Japan creates organisation to recover remains of those killed in second world war
Organisation created to find and bring back remains of those killed during second world war
Japan is to create an organisation charged with recovering the remains of more than 1.1 million military personnel and civilians killed during the second world war, although critics have raised questions over the timing of the project.
The proposal was revealed last week by the deeply conservative Yomiuri newspaper and coincided with a visit by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, built in 1959 to serve as the last resting place for the remains of unidentified Japanese repatriated from battlefields overseas.
Alongside Prince Akishino and his wife, Princess Kiko, Abe attended a ceremony for the interment of the remains of 2,498 soldiers killed in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Russia.
The ceremony brought the total number of dead interred at the Tokyo cemetery to 362,570 - but that is a fraction of those who died in Soviet prison camps in Siberia, remote Alaskan islands, the interior of China and the jungle-clad islands of the Pacific.
"Seventy years after the war, the remains of many Japanese war dead still have not been recovered and repatriated," a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare said.
"Based on the feelings of ageing members of the bereaved families, we believe the recovery work should be accelerated," said the official, a member of the Planning Division of Recovery of the Remains of War Dead.