Hitomi Shibazaki remembers being stunned when she found her grandmother's name in a poem in her textbook during a Japanese language class at her junior high school.
The poem, titled "Bowing Person," was accompanied by a photo of Liu Guiqin in March 1985, bowing deeply at Narita airport, before boarding a return flight to China.
Liu had visited Japan along with other war-displaced Japanese — who, as children, were left behind in China in the aftermath of World War II — to find relatives. She found none, but bowed in the photo to show her gratitude to the people who had helped her search.