Nakajima grateful for Chinese kindness
Print Edition
NOW 73 and sitting in his Tokyo home, Yohachi Nakajima fights back tears when he talks about his Chinese adoptive mother and the farming village where he grew up.
He was just 3 years old when Japan 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 northeast China.
Japanese 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 expansion.
Nakajima’s father Hiroshi was among those drawn to northeast China, but 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,” said Nakajima. “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 center 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.
After Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender, the situation for Japanese migrants trapped in northeast 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 or sickness and some were even killed by fellow Japanese. It is not known 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.
Sun 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 spoke just once with his adoptive mother after that when during a trip to China he acted as an interpreter on a cultural exchange.
The country, by then in the grip of the “cultural revolution (1966-76),” was largely closed to foreigners.
Nakajima only made brief contact by phone with his adoptive mother — who could only shout “Lai Fu! Lai Fu!” before the call was cut off.
The two never talked again and Sun Zhenqin died in 1975.
Tokyo’s efforts to repatriate those left behind in China only began several years after 1972, when it normalized diplomatic ties with Beijing.
In 1959 Japan declared that nearly 20,000 Japanese left overseas since the war were dead or did not intend to return .
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.
“What if the situation had been the other way around? I wonder if the Japanese would have acted the same way.”
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