Noriko Suzuki remembers with horror the last days of the second world war. The 16-year-old was part of a settlement of Japanese farmers in Inner Mongolia. When the Soviet army invaded the region, on August 9, 1945, she and the other Japanese fled.
'Our leader ordered mothers to strangle their children to stop them crying and give away our location to the Soviets. They shut their eyes, wrapped their hands around their children's necks and did as they were told. As their babies went silent, the women screamed. They appeared to go insane,' she says.
Suzuki was one of 330,000-plus Japanese who were settled on 860 farms across Manchuria and Inner Mongolia from 1931 to 1945. When a Soviet army of 1.7 million troops, with 5,000 tanks and 5,300 aircraft, attacked the region, they were abandoned by their own army.
The weeks that followed were episodes from hell. Most of the young men from the settlements had been conscripted into the Japanese military, leaving the women, children and old people to fend for themselves. The men who remained attempted to resist the Soviets but they were either killed or exiled to Siberia.
Many settlers took their own lives, some in collective suicides in the schools and community halls they had built. Women feared rape by Soviet soldiers; many believed they had no country to return to. Parents who fled abandoned their children or gave them to Chinese families: 4,000 of these became the 'Japanese orphans'.
Of the Japanese farmers who had settled in the region, 80,000 died. Those who were not killed succumbed to disease, starvation or suicide. They were the victims of the ambition of their military leaders.
Suzuki was one of the thousands left behind. She took a Chinese husband and together they raised five children. In 1978, after an absence of 35 years, she returned to Japan, aged 49, and began a new life.