Reunited, by a long shot: Japanese soldier’s photo album returns to family, 74 years after his death
- After Hideo Shikata died in the Philippines in 1945, his picture album found its way to the US, where it was picked up by collector Jarat Chopra
- Decades of setbacks later, Chopra has finally found Shikata’s siblings, thanks to some sleuthing by a US group which reunites war items with their owners’ kin
When Jarat Chopra meets the siblings of Japanese soldier Hideo Shikata in Kyoto prefecture on Sunday, he knows precisely what he will say to them.
The Kenya-based lawyer will tell them he took good care of the picture album Shikata had carried into his final battle in the Philippines in 1945, and that for the last two decades, he had been trying to track the family down to return it.
He hopes its return, even after all these years, “will bring them some calm and peace”.
Chopra, 55, had amassed a collection of war items after becoming interested in battlefield mementos as a young man.
While some objects, such as helmets or pieces of military equipment, were virtually impossible to link to an individual Japanese soldier, he has nevertheless tried to reunite the most personal items with the families of soldiers. These included photographs, letters, swords, Japanese flags that a soldier’s friends and family had signed before they left for the front, and “sen nimbari” – or waist bands that 1,000 people contributed a single stitch to and were considered a good-luck charm.