A group of 54 Japanese citizens, all now orphans, on Monday paid a visit to the graves of their adoptive Chinese parents in Fangzheng county in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. [Photo/Chinanews.com]
HARBIN -- A group of 54 Japanese citizens, all now orphans, on Monday paid a visit to the graves of their adoptive Chinese parents in Fangzheng county in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.
From 1931, the Japanese government offered incentives to its people to migrate to China's northeastern provinces, which were then illegally occupied for another decade.
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.
For those "orphans", Japan is the motherland, but China is the hometown, said Ikeda Sumie, director general of a Tokyo support group for those Japanese returned from China.
"All the adoptive parents were the same as my own. They are not buried here, but visiting these graves is a way paying tribute to my own saviors," said Ikeda Sumie.
