War Orphans Return : In Japan, Bittersweet Reunions

The last time Mieko Akiyama saw her brother Yosuke was on Aug. 13, 1945, when they were among the Japanese settlers fleeing in horse-drawn carts from Soviet troops in northern China.

Suddenly, out of the mist, Soviet tanks opened fire. Mieko and her mother fled into the hills. Yosuke, who was 6 years old at the time, wandered alone for a month before reaching a refugee camp and being returned to Japan.

“I didn’t think anyone else had survived,” Yosuke, now a taxi driver in a small town south of Tokyo, said when he and his sister were reunited the other day.

Mieko, whose name is now Lin Yarong, said nothing. She speaks only Chinese.

Mieko, only 2 when the Japanese settlers tried to flee China at the end of World War II, was rescued by Chinese coal miners from her mother, who in a fit of despair had tried to strangle her before taking her own life. The miners gave Mieko to a Chinese family.

Tearful Reunions

The tearful Akiyama reunion on national television was one of dozens taking place this month as China and Japan tie up one of the loose ends from World War II. Four decades after the war ended, there are still thousands of Japanese war orphans in China. Many of them are only now being reunited with relatives in Japan.

Since 1980, when the two wartime adversaries began to allow these reunions, 349 Japanese residents of China have found relatives here under a government-sponsored program, and another 500 have searched without success.

In coming months, the number looking for their Japanese roots is expected to rise dramatically; about 700 people, mostly middle-aged adults left behind as children in China, will arrive here by next spring.

Pioneer Villages

Like Mieko, Yosuke and their parents, these orphans were among thousands of Japanese, almost 300,000 in all, who in the years before and during World War II were sent to China. They went as volunteers, ostensibly, to establish kaitakudan, or pioneer villages, in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which the Japanese had established in 1932, the year after they invaded China.

Many Japanese were actually forced to go because there were no jobs or inheritances for them. Toward the end of the war, the Japanese government also ordered to the kaitakudan people who had lost their houses in air raids.

In the last days of the war, in 1945, many of the settlers were killed by Soviet or Chinese troops. Others managed to make it back to Japan, but others, especially children, were left behind.

Some Children Sold

In some cases, children were sold and grew up as servants in Chinese households. Others found homes with Chinese foster parents, who treated them like members of the family, and grew up never knowing that they were Japanese.

Since the war, many of these war orphans have written to the Japanese Embassy in Peking and to officials in Japan in an effort to find their families in Japan. Some were successful, and 288 of the orphans have chosen to emigrate to Japan, most with their own spouses and children.

But, for many more, the search has not been easy. Until last year, neither government actively encouraged the reunions, and China, in fact, appeared to keep the emigration of orphans to a minimum.

Not All Return

Also, not all the orphans are willing to rejoin their Japanese families. According to Iwao Iyoriya, chairman of the National Council on Orphans Left in China, “there are many who were well taken care of by their foster parents (and want to remain by their side). Others have risen to high positions in China” and have no desire to leave permanently.

Those who have searched for their roots have found, in many cases, that the people who might be able to identify them have died. Of those still alive, some are reluctant to come forward because they do not wish to get involved in a situation that could be costly for them if they end up supporting an entire family of immigrants from China. And some parents who survived have such a strong sense of shame over abandoning their children that they will not speak up.

Neither government has been particularly generous. Since Peking and Tokyo signed the Cabinet-level agreement dealing with the orphans, in 1980, the Chinese have allowed orphans to visit Japan, but until last year they limited such visits. Chinese officials apparently feared that if large numbers emigrated, the Chinese government would have to take on the expense of supporting their abandoned foster parents.

Japan Pays Pensions

Last year, the Japanese authorities agreed to take on a share of this expense, in essence paying a pension of $50 to the foster parents left behind. Chinese cooperation improved then, with the government’s Public Security Bureau providing Japan with a list of another 700 orphans seeking relatives in Japan.

The Japanese government underwrites the cost of bringing the orphans and their immediate families to this country. It provides a resettlement allowance of about $830 per person--half that for the minor children of the orphans. And it has set up a center, about an hour from Tokyo by commuter train, with housing and a cafeteria, where the orphans can study the Japanese language.

The Japanese government also gives the orphans an opportunity to appear on the government television network so that they can find long-lost relatives, and it encourages employers to hire the orphans by subsidizing 30% of their first-year earnings.

Critics Want More

In all, the Japanese government will spend about $2 million on behalf of the orphans this year, but some critics think it is not nearly enough.

The magazine Asahi Journal recently accused the government of treating the orphans as kimin (expendables). And members of orphans’ organizations have suggested that the government should pay for transporting aged relatives to Tokyo for reunions and underwrite the $500 blood tests often needed to prove a family connection.

The attention paid the orphans has inspired some investigative journalism, none of it flattering to the Japanese army or to the parents of some orphans.

One magazine charged that, during the settlers’ withdrawal from Manchuria in 1945, Japanese army officers used the settlers as “scarecrows” against the Soviet troops. Unknown to the settlers, it said, the Japanese army withdrew into an area around three cities and left the kaitakudan pioneer villages out of its defense perimeter.

Mass Suicides Reported

A history published by survivors of the kaitakudan documents about 50 incidents of mass suicide and a dozen massacres during the withdrawal, which together resulted in the deaths of nearly 10,000 people in less than two months. The incident that Mieko and her brother survived took the lives of 465.

Not all the massacres were the work of the enemy. At some kaitakudan, according to survivors’ accounts, the settlement leaders asked the Japanese soldiers to kill the children so that the adults could get away more quickly.

In 1983, a scar helped her Japanese relatives identify Yasuko Obatawho, who had spent the previous 37 years as Wang Shuming in Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province.

“It is Yasuko, for sure,” said her 64-year-old mother, stroking the scar tissue on her daughter’s neck. Yasuko was among a group of children bayoneted by Japanese soldiers during the settlers’ withdrawal.

Emotionally Wrenching

Such incidents have made reunions emotionally wrenching for some. Many parents are known to be reluctant to appear with their children on television out of a sense of shame. Japanese newspapers, which publish lists of orphans being interviewed by people who may be their relatives, place special marks by the names of those who are meeting in private.

The orphans, too, confess to having complicated feelings toward those who abandoned them.

“When they make their appeals on television asking relatives to come forward, the orphans say they understand the conditions that forced their parents to give them up,” said Fumiko Yamamura, a social worker who lost a son while fleeing China. “But privately, many orphans admit that they can never completely forgive their parents for having left them behind.”

However, Yamamura and other volunteers working with the orphans emphasize that lately it is not so much emotional complications as financial problems that prevent people from claiming their long-lost relatives.

First Week Is ‘Paradise’

Kaname Harada, who runs one of the returnee organizations, said: “The first week after a reunion is paradise. Then comes the realization that the son or daughter who has come back from the dead speaks a foreign language and has a large family, and chances are they all need help in immigrating to Japan.

“It is unrealistic of the government to expect ordinary people to bear the financial burden of 40 years of separation. It was the government that sent us out there, and it is the government that should pay for our return.”

Harada said he sees a correlation between the number of orphans who find relatives--a number that is declining--and the financial burden of repatriation. In one group of orphans that came to Japan in 1982, nearly 80% were reunited with relatives, but by late last year the percentage of those locating their families had fallen below 25%.

Financial Anxieties

Harada said he knows of parents who have desperately wanted to come to Tokyo to talk to orphans but “are afraid that if they actually find a lost son or daughter, the costs of setting up such a family in Japan will have to be borne by their present children.”

Relatives have been known to object to the return of an orphan because the new arrival might cut into their prospective inheritance. According to Yamamura, there are orphans who have located probable relatives in Japan but are unable to get them to answer letters. Many have been declared dead, and without proper documentation they cannot obtain a Japanese passport.

Until last year, the only way an orphan could return from China was to find relatives in Japan willing to help. But thanks to the agreement reached last year by the Chinese and Japanese governments, those without relatives can now come, too. So far, though, only 18 in this category have been allowed to come because the center outside Tokyo can accommodate only 90 families a year.

Pace Is Slow

An official of the Ministry of Health and Welfare confirmed that the pace is slow. He said the capacity at the center is being doubled this year.

At present, there are 2,135 orphans on an official list put together by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Chinese Public Security Bureau, and about 1,000 of them are expected to want to come to Japan.

Yamamura warns that years of delay await those wishing to resettle here. She said she has agreed to sponsor an orphan who is not related to her but has been told that he must wait five years because there are others ahead of him.

“Many of the orphans are in their late 40s,” she said. “If they have to wait five or six years, they will reach an age when relocating in a new country is too difficult.”

Mistakes Sometimes Made

Because of the passage of time and other factors, mistakes have been made in the reunion process. A woman thought she was being reunited with a brother she lost in China in 1945 but learned that he was unrelated. Then the real brother turned up. She has decided to accept both.

In another case, a man arrived in Japan to find that another orphan had beaten him home. The father said he knew that the earlier arrival was not his real son but felt that he should not disturb the harmony of the family by allowing his real son to return.

Many of the orphans were so young when they were lost that they cannot remember their Japanese names, making reunions nearly impossible. One sang a Japanese nursery song on television in the hope that someone might recall having taught it to him more than 40 years ago.

Getting the News Late

Another, Tang Qienhua, told Japanese officials that he had not known until a few months ago that he was Japanese. Wang Hongde, a farmer from Liaoning province, said he came to Japan after an official from the Chinese Public Security Bureau visited him and told him to leave.

Another orphan said that officials came to him and told him to “find your relatives, move to Japan and help strengthen ties between our two countries.”

Such hopes may be a little premature. According to one Japanese government survey, 47% of the orphans who elected to settle here were still on welfare three years after their arrival.

“Language is their No. 1 problem,” said an official of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Without fluent Japanese, they cannot find jobs.

Conflicts Over Welfare

And those who have come here sometimes clash with their relatives over accepting welfare payments, among other things. The orphans, brought up under Chinese socialism, see nothing wrong in accepting money from the government. But their relatives, like many Japanese, consider welfare shameful.

Mieko Akiyama--or Lin Yarong--was apparently one of the orphans who looked around here, found her brother and decided to return to China. Now 43 and married, with two sons and a daughter, she works in the office of a state farm in Heilongjiang. Her husband works in a store.

Although she told relatives that she did not wish to live in Japan, she promised, they said, that she would learn to speak Japanese.