FUKUOKA (Kyodo) A large collection of wartime photos taken in China mostly by a press officer in the Imperial army has been found, his relatives said Thursday.
The seven albums of some 780 photos had been stored by Eiichi Kashihara, who died in July at the age of 95.
Kashihara is believed to have taken most of the photos himself in Hankou and its vicinity from around 1940 to 1942, when Japan was at war with China. Hankou is now part of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province.
The photos show Japanese troops marching on roads, firing at enemy forces at the front and relaxing between fighting. Shots of Chinese selling tobacco and peanuts on the street are also in the albums.
Among the albums is a photo that shows a group of soldiers placing a "mochi" rice cake on a fighter plane on New Year's Day.
A shot of a Japanese soldier holding hands with two Chinese kids is apparently aimed at spreading the propaganda of friendship with the Chinese.
Also among the albums were photos of sumo yokozuna Futabayama, popular actor Ken Uehara, and novelists Hiroshi Muneta and Juran Hisao, all of whom visited the front lines during the war to entertain Japanese troops.
Kashihara wrote his own comments on the albums, saying the soldiers were taken to China and farther the south and only soldiers could understand the bitterness of war.
Noboru Umetani, 88, a historian and professor emeritus at Osaka University, called Kashihara's wartime photos precious portrayals of the realities of war.
Umetani, a friend of Kashihara from childhood, also has experiences as a soldier of the Imperial army in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. He was taken to Siberia as a prisoner of war by the Soviet Union.
