Laying Japan’s war dead to rest
Julian Ryall discovers how a Japanese war talisman found in a British junk shop has been reunited with the soldier’s family
As he accepts the fragile flag that was picked up by an unknown British soldier on a battlefield in Burma in 1944, 75-year old shop owner, Shojiro Nakajima says he senses that the soldier it belonged to – whose black-and-white portrait hangs on the wall of his family home in the rural town of Higashi Omi – has finally come home to rest.
And he has another former British soldier and an indefatigable Usbased reconciliation group to thank for bringing his family closure.
Mr Nakajima says he was too young to remember Yasuhei Nakajima, his uncle, marching off to war in northern Burma where he died on the battlefield aged just 26. He had no wife or children, and family memories of this distant relative have dimmed since his death.
But looking at his portrait with a black crepe bow in one corner, Mr Nakajima says he always thought he looked “honest and hard-working”.
Yosegaki Hinomaru flags were considered a good luck talisman for a serviceman going off to war and virtually every Japanese soldier carried at least one. For Allied soldiers, from Burma to New Guinea, Malaya and the islands of the Pacific, they were the perfect souvenir because they were light and could be easily stuffed into a pocket or pouch, even in the heat of battle.
The flags these men carried, however, were highly personal items that the families still believe retained their souls. And as more Allied servicemen from Britain, the US, Australia and elsewhere have grown old and died, their descendants are discovering these long-forgotten artefacts in the backs of drawers or in dusty attics. For the past nine years, one organisation, the Obon Society, has been returning them to the scattered relatives of the Japanese servicemen who died in battle, and whose bodies may never have returned home.
The full details of Yasuhei Nakajima’s death are unlikely to ever be known. It is believed he was killed in a clash with British troops in March 1944 during the Battle of Imphal, the high-tide of Japan’s assault on south-east Asia, but the family only received official notification that he had died many months later. Of the 2.4million Japanese servicemen killed during the Second World War, 1.14million are still listed as “missing in action” and families never received their remains.
On April 5, during a solemn ceremony at Gokoku-jinja Shrine, in the town of Hikone, three tattered and stained flags were returned to their families in Shiga Prefecture.
“To finally have this flag makes the tears well up,” Mr Nakajima says. “To be able to hold it gives me the feeling that Yasuhei was my blood. The whole Nakajima family feels that he is at last coming home. I will take this flag home and we have asked the rest of the family to gather. This flag is now our family treasure.”
The route that Yasuhei Nakajima’s flag took home can only be traced back to 1983, when Andrew Clare, then a Royal Marine Commando, noticed it in a junk shop window in Plymouth.
“Before I could read Japanese “kanji”, characters I knew what it was and that it was genuine,” says Mr Clare, who went on to study Japanese in Sheffield and Kobe, and is now legal director of DAC Beachcroft LLP in Manchester. “I can’t remember how much it was, but it could not have been more than £50 – scandalous when one thinks about the value of it to families.”
As his Japanese improved, over the following years, Mr Clare was able to decipher some of the names on the flag and Nakajima cropped up frequently. It became his ambition to one day to be able to return the flag to the right family, but it was a daunting task. Nakajima is a common surname and the task of finding one family somewhere in a nation of 127million was enormous.
During his research, Mr Clare discovered the Obon Society. Based in Astoria, Washington, the group was set up in 2009 by Rex and Keiko Ziak, after Keiko’s grandfather’s flag was returned through a small and understaffed division of Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Realising that potentially millions of these heirlooms are dotted around the world – and with many now being sold to collectors – they set about reuniting them with the families of fallen soldiers.
“The Japanese concept of the spiritual world is very different to that in the West, so when a family member disappeared in the war, anything that was returned – his wallet, a letter, a flag – became him,” says Mr Ziak. “But these were sought-after souvenirs. They were clearly an enemy flag, they had Japanese writing and hand prints.”
The 50th anniversary of the end of the war in 1995 seemed to be a turning point in many US veterans’ attitudes, adds Mr Ziak, and the flags began to be returned to the Japanese embassy or consulates across the US.
The vast majority are still in storage in Tokyo, but the Obon Society has accepted around 1,000 flags from around the world. Some arrive anonymously; others are accompanied by a note that might provide a few clues; a few have small donations that allow the Ziaks to continue their work. To date, they have managed to return around 180 flags to families.
Mr Clare posted his flag to the Obon Society and admits he never expected the organisation to make too much progress. But, Mr Ziak says, “all the clues that were needed to trace the family were right there on the flag”.
His research team was quickly able to narrow the search down to Shiga Prefecture thanks to the kanji used in the Nakajima family name, which are specific to a relatively small district. Further inquiries cross-checked the name with Japanese government records detailing the soldiers who had died at Imphal in 1944. And there was, as is often the case, a degree of luck in finally identifying the soldier’s descendants just six weeks after the Obon Society had received the flag. Mr Clare was so overwhelmed he decided to travel to Japan with his wife, Deborah, to hand it over in a deeply personal ceremony to a very grateful Mr Nakajima.
“This flag belongs to his family, not me,” Mr Clare says.
Operating on a shoestring, the Obon Society asks for no money from either the sender or recipient of a flag and has a network of 35 volunteers, primarily in Japan and the US. The Ziaks work on the project full time, supported by Mr Ziak’s book sales and occasional lectures, but he admits that he spends 70 per cent of his time trying to find funding. Yet the work is too important for them to stop, they say.
“Often when we hand one of these flags over, the families talk to it”, Mr Ziak says. “They are consoling the flag, reassuring the soldier that he has returned home safely. We frequently find that the families were also traumatised by the war.
“Many veterans’ descendants need these items to put their own hearts at rest.”