"Nihongo wakaranai"-"I don't understand Japanese"- is almost the extent of 71-year-old Nakamura Hiroshi's Japanese skills.
Now resident in Japan's Saitama Prefecture,Nakamura was born in Dunhua city, northeast China's Jilin Province.
He was less than a year old during the mass exodus of 1.55 million Japanese from what was then Manchuria, following Japan's defeat in the Second World War 70 years ago.
After Japan surrendered, the Japanese government endeavored to guarantee the repatriation of Japanese from China,Hong Kong, Taiwan and North Korea.
But those in Manchuria were deliberately left out as part of a thwarted plan by Japan's military to reclaim China's northeast shortly after the end of war.
Japanese migrants waiting to be repatriated in 1946 (Xinhua/File photo)
Nakamura was left behind along with tens of thousands of Japanese women and children.
Nakamura was adopted by a farming couple and raised in a Chinese family. He went to university and became a teacher, living in Dunhua for more than half a century.
Life was difficult in his early years. His adoptive father died when he was 8, and his adoptive mother died when he was 13. His adoptive older sister died when he was 15.
As an orphan, Nakamura was exempted from catering and tuition fees in high school. He received government welfare while studying at normal school.
After he became a teacher, government officials told him he was a Japanese orphan left behind after the war.
"I was shocked, but nothing could be done," he recalls.
He feared his ethnicity would bring trouble, but the authorities looked kindly on him: "Their view was that I wasn't a militarist just because I came from a Japanese family, so they didn't equate me with the thugs during the war."
In the following decade, Nakamura kept his true identity secret. He claimed to be Han Chinese and even joined the Communist Party of China.
In the early 1970s, Nakamura started to think about his "motherland". One day, he took his students to a museum in Changchun, capital of northeast China's Jilin Province, where he met a group of elderly Japanese "dressed all flowery andgreen". They approached the students and asked to take pictures with them.
The event struck a chord: "I felt that China and Japan were connected at last."
The Chinese government has strived to help Japanese war orphans to return to their home country since 1953. Japan's Ministry of Welfare records 35,000 people reunited with their families from 1953 to 1957.
On July 15, Japanese orphans returned to China to meet with representatives from China-Japan Friendship Association and Red Cross Society of China. (Xinhua/Yang Yijun)
In 1984, the two governments reached an agreement, formalizing the search for families of Japanese orphans. Since then, thousands of orphans have been reunited with long lost relatives.
But Nakamura is not one of them. Local police have introduced him to Japanese parents who were separated from their children, but none were his parents.
Of the 3,000 Japanese orphans whom he knows, about 60 percent have failed to find their families.
"It's not unusual," Nakamura says with resignation. "Many people died of starvation or cold during repatriation. Many drowned in the sea. Some attempted suicide. My parents might be long gone."
But many Japanese also chose not to return to their families.
"In some cases, parents had new families in Japan after their spouses died and refused to recognize their children from their previous family in China,"Nakamura explains. "Others didn't want their children from China to inherit their wealth."
Despite failing to contact his parents, Nakamura moved to Japan in 2002 with his family. "I wanted to see my home country,"he says.
However, at almost 60, Nakamura could not find a job and subsisted on government allowances. His son could barely speak Japanese, and could only work in factories.
"My son was discriminated against because of his poor command of the language. He was also paid less than other Japanese workers,"he says.
It's a familiar pattern among Japanese orphans who return. Born in 1945 in Heilongjiang Province, Kanou Kunihiro was a secondary school teacher before returning to Japan when he was 37: "After returning, I went all out learning Japanese, to the extent that I lost myhair."
After retraining, Kanou took up fridge and air-conditioning repair work, but language remained an obstacle.
"It only takes one sentence to determine from your accent whether you're Japanese or not,"Kanou says,"then people will intuitively shut you out."
Nakamura recalls the constant repetition of "I don't understand Japanese" whenever people came to collect housing fees or promote supermarket offers.
Another indignity was being unable to return to China to visit relatives. Once he went to China for half a month, but Japanese government officials halved his allowance for the month when they found out.
But when Nakamura and other returned Japanese protested, the situation changed.
Shortly after his return, he joined a support group of some 3,000 Japanese orphans who sued the Japanese government for compensation for their abandonment.
Initiated by director general Ikeda Sumie,the group filed class-action lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions and collected more than 100,000 signatures in a street petition calling for greater support.
Japanese orphans remembered dead Japanese migrants in a cemetary in Harbin.(Xinhua/Wang Hai)
After a series of actions, the Japanese government in 2007 passed a bill that raised the allowances for Japanese orphans returned from China. They also enjoyed free accommodation and healthcare, and travel restrictions were lifted.
Nakamura returned to China with other Japanese orphans again this year to celebrate the 70th anniversary of China's victory in the war: "We paid our own way,"he says.
During their week-long stay, they visited representatives of their Chinese adoptive parents, remembered the dead Japanese migrants in Manchuria at a cenotaph in Heilongjiang, and met with Vice President Li Yuanchao.
Next time when Nakamura comes to China, he wants to travel. "This time we were too rushed. Next time in Beijing, I want to see the Great Wall and Tiananmen."
