War and compassion: the plight of war orphans in East Asia, 1867–1945 and beyond

Abstract

War and peace are the two incompatible notions. War and compassion are not: war often calls for human compassion to save not only friends but also enemies. As the technology of war has advanced since the nineteenth century, the targets of compassion in the form of philanthropy, social work, and humanitarianism have also expanded to include soldiers, civilians, and children. In this article, I explore the link between war and compassion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by focusing on the plight of Japanese war orphans in Japan and Chinese war orphans in China. These sixty-seven Chinese war orphans were brought to Japan in 1939 by a member of the Japanese Imperial army stationed in occupied China. The founders of orphanages in Japan argued that war incited their compassion to save the young victims of war. Yet they were also forced to work under the watchful eyes of the State. How did Japan's power structures, which created misery in both Japan and China, change over time? How did the Japanese social structures, which tried to help alleviate misery among children, change? My goal is to relate these questions to each other for further understanding the link between war and compassion between 1867 and 1945 and in the early postwar era.

In English dictionaries, orphan is defined as “a child who is deprived by death of one or both parents.”¹ Yet this definition of orphan merely points to two biological facts: an orphan is a child, and the child's parent(s) have died. But orphan can also signal the disappearance of the parent(s) or abandonment by the parent(s). These extended definitions are in keeping with the usage of the term koji (孤児 orphan) in contemporary Japan and in many other countries. When war, famine, epidemics, or natural disasters eradicate a great number of people, children who survive are often classified as orphans, if only because they require compassion, legal protection, relief measures, and social services when the fates of their parents are unknown.

In Japan, sensō koji (戦争孤児), a simple combination of war (sensō) and orphan (koji), seems to have been coined around the time of the First Sino–Japanese war (1894–1895).² Though this war ended with Japan's victory, the visual image of war orphan appeared in Japan. Yet it was the image of the Chinese war orphan in China, depicted by the Japanese artists of the colored woodblock print. Until then, according to Donald Keene, China was considered a “model or object of emulation.” However, it took only a few months of war to destroy this tradition of respect.³ The artists, who produced more than 3,000 prints depicting the war, created images based on imagination rather than experience in China. They portrayed Chinese soldiers with pigtails as “abject cowards running pell-mell from combat” but Japanese soldiers, who were attired in European uniforms, appeared “in poses of heroic determination.”⁴

These scenes often represented Japan as a savior of Chinese children.⁵ One example (Fig. 1) comes from Mizuno Toshikata. It features Captain Higuchi, a hero of the Sino–Japanese war, and a Chinese child. Historian John Dower provides the following caption for this print.

One of the most celebrated Japanese heroes of the Sino–Japanese war was Captain Higuchi, who reportedly rescued a Chinese infant in a crucial battle near Weihaiwei. As the story was told, Captain Higuchi heard the abandoned child crying on the battlefield, scooped him up in his left arm, and led his forces to victory flourishing his sword with his right arm. After the battle, Higuchi returned the child to his parents. … The implication was that the child had been left in peril by its own irresponsible parents and caretakers.⁶

Figure 1. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visualizing Cultures Project, and the Boston Museum of Art.

Mizuno tried to capture Captain Higuchi's compassion toward his enemy's child, who was abandoned by his own father and yet escaped from becoming an orphan.⁷ In other words, it was not “irresponsible” China, but Japan who saved him. If this child had been an orphan, Captain Higuchi might have brought him to Japan.

The Russo–Japanese war (1904–1905), which was fought mainly in southern Manchuria (Northeast China), offers us another story about war orphans. This time, they are Japanese war orphans. While the war ended with Japan's victory, approximately 85,000 Japanese soldiers died. Unfortunately, no one kept records about the number of children who lost their military fathers or brothers. We do know, though, that seventy-two private orphanages were newly built between 1894 and 1910 in metropolitan Japan.⁸ The orphanages that had been built before 1894 also readied themselves to accept war orphans. The Tokyo Orphanage, which philanthropist Katsuragi Yorichiyo helped establish in 1899, was one of them.⁹ Katsuragi also edited the orphanage's Monthly Report (東京孤児院月報 Tokyo Koji-in Geppō), a newsletter sent mainly to the orphanage's donors. Expecting a surge of new orphans who might be brought to his orphanage, Katsuragi wrote the following on the first page of the Monthly Report of March 1904.

Nothing in this world is as misanthropic (非慈善的 hi-jizenteki) as war. Because of war, many young men are killed, and many become disabled. Elders lose their sons, and wives are widowed. Children are orphaned, and every sorrow and suffering of life occurs because of war. As I constantly pray for benevolence to prevail, I am all the more sorrowful about the calamity of war. Therefore, as I hope for the continued prevalence of benevolence, I must also pray for tragic wars to be swiftly eradicated from the world. … However, until this world can truly eradicate war, I shall not merely lament its tragedy and passively pray for its eradication. When war occurs, I shall extend my deep thoughts and prayers to those who die or suffer from war, and I must extend hands of benevolence toward these people. Although everyone should act in such ways during wartime, a philanthropist should be especially determined to do so.¹⁰

In October 1904, the Organization to Assist the Bereaved Families of Soldiers (軍人遺族救護議会 gunjin izoku kyūgo gikai) asked Katsuragi and the directors of three other orphanages to accept war orphans. He solemnly accepted this order. The Russo–Japanese war, Katsuragi hoped, would be the first and the last war in which he participated as a philanthropist. Yet in 1905, he died young of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. After his death, Japan continued to walk on the path of a colonial empire.

The Second Sino–Japanese war (1937–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945) radically changed the nature of warfare in East Asia and the faces of its young victims. Modern and mechanized, these wars were fought on the ground and in the air alike. Millions died: soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old in both Japan and China. The wars also created an unknown number of displaced and orphaned children, ones whose parents were civilians as well as soldiers. Philanthropy alone could not save these millions of war orphans. They needed the compassion of the people, and even the State too, which could offer them “social services” (社会事業 shakai jigyō) and “humanitarian works” (人道 jindō) across international borders.¹¹

In this article, I explore the link between war and compassion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by focusing on the plight of Japanese war orphans in metropolitan Japan and Chinese war orphans in Japan. These Chinese children were orphaned in China during the Second Sino–Japanese war, saved by Japanese soldiers, and brought to Japan in 1939, not by Captain Higuchi, but by Nishimura Makoto, a member of the Japanese Imperial army stationed in occupied China. Katsuragi identified war as the enemy of philanthropy. He also argued that war incited his compassion to save the young victims of war. Yet he had no intention of reaching the war orphans of Japan's enemy.¹² How did Japan's power structures, which created misery in both Japan and China, change over time? How did the Japanese social structures, which tried to help alleviate misery among children, change during the time, when “the idea of childhood” radically changed in both Japan and China? My goal is to relate these two questions to each other for further understanding the link between war and human compassion between 1868 and 1945 and in the early postwar era.

War and compassion in metropolitan Japan: 1868–1945

In The History of the Idea of Childhood in Our Country, published in 1949, Ishikawa Ken defines “the idea of childhood” or jidō-kan (児童観) as follows:

Jidō-kan expresses how adults think of children. In other words, it describes the image of children depicted in the minds of adults. It is the life and culture of each era that weaves the idea of childhood specific to that particular era.¹³

Indeed, in the late-nineteenth century, the idea of the child radically changed in East Asia. In Japan, Ueki Emori (1857–1892), a member of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, published a series of newspaper articles under the title of Shinshi-ron (親子論), “ideas on the relationship between parents and children.”¹⁴ In these articles, he repudiated the idea that children are their parents' property as “borrowed from China” and “primitive.” According to Ueki, this very idea had subjugated Japanese people's minds from ancient times. Instead, he proposed that children should no longer be oppressed by parents but be treated as “the future sovereign of the society.”¹⁵

Notwithstanding Ueki's opinion, China was also undergoing an era of radical social change. Many Chinese intellectuals presented “a more child centered perspective,” free from old patriarchal practices.¹⁶ Lu Xun (魯迅 1881–1936), who often expressed his expectation for children to guide the Republic of China, was one of them. In Fatherhood Today, published in 1919, he urged fathers to liberate their children “to pass through to the land of open space and light.”¹⁷ Thus, in both Japan and China, children were no longer tied only to their parents. They were also tied to the nation, a nation ready to raise its children as its ideal citizens.¹⁸ War orphans, who lost their ties to their parents, were not excluded. They too were regarded as “the nation's children.” But first, I will meet Japanese war orphans in metropolitan Japan between 1867 and 1945.

Mukoku no tami (無告之民) or “those people who are alone in the world and have no one to turn to” is the product of the sixth century Japan. But the word survived into the modern era. These people were the targets of charity and categorized as follows: kan (鰥 widowers), ka (寡 widows), ko (孤 orphans), doku (独 old people without children), rō (老 old people), and shitsu (疾 those who are disabled).¹⁹ In addition, the Meiji State (1868–1912) prohibited infanticide and abortion, and banned the sale of Japanese children to Chinese citizens.²⁰ The State also established a new program called Rice for the Care of the Abandoned Children.²¹ Nevertheless, these edicts, which were not always accompanied by the power of punishment, hardly worked. Yet in one area of children's life, the State's efforts succeeded: they propagated the idea of “the nation's children” among the entire population through compulsory elementary education.

The idea of “the nation's children” was also imposed upon the children institutionalized in orphanages, most of which were private institutions.²² In its Monthly Report, an orphanage in Okayama prefecture, established in 1887, described its children as “the good citizens of the nation.” Another orphanage in Osaka (1886) presented them as “the heirs of the Imperial Nation.” Yet another orphanage in Shimane prefecture (1905) described them as “the good citizens who diligently study and work for the nation.”²³ Moreover, an anonymous author contributed an article to the journal Rikugō Zasshi in 1898, in which he proposed to replace numerous prisons in Tokyo with public orphanages. He then wrote that the State could transform orphans into “courageous patriots willing to sacrifice their lives for our nation” far more easily than rehabilitating adult prisoners.²⁴ In 1904, another article appeared in the journal Chūō Kōron, in which the author passionately argued that the State should ban the use of the words koji and koji-in (孤児院 orphanage), for such terms had defamed orphans. Indeed, the Tokyo Orphanage changed its name to Tokyo Ikusei-en (東京育成園) in 1907, and many other founders of orphanages followed suit. Ikusei means to “nurture” the child.²⁵

In November 1904, Katsuragi accepted the first two orphans of fallen soldiers of the Russo–Japanese war, and he took in two more in the next year. Adding only four war orphans should not have burdened Katsuragi in running his orphanage. Yet he bitterly complained about the rapid increase of orphans brought to his orphanage, so much so that he was ready to restrict the number of incoming children.²⁶ Many of these orphans, however, were not the children of fallen soldiers. They were the victims of an earthquake, a tsunami (tidal wave) and famine. Yet they were also the victims of the severe economic depression, which occurred in the aftermath of the First Sino–Japanese war and the Russo–Japanese war. Having suffered from both natural and man-made disasters, many families were disintegrated, and many children lost their caretakers. Yet they were not considered to be “war orphans.”

The bereaved families of fallen soldiers had been receiving military pensions since 1875, a year after Japan's invasion of Taiwan. Military pensions were also paid to the families of soldiers mobilized to the battlefield during the absence of their caretakers. The circle of beneficiaries widened as time went by, expanding to include not only the soldier's wife, but also the parents and children of the soldier.²⁷ However, the deceased soldier's rank and his time in service determined the amount of the pension. Hence, according to Katsuragi, the families of low-ranking soldiers, those who had lost their sole breadwinners, were often forced to send their children to orphanages.²⁸ In such cases, the military pressured Katsuragi to show special respect to the receivers of military pensions.²⁹ Consequently, he had to come up with a new name for the four war orphans – gunjin iji (軍人遺児), “the honorable children of departed military fathers.” Other children in the same orphanage were continued to be classified as “orphans” or “impoverished children” (貧児 hin-ji). Yet it was the number of “orphans” and “impoverished children” that rapidly swelled. The private philanthropy alone could no longer assist them financially. Katsuragi, and all other founders of orphanages, earnestly needed to receive more resources, not only from private donors but also from the State, under the name of social work (社会事業 shakai jigyō).

In Japanese legal codes, the term shakai jigyō first appeared in 1920. One year later, the Central Association of Philanthropy, founded in 1903, changed its name to the Central Association of Social Work. In the book titled Shakai Jigyō (1922), Tako Ichimin (1888–1963), the first chief of the Bureau of Social Affairs, expressed the difficulty of using the term shakai (society or social), which was still associated with “socialism” in the early-twentieth century. Hence the bureaucrats in his office made efforts not to use shakai, substituting such words as chihō (地方 local) or min-ryoku (民力 people's power).³⁰ However, they soon learned to use shakai, fashioning dozens of compound words including “social problem,” “social policy,” “social engineering,” “social reform,” and most importantly, “social solidarity” (社会連帯 shakai rentai).

Tako characterizes “social work in Japanese style” (日本式社会事業 Nihon-shiki shakai jogyō) as follows.³¹ First, it is distinct from benevolence (同情 dōjō), philanthropy (博愛 hakuai), or humanitarianism (人道 jindō), which “individuals” offer to needy people. In contrast, it is the society that offers social services. To bring social work to fruition, each and every individual citizen must make every effort to build “our society” (私達の社会 watashi-tachi no shakai), which in turn brings happiness to all citizens in Japan, including the young and the old. In this respect, society is like a human body. A healthy body (society) is the product of harmony between every part (individual) of the body.

Tako also argues that, as far as the material life of poor people is concerned, the job of social workers is not to raise the level of their standards of living by offering charity, but to encourage them to learn the skills to be out of poverty, and work hard.³² This emphasis on “self help” (自助 jijo), self-support (自治 jichi), and mutual-help (共助 kyōjo) was indeed the fundamental characteristic of the social work in Japanese style. The following scene, which Yamada Kuratarō sketched in and outside the Tokyo Orphanage, well demonstrates how important it was, for even small children, to daily exercise self-help and mutual-help to contribute to the resources of their orphanage.

From about three o'clock in the afternoon, a group of children from the orphanage go out to sell natto [fermented soybeans]. Some carry as many as thirty packages of natto in the basket on their shoulders, while younger ones carry only five. They return around seven in the evening, and report to the orphanage's Mother how many packages they sold.³³ Today's winner is Heinosuke, as he presented twenty-three sen of money to her. Each child receives some of what he or she earned, so the child can later purchase things like school supplies. At their tender age, they already know the importance of being self-supporting.³⁴

These children had already learned the importance of toiling to pull themselves out of poverty instead of just accepting charity.

But if children did not understand the importance of work, they were sent to Kanka-in (感化院) or reformatories. Kanka or “moral suasion” is usually used as a verb in a passive sentence, such as “a child is influenced (kanka) by someone's speech or deed and change his idea or behavior.” The outcome of kanka is not necessarily positive. Yet kanka, which the Meiji State introduced in 1900, always expected the positive change of the young subject to serve the nation.³⁵ Hence the troublesome child, who was brought to the orphanage or was already living in the orphanage, could always be sent to a reformatory, if the staff of the orphanage failed to exercise kanka.

Indeed, the State heavily invested in the construction of reformatories instead of investing in the construction of public orphanages. In 1908, the State required each one of the forty-five prefectural governments to build at least one reformatory. By 1911, more than thirty reformatories were built with the State subsidies. According to the statistics published by the Ministry of Internal affairs in 1940, there were fifty-one public reformatories and eight private reformatories in metropolitan Japan.³⁶ The main targets of kanka were orphans who were institutionalized in orphanages.³⁷ The concept of kanka organized both life for children in orphanages and the operation of institution themselves. The State often made orphanages compete to each other to decide which institution was most worthy to receive subsidies. The ones that promoted self-help and mutual-help most won. The State began to place all private orphanages under its surveillance, while the society was expected to help them under the name of “social solidarity.” Nevertheless, the “mutual help” was often the help among the orphans themselves. After all, Tako did not explain the difference between the State and the society.³⁸

The early-twentieth century, however, was the time when a new idea of childhood was brought to East Asia from Europe and the United States. It was the idea of “the right of the child.” In 1911, Tamura Nao'omi (1858–1934) published The Rights of the Child (Kodomo no kenri), in which he identified the child as the subject of rights, rather than as a subject for concern. Those rights included first and foremost the right to parental love and the right to be treated as a child, to play, cry, mimic others, lie, quarrel with friends, express thoughts, and so on. In other words, Tamura envisioned the child as the middle-class child in peacetime.³⁹ More than a decade later, Namae Takayuki (1867–1957), who is considered as the father of modern social work in Japan, argued that even if the child was without parents, he or she had the same right to a healthy birth, the right to be raised well, and to receive an education. In this case, the “parents” of the child were “the State and the society” (国家社会 kokka shakai).⁴⁰ In 1924, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child was issued and was immediately translated into Japanese. The Declaration stated that “men and women of all nations” must offer the protection to the child who lost it “beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality or creed.” In other words, it is the child's inherent right to receive protection “in times of distress.”

The hope for peace in the aftermath of World War I, however, soon dissipated. In East Asia, the Manchurian Incident broke out in 1931, which led Japan into a series of wars for another 15 years. In the same year, Namae delivered a speech in Taipei, in which he openly disclosed his disinclination to use the term “right” (権利 kenri) for child welfare.

Lastly, I will mention the idea of the rights of the child. “Right” is a relatively new concept and some people do not seem to like it. … Aside from special circumstances, the culture of the East does not acknowledge the right of the child; our culture admits only the rights of the parents. Such hesitation is still with us as one of the remnants of feudalism.⁴¹

Now the pendulum suddenly swung from “the rights of the child” to “the protection of the child” (児童保護 jidō hogo). How, then, were the children, including orphans, in metropolitan Japan protected? Who offered the protection, and for what purpose? Maki Ken'ichi (1904–1976), another prominent wartime social worker, answered these questions as follows.

Those who are involved in the work of the protection of children must look at them as seeds for the nation, who are the talented and useful human resources (人的資源 jinteki shigen). We must incubate (培養baiyô) them and protect them to secure their ability as resources. … We should not consider them to be the possession of their parents. We should identify them as the nation's human resources. For the goal of acquiring and raising children as healthy resources, we must protect them. This was the responsibility of the State.⁴²

Maki insisted that the State must protect all Japanese children, whether they were rich or poor, because they were all human resources for the nation's future, as soldiers, laborers, and mothers who would “incubate” yet more resources.

Indeed, the State passed many laws to protect the child. Among them were the Law to Prevent the Abuse of Children (1933), the Law to Educate and Protect Youth (1933),⁴³ the Law to Protect Children under the Age of Three and their Mothers and Grandmothers (1937), the Law to Improve Physical Fitness of Japanese Nationals (1940), and the Laws to Provide Medical Care for Every Citizen (1942). But the State also enacted laws that demanded not only citizens' labor, but their bodies and lives to win the war. In 1938, the National Mobilization Law and National Service Draft came into effect. This legislation allowed the State to draft civilian workers including children to produce food and munitions. In 1943, all children older than twelve were required to offer their labor to the State. Men older than seventeen could be conscripted at any time, and the minimum age for conscription was lowered to fifteen in 1944.⁴⁴ Between 1938 and 1945, more than 80,000 boys from age fourteen and nineteen were sent to Manchuria as future farmers and soldiers. These laws and mandates applied to all children, including orphans living in orphanages, whether they were war orphans or not. It was during these times when Chinese war orphans of the Second Sino–Japanese war were brought to Japan. They were called Shina koji (支那孤児 Chinese orphans) in Japan.

Shina Koji in Osaka, Japan: 1937–1945

In China, the Second Sino–Japanese war involved massive air and land operations by “a mechanized foreign invader,” Japan.⁴⁵ The toll that this war inflicted on the Chinese people still remains unclear, but the numbers of the dead and displaced are estimated to be around 14 million and 80 million respectively.⁴⁶ According to Stephen MacKinnon, the available statistical records of refugees are quite confusing, largely because the records counted only refugees already living in shelters in the cities, not in outlying suburban counties. Moreover, these millions of refugees differed in age, gender, occupation, class, place of residence, and intended destination. These figures also included both individuals and families.⁴⁷

In Unlikely Heirs: War Orphans during the Second Sino–Japanese War, 1937–1945, Colette Plum focused on about 220,000 Chinese war orphans in China. They were housed in Wartime Children's Homes founded by the National Relief Commission of the Republic of China.⁴⁸ According to Plum, these orphans aged fifteen and younger fell into certain official categories. They were “children of soldiers and officers of the war of resistance” against Japan, “children of soldiers killed in action,” “sons and daughters of persons who were martyred because of their participation in the war of resistance,” “children of personnel doing national salvation work,” and “children rescued from war disaster areas.”⁴⁹ The staff of the Wartime Children's Homes were determined not to call them “orphans” (gu'er 孤兒). Instead, they referred to them as “the nation's children.”⁵⁰ By so doing, they distinguished them from the orphans living in traditional orphanages established by Confucian societies or Christian missionaries, as well as from those orphans who had been adopted but later abused by their caretakers as a source of free labor.⁵¹

The government of the Republic of China regarded the children of Wartime Children's Homes as better candidates to become the nation's children, than those children with parents, precisely because they lacked families. Plum argues:

In the wartime context, parents were not necessarily an asset to the nation but could be a liability, especially if they had habits [such as gambling or opium smoking] and ways of thinking [such as pro-Japanese sentiments] that ran counter to those viewed as essential to a modern and strong nation.⁵²

In other words, the children of the Wartime Children's Homes were growing up in “the family of the nation.”⁵³ This family of the nation taught the children a variety of technical and vocational skills – so they could support themselves in the future – and take revenge on the Japanese soldiers who had killed their parents.⁵⁴

However, the Wartime Children's Homes cared for only about 0.1 percent of the displaced children in China. We do not know where 1.9 million additional displaced children ended up, on the vast continent divided into the Republic of China, the area held by the Chinese Communists, and the occupied areas by the Japanese. As Plum argued, these children were therefore “available for appropriation” by the Japanese occupiers.⁵⁵ Among those Japanese occupiers, there were the members of senbu-han, the “pacification brigade.”⁵⁶

The Chinese letters of sen-bu (宣撫) suggest a particular relationship between the ruler (Japanese) and the ruled (Chinese): the ruler pities the ruled and then cares for the ruled.⁵⁷ One of those members of the Pacification Brigade was Nishimura Makoto (1883–1956), who was mobilized to northern China between December 1937 and March 1938. He had been interested in engaging in humanitarian works in China since he was in his teens. Opportunity arose in 1927, when he joined the Mainichi Newspaper Company as the head of its Division of Social Work. He first worked for a project called “itinerant hospital,” in which a team of Japanese physicians and nurses traveled throughout Manchuria, providing free medical care to needy Chinese. In 1937, the Mainichi Newspaper Company dispatched the “itinerant hospital” to northern China for the first time. Yet the start of the war forced the team to terminate the service after only 8 days. It was at this time that Nishimura joined in the Pacification Brigade to start a new humanitarian project: to save and care for Chinese war orphans and contribute to the realization of peace between Japan and China by bringing them to Japan. He then presented this project as an example of the “international social work” (国際的社会事業 kokusai-teki shakai jigyō).⁵⁸

To start this international social work, Nishimura enlisted the help of social workers, philanthropists, and the members of religious organizations, all of whom lived and worked in the city of Osaka. The Shiten-nōji Buddhist Temple, also in Osaka, promised to put together an orphanage for Shina koji. The members of the government of collaborationist regime, which the Japanese army established in occupied China, lent their help to Nishimura.⁵⁹ In addition, the Imperial Family donated large amount of money to the project, and the Organization to Love and Protect Our Neighbor's Children (Rinpō jidō aigo-kai, hereafter Aigo-kai) was established to oversee the day-to-day work of the project.⁶⁰ Finally, Japanese soldiers in occupied China played a key role in locating Shina koji. Here, we will meet two of those soldiers, Matsunaga Ken'ya (1907–1996) and Kokubun Ichitarō (1911–1985). They were both schoolteachers before being mobilized to northern China in 1938 and wrote about their encounters with Chinese children in occupied China.

After the Japanese army had occupied Huizhou, Matsunaga visited a newly vacant school. There he found a Chinese teacher's notebook chronicling the days leading up to conflict. He wrote:

In the notebook, she depicted children's lives two weeks before the Japanese army's invasion into the city. They lived in fear of the rumors of the “Japanese demons” (riben-gui) coming. She noted the ways in which the number of children gradually decreased as evacuation began from jōsō kaikyū (上層階級 the wealthy class), and that she couldn't get her mind back on her work.⁶¹

Matsunaga noted that those Chinese who did not evacuate but remained in their homes were members of lower classes. These people, according to Kokubun, had been “oppressed by Chiang Kai-Shek, natural disasters, and primitive styles of agriculture.” When the Japanese army advanced, Kokubun wrote, those poor people could only “hide themselves in the nearby forests or mountains.”⁶² In contrast, upper-class people “escaped by ships to Hong Kong or Macao in search of the protection they could receive from foreign powers.”⁶³ Kokubun described those people who did not evacuate as “sorry people” (気の毒な人 kinodokuna hito), and he wrote that his goal was to “make them smile.”⁶⁴ For these Japanese soldiers, Shina koji were the quintessential figures of “sorry people.” Their enemies, they thought, were Chiang Kai-shek and those affluent Chinese who were around him: they did not hate Japan or Japanese people.

On January 2nd, 1939, the members of Aigo-kai, led by Nishimura, left for the Provinces of Hebei, Shandong, and Shanxi to recruit the first group of 100 Shina koji. According to Aigo-kai's report, they focused on “war orphans” whose parents had been killed in the Second Sino–Japanese war because of their sympathetic attitudes toward Japan.⁶⁵ Yet this method proved to be totally impractical. Instead, the recruiters turned to any child, who lost his or her caretaker, and whose life was in danger. For example, Zhou Haitian (週 海田), age six, lived with a mother. A Japanese soldier found them and arranged for this mother to marry a Chinese policeman. However, after only a few months of marriage, her husband was killed in the war. Now she had to care for both her son and the mother of her deceased husband. Aigo-kai persuaded her to let her son go to Japan, promising a better life for him.⁶⁶ In another case, Zhang Jixian (張 済先), a girl of nine, was sold by her father to the group of itinerant actors. But she was deemed to have no talent for singing and dancing, and for that reason, was physically abused daily. On one bitter cold day, she ran away. A Japanese soldier saved her and brought her to a nearby orphanage, where Aigo-kai recruited her.⁶⁷ In both cases, Aigo-kai relied on Japanese soldiers' assistance to locate “sorry children.”

Despite the help offered by Japanese soldiers, Aigo-kai gathered only sixty-seven Shina koji in this trip.⁶⁸ These fifty-nine boys and eight girls arrived at the Port of Kōbe in February 1939, accompanied by a nursery teacher and an interpreter (both Chinese women selected by the Japanese army).⁶⁹ Yet this small number did not matter. A throng of Japanese children, teachers, mothers from fourteen elementary schools welcomed them. Each one of them was holding a tiny flag of Japan and the “five-color flag,” the official flag of the Republic of China from 1912 to 1928.⁷⁰ They then headed to the Mainichi Newspaper Company, where they met yet another warm welcome, and from there to their “home,” an orphanage set up by the Shiten-nōji Buddhist Temple.

For the children of Japan's formal colonies, “assimilation” (同化 dōka) was the rule. As the subjects of Japanese Emperor, they were required to learn Japanese as their “national language” (国語 kokugo) and to think and behave like Japanese people. Shina koji were the products of a different time in the history of the Japanese Empire: they were expected to learn Japanese as a foreign language (外国語 gaikoku-go), and retain their mother tongue.⁷¹ In the service of this goal, Aigo-kai hired four Chinese teachers of the Chinese language, a Japanese professor of Chinese language, and five additional Japanese teachers.⁷² In other words, Shina koji were not invited to be part of what Chatani Sayaka called the Nation-Empire – the result of the nationalization of Japan's colonial empire – in which all subjects were homogenized into “a category of Japanese.”⁷³ The mission of Shina koji was different: it was to become “the future human ligaments and building blocks” of the New Order of East Asia as Chinese.⁷⁴

Shina koji gained enormous popularity throughout metropolitan Japan. In 1940 alone, more than 800 people visited them at the orphanage. Those visitors included school children and teachers, soldiers (some of whom had just returned from the battlefield in China), wives of high-ranking soldiers, members of women's groups, journalists, radio and film directors, and more. Shina koji also received plentiful “fan letters” from Japanese children, teachers, mothers, and soldiers. The popularity of Shina koji, however, lasted only until the start of the Pacific War.⁷⁵ Anticipating the threat of air raids in the center of Osaka, Aigo-kai decided to relocate the orphanage to Takawashi Village on the southern edge of Osaka prefecture. The most agonizing problem for Aigo-kai was the age of Shina koji. While Aigo-kai originally ruled that the age of Shina koji must be between five and ten at the time of arrival, most of them had already passed the age of ten at that time. In other words, the age of the oldest Shina koji would reach eighteen or more in 1945. Taiwanese and Korean youth of eighteen years and older had already been serving the Japanese Army and Navy as volunteered or conscripted soldiers.⁷⁶ Yet this path was not open to Shina koji, as they were not “Japanese” but “Chinese.”

Coda: war and compassion or peace and compassion

The Mainichi Annual Report of 1942 listed the names of thirty Shina koji who returned to China at the end of 1941.⁷⁷ Seven boys were hired as interpreters of certain agencies of the collaborationist regime (Wang Jingwei regime) in occupied China or as clerks of commercial shops.⁷⁸ Twelve boys and one girl were sent to certain “agencies to protect them” (救済院 kyūsai-in, 孤貧校 kohin-kō) in Beiping (old name of Beijing) and Tianjin. These institutions were most likely orphanages. While several among these thirteen Shina koji were employed as the staff of institutions, others seem to have remained as “orphans.”⁷⁹

In 1943, Aigo-kai located the distant relatives of four boys, and thus sent them back to China. Another six boys were hired by a Japanese commercial entity in Tianjin.⁸⁰ In 1945, a hospital for infectious diseases in Mukden (Shenyang) hired seven more Shina koji as nurses. They were all girls, who had already received medical training while they were in Japan.⁸¹ Finally, in May 1945, the Northern China Transportation Company in Beiping hired eighteen boys.⁸² One boy passed the entrance examination for Mukden Medical School and left for Manchuria.⁸³ Sun Dechen was the only one who remained in Japan, as he had passed the entrance examination to the First Higher School, the way to the Tokyo Imperial University. Today, no one knows the whereabouts of Sun Dechen.⁸⁴

Better-funded orphanages were eventually confiscated by the military for its own purposes. The Tokyo Orphanage was one of them. Kuroshima Masayoshi (1904–1997), who assumed the position of director of the Tokyo Orphanage in 1938, had always argued that “in principle, the operation of the facility of social work [such as an orphanage] should be managed privately.”⁸⁵ By the late-1930s, however, social work had become the State work. Even though Kuroshima himself escaped from conscription, he was forced to give up his orphanage to the army, which converted the building into a munition's factory. He was then hired by the army as a dorm father for the youth who worked in this factory. Many staff of orphanages were conscripted. Orphans themselves, when they came of age, were forced to serve, while younger children were mobilized to work on the farm or in munition factories. The acute shortage of food weakened, sickened, and killed those infants who had remained in orphanages.⁸⁶ The life of Japanese orphans in metropolitan Japan was also threatened after the start of the Pacific War. Dozens of orphanages closed their doors due to the lack of donations.⁸⁷

Despite these pitiable conditions of orphanages, the number of war orphans grew rapidly. As the age of conscription was lowered (and raised to forty), the number of conscripted soldiers grew. Consequently, the number of orphans of low-ranking soldiers increased. Moreover, bombing of more than 200 cities and towns in metropolitan Japan rapidly increased the number of war orphans of civilian parents. The bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 was particularly gruesome: more than 100,000 people died, a million more were injured, and another million lost their homes in one night.⁸⁸ Those orphanages that barely survived could not accept all these war orphans.⁸⁹

Such conditions of life of orphans seem to have eliminated the distinction between “war orphans” of military fathers and “orphans” of civilian parents. Yet the State continued to privilege deceased soldiers' children. Kuroshima shares the following memories with us, the memories of the time before the confiscation of his orphanage.

One day, army's chief staff officer brought an orphan to our orphanage. He told me that “the father of this boy fought in the battlefield for the sake of our Emperor. Hence this boy is kokuji (国児), the nation's child. Showing mercy for him is not sufficient. You must offer him the best possible care you can think of.”⁹⁰

The officer tried to offer Kuroshima a bribe, expecting him to agree to take in the boy. Kuroshima refused the bribe, but accepted the boy, based on the institution's policy to accept any child who was brought to his orphanage. However, Kuroshima's memories also suggest that the “honorable children of the deceased military fathers” as well became human resources for the Japanese State, precisely because they were kokuji. This word, which refers to the child of a deceased soldier, was coined toward the end of the Pacific War. Once kokuji came of age, they were expected to be soldiers and take revenge on their fathers and brothers.

Nishimura, who first conceived the Shina koji project, resigned from the position of the chairman of Aigo-kai at the end of 1944, when dozens of Shina koji still remained in Japan.⁹¹ By then, his idea of “international social work” seems to have disintegrated. As the chair of the All Japan Congress on the Protection of Pre-school Children, he dedicated much of his time to demanding the State to make pre-school education compulsory for all Japanese children, whom he regarded as national assets and future “human resources” to construct the greater empire of Japan. Thus, in an article titled The Multiplication of Yamato People in the East Asia Co-Prosperous Sphere, he argued that “the most important key to prevent the fall of the nation is the number and the strength of its population.” He then described the ideal Yamato (Japanese) youth of the future as follows: the youth who overcame his narrow patriotism to Japan; the youth who nurtured his patriotism to East Asia and eventually to the world; and the youth who acquired excellent mental and physical strength to help lead the world. Here, Nishimura seems to have gone ahead of his compatriots and presented his new vision of “global” Japanese youth. Yet he also placed Japanese youth above the youth of all other nations. In other words, his globalism was merely the logic to hide his nationalism and imperialism. Shina koji were no longer “friends” but “servants” to the Japanese youth.⁹²

Chatani reports that the members of seinendan (village youth association) of the Japanese Empire met more than a dozen times to build “pan-imperial solidarity.” A gathering in Seoul in 1939 was particularly grand. “Four thousand Korean seinendan members welcomed 952 members and leaders from Japan, thirty from Taiwan, thirty from Manchuria, and twenty-five from five parts of China.”⁹³ In contrast, Japanese war orphans never met Shina koji, even though they were expected to create peace together in East Asia. Still, on March 31, 1939, the mayor of Tokyo invited the mayors of Man (Manchuria), Shi (China), and Mō (Mongolia) to the Mayors' Conference of East Asia, where he disclosed his plan to “extend his warm hands of salvation to the destitute orphans who huddle in the corner of Chinese cities.”⁹⁴ Nonetheless, he never initiated another Shina koji project in Tokyo.

In this article, I tried to show that the relief measures for orphans in Japan from 1867 and 1945 had been subordinated to the State's need to modernize the nation and win the war. Orphans were first expected to be the nation's children. They were then given, but merely in theory, the rights of the child, to be protected by the State and society in times of distress. But such rights were soon replaced by the obligations to serve the State as “human resources.” The State in turn “protected” them to make them useful. The State also insisted on dividing its subjects into combatant and noncombatant (civilian), based on the idea that soldiers and their families had offered “exceptional service to the nation.”⁹⁵ Katsuragi and Kuroshima challenged this view of the State and hoped to avoid the State's infiltration into the management of their private orphanages. However, as war escalated, both had no other choice but accepting the State's view. Yet Katsuragi, who lived through the First Sino–Japanese war and the Russo–Japanese war, wrote in the Monthly Report of January 1901, about the beauty of peace, the need to build the world without war, hatred and discrimination, and the importance of teaching orphans that intimidating the weak was a mortal sin.⁹⁶ He was a born pacifist. He challenged those polemicists who argued that philanthropy was merely a stopgap to save a few victims of war without searching for the cause of war. He was only interested in saving the small and the weak.

Nishimura's vision is fundamentally different from Katsuragi and Kuroshima. In 1939, he wrote:

Students of certain religions flatly deny the war. I understand their thinking, but as I further contemplate, I cannot but admit that the actions of war often build the road to lead humans to the surprisingly advanced world.⁹⁷

Indeed, it was the war that spawned Shina koji project, which should have brought “the surprisingly advanced world” to East Asia. Yet it turned out to be the project tied to Japan's nationalism and imperialism. Nishimura's view reminds me of the words of Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), Katsuragi's contemporary and a Christian. In 1905, a year after the end of the Russo–Japanese war, he wrote:

They passionately recite the need to care of war orphans, but they also beat the drum for the reward (利益 rieki) generated by war. So ridiculous and laughable is the philanthropy done by these men and women who believe in the righteousness of war. They are not friends of orphans. They are enemies of orphans.⁹⁸

Uchimura named these men and women “jingoists” (主戦論者 Shu-sen ron-ja), and further argued that the best philanthropy was publicly protesting against war.

Did “peace” after Japan's capitulation bring better social services for war orphans? My answer is a definitive no. The number of war orphans in metropolitan Japan was not even counted until 1948. In that year, the Ministry of Health and Welfare served them and came up with the number 123,511. This number was not cumulative from the beginning of the Second Sino–Japanese war, though. It was taken at one time in February 1948, and the postwar state (here with a small letter of s) did not make this result public until 1983.⁹⁹

The Allied powers, which occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952, deprived the bereaved families of soldiers of their pensions from 1946 to 1953. This action temporarily placed the war orphans of soldiers and those of civilian parents at the same rank. However, when the occupation ended, the government resumed the payment of pensions for the veterans and the bereaved families of soldiers and their descendants. Other Japanese people, who received pensions, compensations, rewards, or solarium from the postwar state were landlords who lost their land due to the land reform conducted by the Allied powers, repatriates who lost their property in Japan's former colonies, and the so-called hibaku-sha, who have continued to suffer from the effects of atomic bombing by the United States. They all received compensation because they offered “exceptional service to the nation” by having lost their assets or having suffered from the bombing by Japan's enemy, and yet having contributed to the reconstruction of Japanese nation.¹⁰⁰ Today, we often hear the slogan “without peace, there is no social welfare” (平和なくして福祉なし). Yet according to Asai Haruo, “peace” in this slogan means the absence of not only war but also poverty, oppression and discrimination on our globe.¹⁰¹

This article has focused mainly on orphans in orphanages. But there were countless war orphans in both Japan and China who were not institutionalized in orphanages. In the early-1990s, a group of war orphans of civilian parents in Japan began to speak of their memories. Most of them had been taken in by their distant relatives, yet they had been deprived of their rights, as children, to be raised well. In 2006, more than 100 Chinese men and women whose families had died in the Japanese army's bombing during the Second Sino–Japanese war brought a suit to the Japanese court asking for compensation and an apology from the Japanese state.¹⁰² Though many of them were already in their late eighties in 2006, the state has never responded to their demands. We still must continue to hear the memories of war orphans to realize “the surprisingly advanced world” without wars.