This is the fifth and final installment of a series.
In the searing August heat, Japanese wearing gas masks and protective clothing were manually digging up shells left behind by the Imperial Japanese Army in a mountainous area called Haerbaling in Dunhua, Jilin Province, in northeast China. This is a joint project by the Japanese and Chinese governments to dispose of chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army.
There are 300,000 to 400,000 shells containing toxic substances, which may induce breathing difficulties among other symptoms, buried in Haerbaling. A person related to the project said, "They are [even more] dangerous as they are rusted or partly damaged."
Except in the depths of winter when temperatures plummet to minus 20 C, more than 200 people, including former Self-Defense Forces personnel who are well versed in unexploded bomb disposal, are stationed in the remote town of Dunhua, which has a population of about 460,000.
This project began in 1999 after the Chinese government unofficially urged Japan to take measures for its abandoned chemical weapons in 1990. The Japanese government has been shouldering all the costs, which had exceeded a total of 220 billion yen as of 2016.
There was criticism that the Japanese government "gave too many concessions to China" at first, but a Japanese government official said, "This was a strategic judgment to contribute to the stabilization of Japan-China relations."
The current five excavation sites for abandoned chemical weapons are concentrated in northeast China, which was once Manchukuo (see below). It is thought that they are concentrated here because the Imperial Japanese Army imagined a series of future battles with the Soviet Union and brought many chemical weapons into this region as an important strategic position.
It is still unclear how many abandoned chemical weapons remain. For the past few years, weapons have been repeatedly found in dredging of river beds in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang Province, and other places. One person related to the operation said that it is "doubtful" that the Japanese government will achieve its target of completing all disposal work by 2022.
Family ties
Even now "the postwar" casts a dark shadow over northeast China. This is exactly why there have been movements to clear a path to a new era. Here you can find Japanese war orphans, who grew up in China after losing their relatives around the end of the war, and many of whom crossed over to Japan in the 1980s.
Their second- and third-generation descendants have "returned" to China one after another, in the hope of becoming bridges between the two countries.
On Sept. 18, 2012, which marked the 81st anniversary of the Munchurian Incident, a third-generation descendant and Kyushu native in his 30s sneaked into a crowd of demonstrators in front of the Japanese Consulate in Shenyang who were protesting Japan's nationalization of the Senkaku Islands in Okinawa Prefecture. He wanted to know what the Chinese were thinking as they protested.
One thing that surprised him was the people there who were telling the youths who were throwing firebombs to "stop." There were also some people taking part in the protest who did not understand the reason that they were there.
The man said, "Although the protest looked scary from far away, each person's feeling was definitely different." He opened an izakaya bar in Shenyang two years later. He has "never experienced" harassment from his customers. He knows at least five other second- and third-generation descendants in Shenyang, and all of them work in Japan-related jobs, he said.
Yoshiharu Ishizawa, 32, who is on temporary transfer from the Economy, Trade, and Industry Ministry to serve as a consul at the Japanese Consulate General in Guangzhou, is another third-generation descendant. His first-generation grandfather and his family settled in China from Yamagata Prefecture as migrants to Manchukuo.
Until Ishizawa crossed over to Yamagata Prefecture with his grandfather and the rest of his family when he was 13, he had been raised in a Heilongjiang village where he "could eat meat only around New Year's." At his Japanese junior high school, he was often bullied with taunts of "Hey, Chinese!"
Right now he is building connections with businesses and authorities in China to support the expansion of Japanese companies there. In his jurisdiction of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, the development of self-driving vehicles and artificial intelligence by Chinese companies has been progressing at a rapid pace, but Ishizawa has a sense of urgency that Western companies have been steaming ahead in these areas while Japanese-Chinese relations have been cooling.
He said: "I want to make use of China's good points while skillfully avoiding its bad points. It's such a waste for people to 'not to care about China anymore.'"
Ishizawa, who has been tossed around by the twists and turns of the Japan-China postwar relationship, concludes that the ideal for the two countries would be just like the "mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic interests" agreement that the Japanese and Chinese governments reached in 2007, which aims to mature the bilateral relationship while allowing both to reap its benefits.
--Manchukuo
The "Manchurian Incident" occurred in 1931 as the Kwangtung Army (Imperial Japanese Army) bombed the South Manchuria Railway on the outskirts of Shenyang, and Manchukuo came into being the following year with the involvement of the Kwangtung Army. It disappeared at the end of the war in 1945. Many of the war orphans that Chinese people took care of in the chaos immediately after the end of the war were actually the children of the Japanese families who had settled in Manchuria.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
