16, 17, 19–20, 24, 25, 31–2, 33, 37, 43, 45, 47, see also Changchun Xu Ming (Ikeda Sumie), 79, 87–92, 139, see also Ikeda Sumie (Xu Ming) Xu Ming Incident, 87–91, 102, 152
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Index
Index
Yamada Otozo, 17–18, 20, 25 Yamada Yoshimi, 31–2 Yamagata prefecture, 38, 187 orphans/settlers from, 125, 187, 209 Yamagata dialect, 187 Yamamoto Jisho, 74–6, 142, 176 Yamazaki Hiroshi, 213 Yamazaki Toyoko, 69, 136–7 Yanagisawa Hakuo, 191, 194, 195 Yan Yi, 212 Yasukuni Shrine issue, 6, 218, 220 goshi ( joint honoring) of Class-A war criminals at, 3–4
politicians’ offerings and visits to, 6–8, 196–7, 198, 199, 213, 220, 221 Yasuoka branch village settlement, xx, xxi, 70–1 Yokota Megumi, 170 Yoshida Shigeru, 51, 54 Yoshida cabinet, 51–2, 54, 219 Yoyogi Olympic Memorial Youth Center, 1, 77, 91 Zhou Enlai, 59, 187 Zhu Rongi, 6
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