A local rumor about the remains of scores of Japanese soldiers having been found in a jungle cave brought 83-year-old Takashi Nagase to a western Thai province bordering Myanmar.
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| Takashi Nagase and his wife, Yoshiko, recite a Buddhist sutra before a jungle cave in a western Thai province. |
The trip was the 108th such pilgrimage for Nagase, who was first in Thailand during World War II as an Imperial Japanese Army interpreter and began his activities to recover the remains of war dead there in the late 1960s.
Serving the war dead on both sides of the conflict, he initially made the journeys mainly to pray for the souls of thousands of British, Dutch and Australian prisoners-of-war and tens of thousands of Asian laborers who died during the rush construction of the infamous Thai-Burmese Railway for the Japanese forces.
"Being in this country puts me in much higher spirits than being in Japan," said Nagase, speaking beside his wife, Yoshiko, 72, who accompanied him on his latest journey.