Japan and China recently marked 50 years since normalizing diplomatic ties, on Sept. 29, 1972. For the past half a century, the two countries have maintained a close economic relationship while periodically confronting each other or seeking closer ties politically.

Kohei Yamada, an 85-year-old resident of the town of Atsuma in southern Hokkaido, is a Japanese war orphan who was left behind in China amid the chaos of the end of World War II. He returned to Japan after the two countries normalized ties.

Yamada, who deeply appreciates the preciousness of peace, said, “I hope the two countries will not fight in the next 50 years, either, and that people will never be made war victims like us again.”

In 1942, at the age of five, Yamada, a native of Gifu Prefecture, settled with his family in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang province, in northeastern China, which was then known as Manchuria. His parents were growing vegetables for Japan’s Kwantung Army, which was occupying the region.

In early August of 1945, while his father was absent having been conscripted, Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Yamada, together with his mother and four siblings, escaped from the war-torn region and headed for Mukden, now Shenyang, which was a transit point for returning to Japan.

One day, when they were staying near Mukden station, a Chinese couple he didn’t know showed him food and beckoned him to come closer.

Exhausted by fleeing Mudanjiang, which had taken several weeks, Yamada followed the couple. He was then suddenly pushed into a car.

Anxious days continued for Yamada, then 8-years-old, being unable to understand the language the couple spoke and with no idea where he had been taken.

But the couple, who became his adoptive parents, brought him up with great care, and he soon learned to speak Chinese.

Although they were laborers and not so wealthy, they allowed him to study at a local university.

“People around me knew I was born to a Japanese family, but I don’t remember being bullied at school,” Yamada said. “I had many friends.”

Three years of forced farm labor

When he was a high school student, a Japanese neighbor told him that his real father was alive in Japan, and Yamada was able to exchange letters with his father a couple of times.

The exchanges didn’t last long, as there were no diplomatic ties between the two countries. And later, when he was working as an engineer in Tianjiin after graduating from university, he was accused of spying for Japan because he'd exchanged letters in the past, and was placed in confinement.

That was in the midst of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

Day after day he was made to memorize "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong," in a dim basement with a concrete floor covered only with straw.

The confinement lasted 104 days, and he was often subjected to physical violence.

Even after he was released, he was forced to engage in farm work for three years in a rural village in Hebei province.

In 1980, when the government’s repatriation program for Japanese war orphans in China was conducted at full pace following normalization of diplomatic ties between Tokyo and Beijing, Yamada, along with his wife and son, came to the town of Niikappu in Hokkaido, where his father lived, to stay in the country permanently.

It was his bitter experience during the Cultural Revolution that pushed him to return to Japan. “If you are not free, it is the same as being dead.”

He also made the decision to return because he'd been worried about the future for his son, who was age 9 at the time.

When Yamada met his father for the first time in some 40 years, the two hugged each other in tears. “Although we couldn’t communicate, both of us could understand that we wanted to see each other,” he said.

He was warmly welcomed by the people of Niikappu. The Niikappu Municipal Government hired him as a temporary employee and, as he had mostly forgotten how to speak Japanese, they created a list of terms they use in the workplace in both Japanese and Chinese and handed it out to all the workers in the municipal government.

Yamada got along with his colleagues, inviting them to his house and offering them dumplings. He learned to speak Japanese gradually.

A few years later, he was hired by a construction company in Atsuma and worked there until he was 67.

Now he spends his time peacefully, sharing vegetables he grows in his garden with his neighbors.

Grassroots exchanges

He never asked his adoptive parents, who had since died, why they took him away, but he guesses they must have desperately wanted a boy because they didn’t have any children.

After returning to Japan, he was told that his mother and siblings had starved to death in Mukden.

“If I hadn’t been taken away then, I would have died with my mother and siblings. I am grateful to my adoptive parents,” he said.

Fifty years have passed since Japan and China normalized ties, but Yamada says that as someone who spent half his life in China, he has “mixed feelings” about the current relationship between the two countries, which he doesn’t think is so good.

He has been keeping in touch with his friends from college, exchanging messages from time to time.

“My life hasn’t been that easy,” Yamada said. “I could overcome difficulties because I had many friends.”

Yamada strongly believes that if people have grassroots interactions, the two countries will not repeat the same mistakes.

This section features topics and issues from Hokkaido covered by the Hokkaido Shimbun, the largest newspaper in the prefecture. The original article was published Sept. 30.