Japanese war babies adopted by China recount their experiences

[yuiyoshida]

by Harumi Ozawa
Aug 14, 2015

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

He was just 3 years old when Tokyo surrendered on Aug. 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, laborers and young military reservists had migrated to 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 remains unknown.

more...http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/08/14/national/history/japanese-war-babies-adopted-china-recount-experiences/#.Vc2ZgX0VjMp

[newfie11]

1. Thank you for posting this

Like many things in history, this was never taught in my schools. Sadly!!!!

[The Polack MSgt]

2. My mother in law

Was repatriated from Manchuria in 1946 - Her family had been sent there to get them out of the land they had on Honshu.
The Empire's military government did sell the story of opportunity and upward mobility to the underclass in a an attempt to have them voluntarily fill its colonies in the Korean peninsula and China.
It also used those colonies as a dumping ground for dissidents and anyone who was inconvenient to the powerful.
The Japanese Empire is presented to us as a society completely loyal and rabidly supportive of the Emperor - the phrase "worshiped as a God" seems to always pop up - but this view is not accurate.
A small elite class of militarists ran the government and used propaganda, brutality and exile to keep power.
They injected "Government Shinto" which included the concept of divine heritage of the Emperor into all "permitted religions" in an effort to give their policies moral justification. If you were deemed insufficiently loyal you would be charged with thought crimes and jailed or exiled.
Sorry if I strayed off topic

[davidpdx]

3. That is a very touching story

I am so glad he was able to find his birth mother. It is sad when people are separated from their birth parents and never get to meet them.