South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Family of dead WWII soldier calls return of flag ‘a miracle’
TOKYO — Toshihiro Mutsuda was only 5 years old when he last saw his father, who was drafted by Japan’s Imperial Army in
1943 and killed in action. For him, his father was a bespectacled man in an old family photo standing by a signed Japanese flag he carried to war.
On Saturday, when the flag was returned to him from a U.S. war museum where it had been on display for 29 years, Mutsuda, now
83, said: “It’s a miracle.” The flag, a “yosegaki hinomaru” or good luck flag, carries the soldier’s name, Shigeyoshi Mutsuda, and the signatures of his relatives, friends and neighbors wishing him luck. It was given to him before he was drafted by the army. His family was later told he died in Saipan, but his remains were never returned.
The flag was donated in
1994 and displayed at the museum aboard the USS Lexington, a WWII aircraft carrier, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Museum director Steve Banta, who brought the flag to Tokyo, said he learned the story behind the flag earlier this year when he was contacted by the Obon Society, a nonprofit organization that has returned about 500 similar flags to the descendants of Japanese servicemembers killed in the war.
The search for the flag’s original owner started in April when a museum visitor took a photo and asked an expert about the description that it had belonged to a “kamikaze” pilot.
When Shigeyoshi Mutsuda’s grandson saw the photo, he sought help from the Obon Society, group co-founder Keiko Ziak said.
“When we learned all of this, and that the family would like to have the flag, we knew immediately that the flag did not belong to us,” Banta said at the handover ceremony. “We knew that the right thing to do would be to send the flag home.”
The soldier’s eldest son, Toshihiro Mutsuda, was speechless for a few seconds when Banta, wearing white gloves, gently placed the neatly folded flag into his hands. Two of his younger siblings, both in their 80s, stood by and looked on silently.
“After receiving the flag today, I earnestly felt that the war like that should never be fought again and that I do not wish anyone else to go through this sadness (of separation),” Toshihiro Mutsuda said.
The soldier’s daughter, Misako Matsukuchi, touched the flag with both hands and prayed.
“After nearly 80 years, the spirit of our father returned to us. I hope he can finally rest in peace,” Matsukuchi said later.
Toshihiro Mutsuda said he clearly remembers his mother, Masae Mutsuda, who died five years ago at age 102, making the bus trip almost every year from the farming town in Gifu, central Japan, to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, where 2.5 million war dead are enshrined, to pay tribute to her husband’s spirit.
That’s why Toshihiro Mutsuda and his siblings chose to receive the flag at Yasukuni and brought the framed photos of their parents.
“My mother missed him and wanted to see him so much and that’s why she used to pray here,” he said.