Hideoki Ogawa vividly remembers the tears and waving flags of the Chinese soldiers and hospital staff who turned out at the port of Tiangjin near Beijing to bid farewell to his father.

It was toward the end of 1946, one year after the end of World War II in August 1945.

During the war, his father, Naohide Ogawa, a professor of dermatology at the Imperial University of Tokyo, was assigned to the task of creating the Department of Dermatology at Beijing University, where Japanese, Chinese and Korean staff worked together.