’As Japanese, we wish to live as respectable human beings’: Orphans of Japan's China war

[Modern wars always produce large numbers of orphans, nearly all from the invaded nation. Japan's China War of 1937-45 is no exception. That war generated not only hundreds of thousands of Chinese orphans, but also large numbers of orphans of Japanese and Korean settlers in Northeast China. This article examines the fate of a subgroup of orphans, the zanryu koji, who were orphaned (or separated from their relatives) soon after Japan's capitulation in 1945, and were raised by Chinese adoptive parents only to be ‘discovered’ by their Japanese families more than a quarter of a century later. In a sense, they had fallen in the cracks of the system of modern nation-states in the wake of war. The Japanese state quickly forgot them, officially declaring them dead. When the voices of zanryu koji began to reach Japan in the mid-1970s, however, the Japanese State and many people were forced to reflect anew on the enormity of the last war that had deprived not only tens of millions of Chinese of their lives and hopes, but also on the fate of the zanryu koji bereft of their nationality and even identities.