A woman whose grandparents were saved by a Japanese vessel during the 1917 Russian Revolution spent years searching for the identity of the ship's captain and in the process has shed light on a little-known story.
Olga Molkina, 59, finally found the descendants of the captain, Motoji Kayahara of Kasaoka, Okayama Prefecture, and visited them two years ago to extend her gratitude for the assistance he gave her grandparents almost a century earlier.
"It is one of the absolutely unknown pages of relations between the two countries," Molkina said at a news conference in Tokyo in early October during her latest trip to Japan.