Japanese Emperor Akihito meets children of Tokyo’s second world war soldiers during Vietnam visit

Japan’s royal couple on Thursday listened to the tearful stories of Vietnamese children who were abandoned by their Japanese soldier fathers after the second world war, a symbolic meeting in Hanoi aimed at healing wounds between the former war foes.

The 83-year-old Japanese emperor Akihito and his wife, Michiko, are on their first visit to Vietnam, the latest in a series of trips to former battlegrounds.

The elderly couple shook hands and comforted more than a dozen children of the some 700 Japanese military men who decided to stay in Vietnam for a decade after their country’s defeat in the second world war. It was under Akihito’s father Hirohito that Japan first sent troops into Vietnam in 1940 when the country was a colony of France.

After the war many of the soldiers stayed on, married Vietnamese women and began raising families as they helped revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh secure independence from Paris, a little-known chapter of the two countries shared histories.

But they were ordered to leave the country in 1954 and “encouraged” by the Vietnamese government to leave their families behind, said Hatsuhisa Takashima, the emperor’s press secretary.

“It might be possible that Vietnamese authorities thought that it was not good for Vietnamese people to jump to a quite new environment,” he said.

The half-Japanese children left behind often endured painful ostracisation at home, while their mothers struggled to raise families on their own and were criticised for cosying up to the former occupying forces.