＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
<Addition on 12/23/2020>“An Inconvenient Truth” Also Revealed in the Collection of Remains of War Victims from the Battle of Okinawa
According to a report on NHK News Watch 9 on 12/23, experts conducted DNA analysis on 75 of the 700 remains collected and preserved in the “collection of remains of the war dead” project in Okinawa, and found that 1/4 of them were “bones of people who died at least before the Meiji era.
The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare was aware of this fact, but did not disclose it themselves, and it was discovered when a volunteer citizens’ group that participated in the collection of human remains published it in its journal.
The reason for the mixing of such old human remains is that the natural caves called “gama,” where Japanese soldiers and civilians fled during the Battle of Okinawa, were used as “cemeteries” in the past and apparently contained many human remains in urns.
It is estimated that more than 180,000 (98%) of the remains of the war dead from the Battle of Okinawa have been recovered. However, only five of the remains have been scientifically identified.
The collection of remains in Siberia and the Philippines was also pointless, and it is appalling that such a sloppy project to collect the remains of the Battle of Okinawa was also carried out. I believe that such a meaningless project should be stopped immediately, and that those in charge and their superiors at the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare should take appropriate responsibility.
On August 14, 1945, Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and “unconditionally surrendered,” ending World War II.
On August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union suddenly announced its participation in the Potsdam Declaration and declared war on Japan, claiming that it had been requested to enter the war by the Allied Powers because of Japan’s rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, and unilaterally broke the Soviet-Japanese Nonaggression Pact (Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact), invading Manchukuo, northern Korea, South Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and other islands one after another. On August 18, the “Battle of Syumusyuto Island” (Jiro Asada’s novel “The Summer that Never Ends” depicts this battle) took place. The article “The Return of the Northern Territories” has more details.
As a result, approximately 600,000 Japanese soldiers were interned in Siberia, of which 55,000 died there. The fact that Japanese soldiers who were “disarmed” by the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration were considered “prisoners of war” is in itself a violation of international law, and the fact that they were taken to Siberia to engage in forced labor is in complete violation of the Potsdam Declaration, which guaranteed that “disarmed Japanese soldiers would return to their homes.
The startling fact that the “remains” brought back from such “Siberian internee remains collection” included non-Japanese (Russian) remains was reported in August 2019.
Furthermore, this fact had been pointed out many times in closed-door meetings over the past 14 years, and the MHLW had been aware of it since that time, but had effectively neglected to disclose it over the years. This is doubly surprising, and we are outraged at the irresponsible response by the MHLW.
1. collection of remains of Siberian internees
According to a report by NHK, several experts who conducted DNA analysis of the remains repeatedly pointed out 15 times that the “remains” collected not only at the two Siberian sites that had been revealed so far, but also at seven other sites, were “not Japanese.
(1) Difficulty in collecting remains
It is not difficult to imagine how difficult it is to collect remains 70 years after the war. Moreover, unless the remains were buried in a “proper cemetery” and carefully managed, the Siberian internees were virtually left out in the vast Siberian wilderness, and the exhumation of their remains was based on the story that “they were buried in this area,” which is a very unreliable story.
Moreover, the residents who were present at the burial of Siberian internees at the time have already passed away, and the story is based on hearsay, which makes it even more unreliable.
If it were after a battlefield like the Philippines, there might be iron helmets, guns, and personal belongings, but in Siberia, where disarmed Japanese soldiers were forced to engage in slave-like forced labor, there is no way that such clues could have been found.
(2) Sentiments of the bereaved families
As a bereaved family member of a Siberian internee who died with regret in the extreme cold of Siberia, it is painfully understandable that you would at least want to bring the remains back to your homeland and offer your deepest condolences.
2. collection of remains of fallen japanese soldiers in the Philippines
In May 2019, there was a shocking news report that “none of the ‘remains’ brought back from the project to collect the remains of fallen Japanese soldiers in the Philippines belonged to Japanese nationals.
The project in the Philippines, the most intense war zone, was suspended for eight years starting in 2010. This is because of the allegation that most of the remains collected may have belonged to Filipinos.
As of the end of March 2019, the number of remains housed from the Philippines, where 518,000 people were killed, was 148,530 pillars.
Collection by government missions continued to decline after peaking at 16,826 pillars in FY1974 and dropped to a few dozen a year by mid-1974.
However, since 2007, when the NPO Kuen-tai(空援隊) joined the government delegation, the number of remains collected has risen dramatically, and in 2009, when the NPO Kuen-tai(空援隊) received the sole order for the “Information Collection Project on Unrepatriated Remains” (for the Philippines), it collected a large number of remains (7,740). However, this is an “extraordinary figure,” even by the layman’s standards. There are stories that a large number of bones of Filipino ancestors were stolen. The local “appraiser,” who was also a “mineral expert,” said, “I can at least tell whether the bones are human or animal, but I can’t tell whether they are Japanese or Filipino. It is impossible to make a DNA analysis, for example. It is highly suspected that local residents dug up the bones of their Filipino ancestors who were buried in a Filipino cemetery and offered them as Japanese remains in order to earn money for their part-time jobs. If the remains collection business is preyed upon by such unscrupulous people, the dead will not be able to recover.
This story reminds me of the case of Ms. Megumi Yokota who was abducted by North Korea, where the “remains of Ms. Yokota” sent by North Korea claiming her to be dead, turned out to be those of a completely different person as a result of DNA analysis.
I believe that such “grave robbing” and deceptive “deceptive collection of remains,” which is rife with “fraud” to prey on subsidies, is doubly hurting the bereaved families.
3. Laws Concerning Remains Collection Programs
The program of collecting remains of overseas war dead, which started in 1952, has been expanded from the South to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and other countries, and continues under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare.
The Law for the Promotion of the Collection of Remains of the War Dead, enacted by a Diet member in 2016, clearly states that the collection of remains is a “national responsibility” and designates the five-year period through FY2024 as the “period of intensive implementation of measures for the collection of remains. However, the remains cannot be examined with a metal detector, and it is highly doubtful that it will be easy to find in the next five years what has not been found after more than 60 years of searching in the jungle.
A “serious” search will yield close to “zero results.”Throwing the whole thing to a sleazy organization like the NPO Kuen-tai(空援隊) will only result in thousands of stolen Filipino bones.This is not surprising since the search for the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, eight years ago, was also extremely difficult.
The number of overseas war dead from World War II is approximately 2.4 million, of which 1.12 million remains are still lying in the field.
Now that more than 80 years have passed since the end of the war, the business of collecting remains is expected to become increasingly difficult. Looking at the failed attempts to collect the remains of Siberian detainees and those in the Philippines, I think it is time to abandon “idealism and idealism,” and to make a realistic “change of direction” in the project, such as “abandoning the collection of remains.
In Sagano, Kyoto, there is a temple of the Jyodo-Syu(Pure Land sect)
called Adashino-nenbutsuji. The temple is famous for its 8,000 stone statues of Buddha and pagodas, but Adashino has been a cemetery since the Heian period (794-1185) and is famous for “fuso” burial. Fuso” is a burial method in which the body is exposed to the wind and waits for the body to weather.
It is not a song from the “Sen no Kaze ni Natte” (A Thousand Winds), but it is time to stop the “sham remains collection business” as soon as possible and think of a constructive way to reward the bereaved families generously, without being concerned about their remains or graves.
I have heard from a local government official that “once a government starts running, it cannot stop. I have a feeling that this issue of collecting human remains will not stop unless there is a “big order for a change of policy” from the top, such as from the government, the LDP, or the ruling party.
I would like to ask the government, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, and the Bereaved Families Association to consider this matter.
遺骨 戦没者三一〇万人の戦後史 （岩波新書） [ 栗原俊雄 ]