For 93-year-old Kyoko Ohira, a resident of Chichijima Island in the Ogasawara chain, World War II did not end in 1945. It ended in 1968, when her ethnic Japanese school friends were at last allowed to return to the remote Pacific island.

Ohira, born in 1921 as Edith Washington, is a descendant of Western settlers on Chichijima, the largest of the Ogasawara Islands and located some 1,000 kilometers south of Tokyo.

Americans and Europeans first arrived on the island in 1830 and later became Japanese citizens after the archipelago's roughly 30 islets were internationally recognized as Japanese territory.