Time ebbs for dead
Japan unlikely to recover over 1M still missing from WWII
TOKYO — Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, more than 1 million Japanese war dead are scattered throughout Asia, where the legacy of Japanese aggression still hampers recovery efforts.
The missing Japanese make up about half of the 2.4 million soldiers who died overseas during Japan’s military rampage across Asia in the early 20th century.
As the anniversary for the end of the Pacific War arrives Saturday, there is little hope these remains will ever be recovered, let alone identified and returned to grieving family members.
Only about 500,000 are considered retrievable. The rest are lost in the sea or buried in areas that can’t be reached because of fighting or security or political reasons, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
Locating, identifying and finding places to store the decades-old remains have been complicated as memories fade, artifacts and documents get lost and families and relatives age.
In 2016, Japan’s parliament passed a law launching an eight-year remains recovery initiative. It promotes more DNA matching and cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense in case remains are found at U.S. military facilities on islands in the southern Pacific that were former battlegrounds.
It was not until 2003 that the Japanese government started DNA matching, but only at the request of possible families. In July, Japan set up a comprehensive remains information center at the ministry that would provide DNA testing.
After Japan’s disastrous retreats in the Pacific in 1943, the military started sending back empty boxes with stones to bereaved families, without providing details about the deaths. Similar practices were continued by postwar governments, which didn’t put an emphasis on identifying individual remains to return to families, experts say.
Japan sent its first overseas remains collection mission in 1952 after a seven-year U.S. occupation ended. The efforts were unwelcome in many Asian countries that had suffered under Japanese wartime aggression.
The government in the 1950s dispatched missions to major former battlegrounds for the “token” collection of random remains; most were unidentified and never returned to families. After collecting the remains of about 10,000 war dead, the welfare ministry in 1962 tried to end the project but was forced to continue the effort following repeated requests by veterans and bereaved families.
The government mission has so far recovered just 340,000 remains; most are kept at Tokyo’s Chidorigafuchi national cemetery of unknown soldiers.
They were never DNA tested or identified, and almost certainly include a “significant number” of the remains of non-Japanese nationals, including Koreans and Taiwanese soldiers drafted to fight for the Japanese Imperial Army, said Kazufumi Hamai, a Teikyo University historian.
More than 240,000 Koreans fought for Japan during the country’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, including 20,000 believed to have died outside of mainland Japan.