The bond: Japanese war orphans and their Chinese parents. 'Children of The Aggressor': The Japanese War Babies Adopted by China

[beijingwalker]

The bond: Japanese war orphans and their Chinese parents. 'Children of The Aggressor': The Japanese War Babies Adopted by China
Updated 20:14, 18-Sep-2021

When Xu Shilan was little, she asked her father which date she was born on after seeing other kids celebrate their birthdays. Her father paused, then uttered, "July 20 is your lunar birthday."

Years later she learned that July 20 on the lunar calendar is in fact August 15 in the year of 1945, the day Japan surrendered to the Allies, bringing an end to WWII. She recounted this childhood memory, sitting on her bed in a cozy bungalow opening to a backyard studded with mottled pots of flowers.

We made the visit to her home in the northeastern Chinese town of Fangzheng, 120 miles away from the capital city of Harbin in Heilongjiang Province. Upon arriving, she was already waiting for us, dressed in a claret-red coat and her neatly combed jet black hair, which her daughter said she had helped dye. It's hard to tell her exact age from her wrinkled face and diminishing hearing, yet she was able to articulate her thoughts clearly. She believes she's 80 years old, but there's no way to be sure, since her father had her age set at 19 in the year she got married.

She'd lived a peaceful life with her family – a loving husband and three children – until one day in the year 2000 when she came across a man who was surprised to see her and asked, "Why are you still in town? They've already gone back to Japan." That statement made her realize why she had been called "little Jap" by neighboring kids when she was little.

The man turned out to have handed her over to her foster parents in the final days of WWII. At the time, he encountered a feeble Japanese woman in the street who had begged him to take care of her baby girl. A poor 19-year-old himself, he couldn't afford to raise a child and hence went searching for a kindhearted family to take her in. Finally the toddler, groaning with fever and pain, was rescued by a young couple. "Your foster father repeatedly warned me against telling that you are a Japanese orphan," the man told Xu, a promise that he kept for over half a century.

A map shows the Japanese settlements after the Japanese invasion in northeast China started on September 18, 1931. Photo taken at the September 18th History Museum in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, April 26, 2021. Qi Jianqiang/CGTN

In those days of turmoil following the war that had begun with the Japanese invasion on September 18, 1931, Chinese foster families chose to keep secret their adoption of Japanese children, afraid that a target would be painted on the backs of these young lives. After all, they were the children of the enemy.

Sun Yuqin, who lives a 30-minute drive away from Xu, only came to know that she's Japanese when her foster mother was dying in 1968.

"When I was seven, a neighbor – a Japanese woman known as a 'stranded war wife' – told me I'm Japanese. I ran home seeking confirmation from my mother. My mother said, 'No, you are definitely Chinese'," Sun, now 76, told us. Unlike Xu, she knew how old she was because she was born in her foster parents' home.

In the days shortly before Japan's defeat, Sun's biological mother was about to give birth and hid along with her father in a cornfield behind what was back then her Chinese parents' house. "My foster family found them and let them in the house since my birth mother's amniotic fluid broke in a gush. Days later, my foster mother delivered me. By then news came that Japan had surrendered and my biological parents left in spite of persuasion," Sun said. "After finding my biological parents dead in a battle, my foster family realized they must protect and bring me up."

Sun showed us the mark on her right leg – the scar of a scratch left by her birth mother, along with a brown tweed coat and a letter with their family information in it. Sun wore that coat for decades before turning it into a smaller jacket for her grandson. As for the letter, she found it in an embroidered shoe according to the clue her foster mother offered. It's now become a mess of erasures and stains after all these years.

Adopting the enemy's children
Xu and Sun are the only Japanese war orphans who are still alive in Fangzheng, the quiet, scarcely populated county in China peppered with billboards in both the Chinese and Japanese languages. The small town's complicated ties with Japan date back to September 18, 1931.

With the Japanese invasion of northeast China came an emigration program to settle 1 million Japanese households, roughly 5 million people, in northeast China over the following 20 years, as part of Japan's effort to colonize the fertile, resource-rich region. "Officials, factory managers, railway workers, and mostly, farmers, came in throngs with the creation of the puppet state known as Manchuria. First the men arrived, then the women followed, with families right behind, turning Chinese villages into Japanese communities," Meng Yueming, deputy director of the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies at the Shenyang Academy of Social Sciences, explained. "Many rural Japanese were deceived by the Japanese government at the time who had promised them a better life and land possession."

Japan sent over 380,000 agrarian emigrants, most of them living a destitute and depressed life in rural Japan. In northeastern China, they tilled the land the Japanese army confiscated from Chinese peasants and also hired Chinese as laborers. In a way, they developed sophisticated relationships with the locals, filled with a mixture of agony, hatred and sympathy. Fangzheng was home to a large number of such Japanese settlements. Xu said her foster father utterly detested them as he was badly beaten by some Japanese while working for them.

In the final years of WWII, male Japanese farmers were conscripted and became part of the Japanese army reserve to help fight its war, leaving behind women, children and the elderly.

In August 1945, Japan surrendered as the Soviet army advanced. An exodus began.

However, the Japanese government did not immediately notify the farmers. "They were afraid they would be a burden to post-war Japan, so they adopted a policy of 'abandoning emigrants'," explained Meng, who's studied the population of Japanese war orphans for years. "The low-level Japanese settlers were left to sink or swim."

After a few days of walking to rail stations or ports in the hope of returning to Japan, they were either exhausted or fell ill. Some mothers, hounded by hunger and disease, started to give up their children, starting with the youngest who couldn't walk. They either abandoned them in the hope that kindred locals would give them a chance to live or entrusted them to Chinese families. In the latter case, most mothers left a keepsake noting their name, birth, and home address in Japan, according to Meng.

There were also cases of military leaders ordering mothers to strangle their children for fear that their crying would reveal their whereabouts during the retreat. Tragedies abounded, in addition to hundreds of group suicides in the spirit of "Japanese militarism."

Incomplete statistics show more than 4,000 Japanese orphans under the age of 13 were left behind, 90 percent of them the offspring of emigrants.

In the overcast days after August 15, some 10,000 Japanese emigrants in Fangzheng tried to make their way to Harbin to catch a train back. "Cold, hungry, and trapped by Soviet soldiers, some 5,000 people died," Cao Songxian, director of Fangzheng's overseas Chinese federation, told us on the way to Xu's home. He pointed to the gun turrets and airports the Japanese built in the small county. "Babies were just crying along the dirt street, and local Chinese took them home."

Impoverished themselves, they managed to raise the children with all they could. "Everyone was living on very short commons in those tumultuous years but they'd starve themselves to feed the children," Meng said.

"My foster parents have five kids but I'm their favorite," said Sun, who has an elder sister and three younger cousins. "Every Spring Festival, I'm the only one in the family to wear new clothes while my sisters had to wear old coats and pants of mine." Moreover, she's also the only one among all the girls to have graduated from junior high, while all her sisters dropped out from elementary school. "Upon graduation, I became the first female tractor driver in Fangzheng," she exclaimed, wearing a proud look.

These Chinese parents also shielded the kids from any psychological trauma. Despite the myriad atrocities the Japanese imposed on him, Xu's foster father would take the issue up with the parents of the children who called her "little Jap." Once she got angry with her father for not allowing her to play with a kid in the neighborhood, only to learn later that he was protecting her. That was also something Liu Guizhi's foster parents would do every time she was bullied. Liu's story is more painful. She's orphaned twice – her stepfather gave her up and 13 years later her foster parents died of illness.

Letters between Liu Changmao and his Japanese sister Liu Guizhi, whose Japanese name is Keiko Matsuda. Photo taken in Liu Changmao's home in Daqing, Heilongjiang Province, April 27, 2021. Wang Xiaonan/CGTN

The three war orphans we reached out to have varied life trajectories, yet what ties them together is that they were all adopted and raised by Chinese families, married into Chinese families and don't speak good Japanese.

'China is my home, forever'
Not long after Liu was born in 1940, her father joined the Japanese emigrants to Harbin. Two years later, her biological mother eventually carried her on her back to look for her father. After a difficult journey, they were finally able to reach the settlement where her father was stationed, only to discover that he left to fight in the military. Penniless, they had to beg on the streets while they continued to look for him. One day news came that her father had died.

Her mother tied the knot again with a Japanese man who took Liu as a burden and gave her to a childless Chinese couple. "I was treated like a princess, even after my brother was born in 1947," she told us through the phone. She went back to Japan's Saitama Prefecture, her hometown, in 1990, under a repatriation program launched by both the Chinese and Japanese governments. The programs started in 1981, three years after the two countries established diplomatic ties. Liu was part of the second batch to return to Japan and took the name of Keiko Matsuda.

Japan has so far recognized 2,818 war orphans, among them 2,557 have gone back to Japan and 260 chose to stay. "Many chose to stay in China and there are also those who made it back to China after spending some time in Japan because of bias and discrimination, both conscious and unconscious," said Du Ying, director of the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences. "That part of history was basically in oblivion in the memories of many Japanese before the 1980s. So it's very difficult for the war orphans to live a decent life back in Japan."

Liu experienced a down period, taking as many part-time jobs as she could. But a tough woman, she managed to lead a happy life with her big family.

A monument dedicated to Chinese foster parents at the September 18th History Museum in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. Over 1,000 Japanese war orphans donated money to build the monument in 1999. Wang Xiaonan/CGTN

Before our trip to Fangzheng, we arrived at Daqing, known as the oil city, to visit her Chinese brother Liu Changmao who's in his 70s now. They'd written to each other a few times every month before smartphones facilitated video communication.

"We are very close. My parents died when I was only six, my Japanese sister helped bring me up when we lived at our relatives' home in Shandong," Liu Changmao said. "Stay home. COVID-19 is rampant in Japan," he told his Japanese sister before hanging up.

In Japan, Liu Guizhi and other Japanese war orphans, have been helping to improve China-Japan ties – a relationship of entanglement imbued with love and hatred. In 2009, the elderly woman went to Beijing with a delegation of Japanese orphans and sang a song written by her Chinese husband to then Premier Wen Jiabao "China is my home forever."

In times of bilateral uncertainties, the orphans served as a bridge. In 1995, an orphan built a monument to Chinese foster parents in the China-Japan Friendship Garden – a cemetery then Premier Zhou Enlai ordered to construct in the 1960s in the memory of the over 5,000 Japanese who died in Fangzheng during their retreat. In 1999, over 1,000 orphans donated money to build another monument to Chinese foster parents inside the September 18th History Museum in Shenyang. There's also a China-Japan Amity House in Changchun, built exclusively to house elderly foster parents, which has remained empty since the last foster parent there died in late 2020.

"When the war orphans decided to go back to Japan, which recorded spectacular economic growth in the '80s and '90s, all their Chinese parents showed was encouragement no matter how reluctant they were," Meng said.

Du has been studying the population of Chinese parents who adopted Japanese orphans. According to her observation, these parents would always let the children choose their own path, even though some of them did not choose to have their own kids in order to create a better environment for the children of the enemy. "Children are innocent. They are also victims to the war."

For Liu Guizhi, Xu Shilan, Sun Yuqin, and others like them, the war is still very much part of their lives. Sometimes, Xu would stare at the smallpox vaccination scar on her left arm, which is different from the one for the Chinese, and the only mark her native country has left on her.

The bond: Japanese war orphans and their Chinese parents

This is a story of how the Chinese people bringing up the children of the enemy. It's about survival, suffering and love.

news.cgtn.com

 

[beijingwalker]

Bittersweet memories for Japanese war orphans after ‘last Chinese foster mother’ dies
In the final days of World War II, thousands of Japanese families fleeing Manchukuo in northeast China entrusted their children to locals
One of the last Chinese foster mothers, who had spent years living in a special facility for such families, died last week aged 98

Published: 6:08pm, 6 Nov, 2020

Young Japanese war orphans returning to Tokyo in 1946. Photo: AP

Yoshifumi Miyazaki was too young to remember his Japanese birth mother or the day she handed him over to a Chinese family in the chaotic final days of World War II.

He was one year old at the time and now, aged 75, he still does not know whether his mother or family members survived the retreat from Tokyo’s puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China and made it back to Japan. But Miyazaki does have fond memories of the woman who raised him in the suburbs of Beijing.

“These mothers raised us as their own children,” he said. “They kept us safe.”

Cui Zhirong, one of the last known surviving Chinese foster mothers to Japanese war orphans, died last week aged 98 in Changchun, Jilin Province. The news of Cui’s death revived Miyazaki’s memories of his own experiences.

“This is very sad news indeed,” he said. “I never met Cui but I know the hardships many of these families faced in the years after the war.”

In the early 1930s, the Japanese government sent about 320,000 people to Manchukuo – officially known as Manchuria. Most of them served in the military or as bureaucrats, along with businessmen and families from rural parts of Japan who were told they could help themselves to land and farm. That dream collapsed when the Soviet Union, immediately after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, revoked its pact of neutrality with Japan and invaded.

It is unclear how many people died during the retreat to port cities in the hope of boarding a ship back to Japan but thousands of families, fearing they would not survive, decided instead to entrust their young children to Chinese families.

An estimated 6,000 people returned to Japan after it normalised diplomatic ties with Beijing in 1972. Of those, 2,500 were under the age of 12 when left behind. Japan has to date recognised 2,818 war orphans.

Japanese war orphans who sued the government in 2005 after returning from China as adults. Photo: AFP

In 1990, a Japanese businessman who managed to escape Tokyo with his family in 1945 provided funds to build the China-Japan Friendship Apartments in Changchun. The building at one time housed 30 families who had taken in Japanese war orphans and was the country’s only such facility. Cui was the last foster mother living in the flats.

In the final days of the war, Cui adopted a three-year-old Japanese orphan as her eldest daughter. In 1983, the Japanese government programme was able to confirm through blood tests that the woman was the child of a man living in Kawasaki. After being recognised as a war orphan and qualifying for financial support from the government, the woman moved back to Japan.

“I did not have any hostility towards Japanese people,” Cui said at the time. “I considered her to be my daughter and I raised her.”

Syd Duer in 1950, about five years after he had been released from the internment camp.

Miyazaki returned to Japan in 1997 under a government repatriation programme and now lives in Tokyo. The government has also attempted to connect war orphans with families who returned to Japan but Miyazaki had no success.

Miyazaki married a Japanese woman, taking her name because he did not know his own. They have two children. He works for the China Returnees Friendship Association where he helps other war orphans move to Japan and hopefully find blood relatives.

“I was sad to leave my foster mother behind in China, but I’m happy to be in Japan now,” he said, with more than a hint of Chinese still audible in his Japanese speech. “But I do wish it would have been possible to trace my real family.”

Bittersweet memories for Japanese war orphans as ‘last Chinese foster mother’ dies

In the final days of World War II, thousands of Japanese families fleeing Manchukuo in northeast China entrusted their children to locals.

www.scmp.com

 

[beijingwalker]

What kind of parents would leave thousands of their children behind in a war and just run for their own lives?

 

[beijingwalker]

'Children of The Aggressor': The Japanese War Babies Adopted by China​

WorldAgence France-PresseUpdated: August 12

This picture taken on July 14, 2015 shows Yohachi Nakajima holding a picture of his Chinese adopted parents, at his residence in Tokyo. (AFP_

Tokyo: Now 73 and sitting in his Tokyo home, Yohachi Nakajima fights back tears when he thinks of his Chinese adopted mother and the farming village he once called home -- a boy lost inside imperial Japan's crumbling empire.

He was just three years old when Tokyo surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending World War II but also leaving about 1.5 million Japanese stranded in Manchukuo, Tokyo's puppet regime in northeastern China.

Farmers, labourers and young military reserves had migrated into the region from the early 1930s, attracted by government promises of a better life as Japan marched across Asia in a brutal expansionist campaign.

Nakajima's father, Hiroshi, was among those drawn to Manchukuo, but the frontier life proved miserable and the elder Nakajima was drafted into the military just three weeks before Japan's surrender. His fate is unknown.

Ill and poverty-stricken, Nakajima's mother sought out a local family to care for her son.

"Japan was an invader for them, clearly," Nakajima, who now lives in Tokyo, told AFP.

"It must have been pure humanity that convinced them to adopt and raise me, a child of the aggressor."

The malnourished boy, stomach bulging from starvation, was brought into the centre of the village as curious locals looked on.

One woman, Sun Zhenqin, volunteered to be his guardian and soon gave her scrawny charge a new name, "Lai Fu" (good luck coming).

"She would feed me from her mouth and gently massaged my stomach," Nakajima said.

"She was a midwife. It must have been almost on impulse that she took me in."

'Pearl in the palm'

After Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender, the situation for Japanese migrants trapped in northeastern China deteriorated, with tens of thousands dying of hunger and disease as a frigid winter set in later in the year.

Some migrants-turned-refugees resorted to mass suicide, cramming into small houses that they blew up with grenades, while roving groups of sword-wielding male migrants stabbed women and children to death to end their suffering.

It is believed that just a handful of children were adopted by local families. Many others died of starvation, sickness and some were even killed by fellow Japanese out of mercy. There are no reliable statistics on how many survived.

The mother of Sun Shouxun, 58, a Chinese man who now lives in the northeastern city of Changchun, was one of those who took in a Japanese child.

He described his adopted Japanese sister as "a pearl in the palm" for his loving parents.

"Public opinion at the time was rather strong against raising a Japanese child and our relatives also opposed it, but my mother insisted on doing so," he said.

It is not known exactly how many Japanese children found new homes in China like Nakajima and Sun's sister, but Tokyo has confirmed just over 2,800.

Nakajima returned to Japan when he was 16 and afterwards spoke just once with his adopted mother, in 1966, during a trip to China when he acted as an interpreter on a cultural exchange.

However, the country, by then in the grips of the chaotic Cultural Revolution, was largely closed to foreigners and Nakajima only made brief contact by telephone with Sun who could only shout "Lai Fu! Lai Fu!" before the call got cut off.

The two never talked again and Sun died in 1975.

'No phone calls, no letters'

Tokyo's efforts to repatriate those left behind in China only began several years after 1972, when it normalised diplomatic ties with Beijing.

Children were not the only ones missing -- there were also young women who had been dispatched as "bride candidates" to marry migrants.

Fumiko Nishino, 88, was one of them, although the official reason she moved to Manchukuo, along with her two sisters, was to work as a telephone operator.

The trio eventually found passage home, but Nishino, who had twin baby girls with a Chinese soldier by that time, refused to board the ship.

"I lost contact -- no phone calls, no letters -- with my Japanese family for years and years afterwards," she said.

"When I finally returned home to Japan (in the mid-1970s) there was a grave that said I was dead at 19.

"I pushed over the gravestone and destroyed it, crying and laughing at the same time with my family."

Japan's welfare ministry said just over 4,150 women like Nishino returned home while many others make occasional visits.

Reimei Sakuma, 72, was the child of a Japanese soldier. Adopted and raised in a Chinese family, he returned to Japan in 1986 and also found his name on a gravestone raised by his Japanese relatives -- in part due to government policy.

In 1959, Japan declared that nearly 20,000 Japanese left overseas since the war -- mostly in China -- were dead or did not intend to return -- abandoning them for a second time.

"I could only feel helpless and at the mercy of two big powers," Sakuma said of his experience.

The legacy of the war still strains diplomatic ties between Tokyo and Beijing. China says more than 20 million of its citizens died as a result of Japan's invasion, occupation and atrocities.

Nakajima was one of the lucky ones. He reunited with his birth mother, who had also made it back home, and they remained close until her death at 98.

But the kindness of Sun and other villagers is one of the memories forever etched on Nakajima's mind, along with working in the fields and coming home to a steaming plate of potatoes.

"What if the situation had been the other way around? I wonder if the Japanese would have acted the same way," he said.

'Children of The Aggressor': The Japanese War Babies Adopted by China

Now 73 and sitting in his Tokyo home, Yohachi Nakajima fights back tears when he thinks of his Chinese adopted mother and the farming village he once called home -- a boy lost inside imperial Japan's crumbling empire.

www.ndtv.com

 

[beijingwalker]

Japanese orphans are in memory of their Chinese adoptive parents， Their Chinese adoptive parents had all passed away

 

[beijingwalker]

Japanese orphans are in memory of their Chinese adoptive parents， Their Chinese adoptive parents had all passed away

 

[beijingwalker]

Many China haters here in PDF always mock China about how many Chinese were killed by Japanese invaders, but we care more about how many innocent Japanese children we Chinese saved after they were abandoned by their parents after the war.

 

[epebble]

What kind of parents would leave thousands of their children behind in a war and just run for their own lives?

Sadly, this is not unique. We have a whole community of Amerasians because of Vietnam (and may be Korean) war.

Amerasian - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[beijingwalker]

Japanese citizens, who were adopted by Chinese people during World War II, mourn for adoptive parents in front of a grave in a cemetery to memorize adoptive Chinese parents in Fangzheng County near Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, July 13, 2015. A group of 54 Japanese citizens, all now orphans, on Monday paid a visit to the graves of their adoptive Chinese parents here. Abandoned by their birth parents during the hasty retreat at the end of World War II in 1945, the orphans, now over 70 years old, were taken in and raised by the very Chinese residents of those northeastern provinces who spent so many years suffering at the hands of the waifs' parents. As WWII and the War of the Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was coming to end, more than 4,000 children were simply abandoned by their fleeing parents. Most of them relocated to Japan after China and Japan normalized relations in 1972.

Ikeda Sumie, director general of a Tokyo support group for those Japanese returned from China, mourns for adoptive parents in front of a grave in a cemetery to memorize adoptive Chinese parents in Fangzheng County near Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, July 13, 2015. A group of 54 Japanese citizens, all now orphans, on Monday paid a visit to the graves of their adoptive Chinese parents here. Abandoned by their birth parents during the hasty retreat at the end of World War II in 1945, the orphans, now over 70 years old, were taken in and raised by the very Chinese residents of those northeastern provinces who spent so many years suffering at the hands of the waifs' parents. As WWII and the War of the Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was coming to end, more than 4,000 children were simply abandoned by their fleeing parents. Most of them relocated to Japan after China and Japan normalized relations in 1972.

A Japanese citizen, who was adopted by Chinese people during the World War II, lays a wreath to a grave as they visit a cemetery to memorize adoptive Chinese parents in Fangzheng County near Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, July 13, 2015. A group of 54 Japanese citizens, all now orphans, on Monday paid a visit to the graves of their adoptive Chinese parents here. Abandoned by their birth parents during the hasty retreat at the end of World War II in 1945, the orphans, now over 70 years old, were taken in and raised by the very Chinese residents of those northeastern provinces who spent so many years suffering at the hands of the waifs' parents. As WWII and the War of the Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was coming to end, more than 4,000 children were simply abandoned by their fleeing parents. Most of them relocated to Japan after China and Japan normalized relations in 1972.

Nakamura Keiko, 73, kneels on the grave of her adoptive parents and weeps as she visits a cemetery to memorize adoptive Chinese parents in Fangzheng County near Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, July 13, 2015. A group of 54 Japanese citizens, all now orphans, on Monday paid a visit to the graves of their adoptive Chinese parents here. Abandoned by their birth parents during the hasty retreat at the end of World War II in 1945, the orphans, now over 70 years old, were taken in and raised by the very Chinese residents of those northeastern provinces who spent so many years suffering at the hands of the waifs' parents. As WWII and the War of the Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was coming to end, more than 4,000 children were simply abandoned by their fleeing parents. Most of them relocated to Japan after China and Japan normalized relations in 1972.

 

[tower9]

Luckily Japanese and Chinese look the same so they could easily blend in.

 

[beijingwalker]

Sadly, this is not unique. We have a whole community of Amerasians because of Vietnam (and may be Korean) war.

Amerasian - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You invaded them, raped them and created that tragic family seperation and unwanted children, we didn't.

 

[beijingwalker]

Luckily Japanese and Chinese look the same so they could easily blend in.

You think Japanese will do the same if the shoe is on the other foot?

But the kindness of Sun and other villagers is one of the memories forever etched on Nakajima's mind, along with working in the fields and coming home to a steaming plate of potatoes.

"What if the situation had been the other way around? I wonder if the Japanese would have acted the same way," he said.

'Children of The Aggressor': The Japanese War Babies Adopted by China

Now 73 and sitting in his Tokyo home, Yohachi Nakajima fights back tears when he thinks of his Chinese adopted mother and the farming village he once called home -- a boy lost inside imperial Japan's crumbling empire.

www.ndtv.com

 

[epebble]

You invaded them, raped them and created that tragic family seperation and unwanted children, we didn't.

View attachment 959540

I am by no means justifying any of these wars. Just pointing out the consequences of wars are similar. All wars are tragic; there are no nice wars.

 

[tower9]

You think Japanese will do the same if the shoe is on the other foot?

No, the Japanese are heartless, we all know that. It's not that evident now because they are just polite and socially awkward, but their social retardation comes from the fact that they are at their core, heartless people.

 

[beijingwalker]

We Chinese can separate the monsters from the innocent

"I did hesitate a little after we learned that it was a Japanese child," said Zhang Zhilan, Ran's foster mother. "I hated the Japanese army very much. They were so atrocious, killing Chinese civilians as if they were chopping a tree. But looking at the newly born infant, I made up my mind. If I was not going to raise him, he would soon die. After all, the child was innocent."

Zhang Zhilan decided that adopting a child would not cause too much extra economic burden. The 26-year-old had got married a few years earlier but had not given birth.

But for many other foster families, which already had four, five or even more children, it did aggravate the burden.

With no exception, however, the Japanese orphans were taken good care of by their foster parents. In many circumstances they received extra attention from their foster parents.

Japanese War Orphans in China