Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria ― Forgotten Victims of World War II

Japanese war orphans left behind in Manchuria at the end of World War II are forgotten victims of the war. These 5,000 children were trapped in the strained postwar Sino-Japanese relationship, grew up in China, were bullied as “little Japanese demons,” and then were persecuted as “Japanese spies” during the Cultural Revolution. They experienced every imaginable human atrocity: they were shot or stabbed with bayonets, witnessed group rape, massacres, and mass suicide, became displaced persons in an enemy country, and lost their identities. They endured what the American soldiers and the Guantanamo Bay Prison inmates combined encountered--near fatal injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, interrogations, and torture. Upon delayed repatriation four decades later, they were despised as “Chinese” in their homeland. This original book demonstrates that they are another group of victims of Japanese militarism, in addition to the Chinese and Korean “comfort women” and forced laborers. The orphan issue is an integral part of the Japanese government’s war responsibility.

Mayumi Itoh is a former professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has also taught at Princeton University and Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Globalization of Japan: Japanese Sakoku Mentality and U.S. Efforts to Open Japan (1998), The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership Through the Generations (2003), and contributed chapters to Gilbert Rozman, Japan's Response to the Gorbachev Era, 1985-1991: A Rising Superpower Views a Declining One (1992) and to Ronald J. Hrebenar’s Parties and Politics in Contemporary Japan: The Post Koizumi Era (forthcoming). She has extensively written on Japanese foreign policy and domestic politics in Acta Slavica Iaponica, Asian Survey, Halcyon, Orbis, Pacific Review, Popular Culture Review, Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI) Working Papers, etc.