Table Of ContentAbandoned Japanese in Postwar
Manchuria
This book relates the experiences of the zanrynj-h ǀjin – the Japanese civilians,
mostly women and children, who were abandoned in Manchuria after the end of
the Second World War when Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria ended and most
Japanese who had been based there returned to Japan. Many zanrynj-h ǀjin survived
in Chinese peasant families, often as wives or adopted children; the Chinese gov-
ernment estimated that there were around 13,000 survivors in 1959, at the time
when over 30,000 “missing” people were deleted from Japanese family registers
as “war dead.”
Since 1972 the zanrynj-h ǀjin have been gradually repatriated to Japan, often along
with several generations of their extended Chinese families, with the group in Japan
now numbering around 100,000 people. Besides outlining the zanrynj-h ǀjin’s experi-
ences, this book explores the related issues of war memories and war guilt which
resurfaced during the 1980s, the more recent court case brought by zanrynj-h ǀjin
against the Japanese government in which they accuse the Japanese government of
abandoning them, and the impact on the towns in northeast China from which the
zanrynj-h ǀjin were repatriated and which now benefit hugely from overseas remit-
tances from their former residents. Overall, the book deepens our understanding
of Japanese society and its anti-w ar social movements, while providing vivid and
colourful sketches of individuals’ worldviews, motivations, behaviours, strategies,
and difficulties.
Yeeshan Chan obtained her PhD from the University of Hong Kong and currently
works as a freelance journalist. She has published investigative journalism under
the pen name Yeeshan Yang.
Japan Anthropology Workshop Series
Series Editor:
Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University
Editorial Board:
Pamela Asquith, University of Alberta
Eyal Ben Ari, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hirochika Nakamaki, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka
Kirsten Refsing, University of Copenhagen
Wendy Smith, Monash University
Founder Member of the Editorial Board:
Jan van Bremen, University of Leiden
A Japanese View of Nature Dismantling the East-W est
The world of living things Dichotomy
Kinji Imanishi; translated by Pamela Essays in honour of Jan van Bremen
J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Edited by Joy Hendry and
Yagi and Hiroyuki Takasaki; edited Heung Wah Wong
and introduced by Pamela J. Asquith
Pilgrimages and Spiritual Quests
Japan’s Changing Generations in Japan
Are young people creating a new Edited by Maria Rodriguez del Alisal,
society? Peter Ackermann and
Edited by Gordon Mathews and Dolores Martinez
Bruce White
The Culture of Copying in Japan
The Care of the Elderly in Japan Critical and historical perspectives
Yongmei Wu Edited by Rupert Cox
Community Volunteers in Japan Primary School in Japan
Everyday stories of social change Self, individuality and learning in
Lynne Y. Nakano elementary education
Peter Cave
Nature, Ritual and Society in
Japan’s Ryukyu Islands Globalisation and Japanese
Arne Røkkum Organisational Culture
An ethnography of a Japanese
Psychotherapy and Religion corporation in France
in Japan Mitchell W. Sedgwick
The Japanese introspection practice
of Naikan
Chikako Ozawa-d e Silva
Japanese Tourism and Travel Home and Family in Japan
Culture Continuity and transformation
Edited by Sylvie Guichard-A nguis and Edited by Richard Ronald and
Okpyo Moon Allison Alexy
Making Japanese Heritage Abandoned Japanese in Postwar
Edited by Christoph Brumann and Manchuria
Robert A. Cox The lives of war orphans and wives
in two countries
Japanese Women, Class and the Yeeshan Chan
Tea Ceremony
The voices of tea practitioners in
northern Japan
Kaeko Chiba
Abandoned Japanese in
Postwar Manchuria
The lives of war orphans and wives in
two countries
Yeeshan Chan
First published 2011
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2011 Yeeshan Chan
The right of Yeeshan Chan to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Chan, Yeeshan.
Abandoned Japanese in postwar Manchuria : the lives of war orphans and
wives in two countries / Yeeshan Chan.
p. cm. — (Japan anthropology workshop series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945—China—Manchuria. 2. Sino-Japanese
War, 1937-1945—Personal narratives, Japanese. 3. Japanese—
China—Manchuria. 4. Orphans—China—Manchuria. 5. Abandoned
children—China—Manchuria. 6. Abandoned wives—China—Manchuria.
7. China—Ethnic relations. 8. Manchuria (China)—History. I. Title.
DS777.533.C47C47 2010
951.04’2—dc22 2010021606
ISBN 0-203-83933-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 978-0 -4 15-5 9181-2 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0 -2 03-8 3933-1 (ebk)
Contents
Foreword ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Japanese word list xiv
Chinese word list xv
Individual informant list xvi
Family informant list xviii
Prologue: who are they? xix
1 Approaches to the study of zanrynj-h ǀjin 1
PART I
Structures: zanryū-h ōjin acting passively in response to social
changes 15
2 Zanrynj-h ǀjin within the flow of historical change 17
3 Personhoods formed in rural Northeast China 32
4 Repatriation since 1972 47
PART II
Families: relationships within zanryū-h ōjin families over a
transnational space 63
5 Three family accounts 65
6 Family in transition 82
7 Generational tensions and personhoods developed in Japan 93
viii Contents
PART III
Negotiation: strategies for betterment 109
8 Qiaoxiang practices and profiting from kinship 111
9 Volunteerism and activism 132
10 Conclusion: to what extent have they transformed? 151
Appendices 163
Notes 166
Bibliography 170
Index 181
Foreword
When Japan annexed Manchuria in the 1930s it was seen as a great opportunity for
expansion and utilization of the area’s abundant natural resources. Subsequently,
large numbers of Japanese civilians were recruited to settle there in small villages
in a similar pattern to the way Hokkaido had been successfully colonized some
80 years earlier. However, the colonization of Manchuria lasted only a little over
a decade before Japan’s grand war adventure collapsed. In 1945 Soviet soldiers
entered Manchuria, and the Japanese were forced to flee. Not all succeeded in get-
ting away. Many were killed and perhaps as many as 20,000 women and children
were stuck in or around the villages they had lived in. Those who did not take up
the national call for suicide in the face of defeat managed to survive by becoming
part of local Chinese peasant families by adoption or marriage or simply as extra
hands in the households.
In the years after the war, Japanese people were repatriated from the various
areas they had occupied, but the chaotic situation in China and the beginning of
the Cold War prevented any significant repatriation of the abandoned women and
children. Not until 1972 and the relaxation of China’s relationship with the US and
Japan did they get their first opportunities to visit their homeland and search for
lost kin. By this time many had thoroughly adapted to life in China, and some of
the youngest had lost all memory of Japanese life and language. Those who sought
repatriation faced a choice of moving to Japan and losing their Chinese families
or to settle for life in China.
In the 1980s, when Japan experienced a shortage of labour, immigration rules
for the abandoned war wives and orphans and their families were relaxed to allow
for import of a workforce that was at least not entirely foreign. On the Japanese
side, their repatriation was warmly supported by a strong group of volunteers and
activists who helped the newcomers settle and helped them with legal procedures
to get support and bring more family members over.
Since the 1990s the abandoned Japanese in Manchuria have played a pivotal
role in helping Chinese from North Eastern China to get to Japan, legally as well
as illegally, and the community of repatriates and immigrants had reached 100,000
in 2005.
This book describes the lives of people suspended between urban Japan and
rural Northeast China in great detail. It gives us an insight into the life politics they
