Former Japanese Soldier Comes Home From WWII
Ishinosuke Uwano, who was 20 and a conscript in the Imperial Army, never made it back to Japan after his country's defeat in World War II.
In the war's chaotic aftermath and with his infantry regiment disbanded, the soldier settled in Sakhalin, a Russian island north of Japan, where he found work as a timber cutter.
The last anyone in Japan heard of him was in 1958, according to his family and the Japanese Government.
Though the details are sketchy, it appears he moved from Sakhalin to Ukraine before 1960 and built a life in the city of Zhytomyr, 120 kilometres west of Kiev.
Now 83, and with a wife and three Ukrainian children, Mr Uwano asked a friend last October to help him find his family in Japan.
Japanese diplomats traced them to their original village in a dairy farming area 500 kilometres north of Tokyo. Mr Uwano's nephew Yukio still occupies the house where the older man was born.
Mr Uwano's mother, who died in 1981, never doubted her son was alive and believed he would return home, according to the Iwate Nichinichi Shimbun, the local newspaper.
But as the decades elapsed, the family decided to settle their worries about his drifting soul, and in 2000 petitioned for him to be numbered among Japan's war dead.
A family spokesman said they welcomed his return and he would stay with them in the house where he grew up.
Large numbers of soldiers were left to their fate after the war defeat and either did not return to Japan or refused to surrender and committed suicide. A government spokesman said yesterday that 440 soldiers remained unaccounted for since the war. Make that 439.
It would be just this guy's luck, that soon after his homecoming, a North Korean submarine-based kidnapping team would--as occasionally occurs--make landfall on the Japanese coast and grab the hapless returnee to spend his twilight years teaching Japanese to North Korean spies.
posted by Effwit at 9:24 AM
2 Comments:
On an unrelated note, what's your take on the FBI's heavy breathing over the late Jack Anderson's documents? They seem to be pretty hot and heavy over something they think he had/has in the 200 or so boxes he left to GWU. Does it have to do with AIPAC...or something else?
DrewL:
The FBI used the AIPAC investigation as a pretext to try to rummage through Anderson's files en masse.
They may not be looking for anything specific, but could instead be sending another chilling message to (living) reporters not to muck about overmuch with secret intel.
I think it is somehow linked to the secret eavesdropping on the press and their security-cleared contacts.
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