Bittersweet memories for Japanese war orphans after ‘last Chinese foster mother’ dies

In the final days of World War II, thousands of Japanese families fleeing Manchukuo in northeast China entrusted their children to locals

One of the last Chinese foster mothers, who had spent years living in a special facility for such families, died last week aged 98

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Young Japanese war orphans returning to Tokyo in 1946. Photo: AP

Published: 6:08pm, 6 Nov 2020Updated: 6:37pm, 6 Nov 2020

Yoshifumi Miyazaki was too young to remember his Japanese birth mother or the day she handed him over to a Chinese family in the chaotic final days of World War II.

He was one year old at the time and now, aged 75, he still does not know whether his mother or family members survived the retreat from Tokyo’s puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China and made it back to Japan. But Miyazaki does have fond memories of the woman who raised him in the suburbs of Beijing.

“These mothers raised us as their own children,” he said. “They kept us safe.”

Cui Zhirong, one of the last known surviving Chinese foster mothers to Japanese war orphans, died last week aged 98 in Changchun, Jilin Province. The news of Cui’s death revived Miyazaki’s memories of his own experiences.

“This is very sad news indeed,” he said. “I never met Cui but I know the hardships many of these families faced in the years after the war.”

In the early 1930s, the Japanese government sent about 320,000 people to Manchukuo – officially known as Manchuria. Most of them served in the military or as bureaucrats, along with businessmen and families from rural parts of Japan who were told they could help themselves to land and farm. That dream collapsed when the Soviet Union, immediately after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, revoked its pact of neutrality with Japan and invaded.

It is unclear how many people died during the retreat to port cities in the hope of boarding a ship back to Japan but thousands of families, fearing they would not survive, decided instead to entrust their young children to Chinese families.

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