Efforts are under way to give a human face to Japanese casualties of World War II and immediately preceding conflicts by reading their names aloud in a new type of memorial service, despite the difficulty of identifying all individual war dead.
From the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 until the end of World War II in 1945, the government estimates the number of war dead at 3.10 million, including 2.30 million military personnel and 800,000 civilian casualties. In the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, roughly 140,000 and 74,000 people had been killed, respectively, by the end of 1945 while 188,000, including 94,000 civilians, perished in the Battle of Okinawa.
But determining the name of each military and civilian casualty is a monumental task. In many cases, there were no remains, making it impossible to investigate the circumstances behind the deaths.