Distant Kin: Japan's "War Orphans" and the Limits of Ethnicity

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Distant Kin: Japan’s “War Orphans”and the Limits of EthnicityRob EfirdSeattle University

AbstractThis paper examines the treatment and repatriation of Japan’s “warorphans” (zanryu-- koji) in order to support a critique of “ethnicity” as an ana-lytical category. War orphans are people of Japanese parentage who as chil-dren were stranded in China following World War II. Most of the survivingwar orphans were then belatedly repatriated to Japan as adults beginning inthe late 1970s. Their stories and circumstances testify to the ways in whichconcepts of ethnicity and ethnic identity may tragically distort key empiricalcircumstances in ways that resemble the unscientific assumptions of “race.”[Keywords: ethnicity, race, culture, war orphans, Japan, China]

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 4, pp. 805–838, ISSN 0003-549. © 2010 by the Institute for EthnographicResearch (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

Distant Kin: Japan’s “War Orphans” and the Limits of Ethnicity

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IntroductionSince the 1960s, American anthropologists and sociologists have broadlyembraced ethnicity as a benign substitute for race (Banks 1997; Keyes 1997,2002; Glazer and Moynihan 1975; Hutchinson and Smith 1996). However,while the rejection of race and its specious biologism is both welcome andjustified, ethnicity itself remains a semantic and methodological muddle.Some scholars see ethnicity’s “mutable and situational” qualities as astrength that usefully distinguishes it from racial determinism.1 But in bothanalytical practice and everyday life, ethnicity’s ambiguity also invites thevery same associations with biology and behavior that made race so perni-cious. Indeed, the confusions of cultural heritage and biological heritabilitythat compose popular ideas of ethnicity often end up seeming all too simi-lar to the “race” that they were meant to replace. Since the scholarly use ofethnicity as an analytical category fails to resolve this confusion, we areobliged to reflect upon ethnicity’s limits. As one illustration, this paper con-siders the personal stories and experiences of “war orphans” (zanryu-- koji),whose lives between China and Japan demonstrate the ways in which ethnic-ity can be a tragic distraction from reality.

All of a sudden, it seems, we are living in “the era of ethnicity” where-in ethnicity “has now become a central issue in the social and political lifeof every continent.” (Hutchinson and Smith 1996:v). Yet despite the rapidproliferation of ethnicity as a term in post-1950s popular and academicdiscourse, social scientists remain divided on the question of its properinterpretation. Some argue that this is inevitable: as a widely cited recentstudy of ethnicity in Japan (Lie 2001:3) concludes, there is “no gettingaround [ethnicity’s] essentially ambiguous definition.” This impasse hasproduced calls for ethnicity’s rejection or supercession (by, for example,Erickson 1993 and Just 1989), while others contend that “ it is too late tokill it off or pronounce ethnicity dead; the discourse on ethnicity hasescaped from the academy and into the field…to be fed by politicians,journalists and ordinary citizens through their words and actions” (Banks1997:189). One might also add that much good has come from popularmobilizations of ethnic identity. At what cost, however? As we ponder theproper place of ethnicity in our social analyses, we must consider theways in which ethnicity’s ambiguity enables both social injustice and ana-lytical imprecision. Both are illustrated by Japan’s so-called “warorphans,” the children of WWII-era Japanese colonists who were strandedin China and raised by Chinese families. Belatedly repatriated to Japan as

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“Japanese,” yet culturally Chinese, their stories demonstrate how theembrace of ethnicity may have tragic consequences, and raise the ques-tion of ethnicity’s value as both a popular and scholarly category of analy-sis. As we will see, the dangers of ethnicity spring from the same confu-sion of biology and culture that renders “race” such a virulent illusion.

Though it was popularized as a “cultural” and thus non-biologicalalternative to race, ethnicity preserves many of the theoretical challengesof “race” and retains, in the popular imagination at least, many of thesame biological associations. Moreover, ethnicity has patently failed tosupplant race, which retains currency and “reality” as a popular idea eventhough it has been thoroughly discredited as a biological phenomenon.Instead of replacing race with a marker of cultural (rather than biological)affiliation, ethnicity draws its power from the very same bogus assump-tions about immutable, heritable “ethnic” characteristics and behavior.Given this state of affairs, we may wonder whether our use of ethnicity insocial analysis lends scientific legitimacy to race-like notions of common“blood” that are biologically untenable and often socially divisive. Do ourincessant testimonies to ethnicity’s fluidity and subjectivity paradoxicallyfix and reify the very same idea? And if so, can ethnicity be preserved asa viable term of analysis, or must we recruit (or invent) an alternative?

The experiences of Japan’s war orphans demonstrate the frailty of eth-nicity as a popular notion of group membership. They further suggest thatethnicity as a mode of social analysis is deeply flawed. Though its adop-tion by social scientists was well-intentioned, the use of ethnicity as ananalytical category may unintentionally lend legitimacy to unscientificideas about blood-based “ethnic groups.”

Blood GroupsOne of the most incisive and influential perspectives on ethnic identifica-tion remains that of Max Weber, whose self-described “vague generaliza-tions” about ethnic membership (Gemeinsamkeit) were written in the early20th century. Ethnicity, he wrote, was fundamentally “a subjective interpre-tation of descent” or “the belief in the affinity or disaffinity of blood”(Weber 1968 [1922]:394). Thus while in practice ethnic identification maydraw upon a wide variety of shared associations and affiliations in the formof language, religion, geographical origin, behavior, attire, and so forth, itis the language of common “blood” (biological descent) that seems to speak


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most persuasively (see also Just 1989). Such myths of origin and descent arewhat Smith (1986:24) calls the “sine qua non of ethnicity, the key elementsof that complex of meanings which underlie the sense of ethnic ties andsentiments for the participants.” Hence ethnicity’s persistent associationwith race, since both are popularly linked to biological descent, and thenceto biologically based behavior, appearance, and essence.

Weber was acutely sensitive to the political uses of ethnicity and therole of ethnic identification in forming so-called “ethnic groups.” But hewas careful to distinguish between ethnicity and the ethnic groups them-selves: “ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitatesgroup formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere”(1968:389). Weber’s distinction usefully clarifies ethnicity as a rhetoricalconstruct rather than an empirical constant, a “constructivist” positionthat would later be substantiated by Barth et al.’s (1969) classic work onethnic groups and boundaries. Unlike Barth and many other scholarstoday, however, Weber felt that the concept’s ambiguity rendered it“unsuitable” for analysis. If, Weber wrote, we were to make a detailedstudy of “ ‘ethnically’ determined social action…it is certain that in thisprocess the collective term ‘ethnic’ would be abandoned, for it is unsuit-able to a really rigorous analysis” (1968:395).

Recently, Brubaker (2004) has made a similar argument against the useof ethnicity as a category of analysis. He urges us to conceptualize ethnic-ity, race and nation

“not as substances or things or entities or organisms or collectiveindividuals—as the imagery of discrete, concrete, tangible, bound-ed, and enduring “groups” encourages us to do—but rather in rela-tional, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms. Thismeans thinking of ethnicity, race, and nation not in terms of sub-stantial groups or entities but in terms of practical categories, situ-ated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames,organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, andcontingent events. It means thinking of ethnicization, racializationand nationalization as political, social, cultural and psychologicalprocesses.” (Brubaker 2004:11)

Similarly, the following discussion treats ethnicity as an insubstantialand frequently contested variable in a process of ethnic identification. In

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the case of Japan’s war orphans and their repatriation from China toJapan, the collision between divergent ethnic identifications supportsWeber’s and Brubaker’s views on the futility of using ethnicity as a con-stant category of analysis. When trying to make sense of the experiencesof the war orphans and their treatment in Japan, we find firmer analyti-cal purchase with categories like citizenship, language, family, and eventhe much-maligned concept of culture. By documenting the failure of eth-nic identification to catalyze group coherence, my hope is to refocus ouranalytical attention upon just such categories and away from the abuse ofethnicity as a concrete “thing.” For as Brubaker notes, “being analytical-ly attuned to ‘negative’ instances in this way enlarges the domain of rel-evant cases, and helps correct for the bias in the literature toward thestudy of striking instances of high groupness, successful mobilization, orconscious violence—a bias that can engender an ‘overethnicized’ view ofthe social world” (2004:12).

Distant Kin: Japan’s “War Orphans”“War orphan” is a term applied to more than two thousand men andwomen of Japanese parentage who as infants or young children were sep-arated from their families in Japan’s informal colony of Manchuria (north-east China) during and following the chaotic conclusion of the Asia-PacificWar. Most of these orphans were taken in by Chinese foster families andthen stranded in China for more than three decades, unaware or unsure oftheir true parentage and cut off from their Japanese kin, the Japanese lan-guage, and Japanese society. In Japanese, these individuals are officiallyidentified as Chu--goku zanryu-- Nihon(jin) koji, literally “Japanese orphansthat remained in China.”2 Following the normalization of Sino-Japanesediplomatic relations in 1972, Japanese activists and influential sympathiz-ers (most of whom were former colonists and soldiers in Manchuria) com-pelled the Japanese government to support the identification, repatria-tion, and resettlement of these orphans. Largely as a result of such efforts,over 2,500 adult war orphans have “returned” to Japan.3

Historical accounts of the war orphans often begin with August 9, 1945,the day that the Soviet Union’s military forces crossed into northeastChina and mounted a devastating attack on Japanese in the puppet stateof Manchuria (Manshu--koku). The Japanese popular and official tendencyto begin with this date avoids explaining how and why Japan’s govern-


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ment had actively promoted Manchuria’s colonization for many yearsprior to this time. In fact, on the day of the Russian attack more than amillion and-a-half Japanese nationals were in the region, including sol-diers, Manchurian railway employees, colonial settlers and their families.After aggressively promoting Manchurian colonization for almost adecade, however, the Japanese government then effectively abandonedits civilian colonists when the Russians attacked: the day after the initialassault, the Japanese army in Manchuria was ordered to fall back anddefend Japan’s interests in Korea, leaving an estimated 223,000 Japanesecolonists then in Manchuria to flee and fend for themselves. More than athird perished. An estimated 11,500 people died by violence (amongwhom almost half died by suicide), and an appalling 67,000 people—mostly women, children, and the elderly—succumbed to starvation anddisease during the horrific months of flight and captivity that precededmass group repatriations to Japan.4 During this chaotic period, severalthousand Japanese infants and children were taken in to Chinese house-holds. Their circumstances varied: some children had lost their parents toviolence or sickness, while others had simply become separated in theconfused retreat. Still others were given to local families for safekeepingby parents who feared for their health or safety. Although some of theseinfants and children were subsequently included in the succession ofmass repatriations that followed, when the 1958 cessation of Sino-Japanese cooperation put an end to organized repatriations, an estimat-ed ten thousand or so Japanese still remained in China (Araragi 2000b:25).

Among the hundreds of thousands of unrepatriated Japanese whosepostwar fate Dower calls “a neglected chapter among the countless epictragedies of World War II” (Dower 1999:50), thousands of these Japaneseorphans remained in China for decades, unacknowledged by Japan’s gov-ernment. They grew up far from their Japanese kin as the foster childrenof Chinese families, many in poor rural areas of China’s northeast. Mostwent on to marry Chinese spouses, raise children, and pursue their liveli-hoods in China. Some orphans knew of their Japanese parentage, andthose whose backgrounds were known to others often suffered persecu-tion as a result, particularly during the various political movements of the1950s and 1960s, such as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). But othersgrew up entirely unaware of their Japanese parentage until late in life.Many orphans were mere infants when they were abandoned, and theywere often shielded from their past by well-intentioned foster parents

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who moved frequently to prevent others from divulging the secret. Japanand Japanese were widely reviled in China after the war, a feeling fed bypersonal and family suffering under Japanese aggression and postwarpropaganda films. As a result, children identified as Japanese would oftenface persecution. However, even those orphans who were identified (orthemselves identified) as Japanese retained little if anything in the way ofJapanese socialization or language skills and, therefore, became cultural-ly indistinguishable from the Chinese with whom they grew up.

Despite their unfamiliarity with Japanese language and culture, many ofthe war orphans who knew of their Japanese background strongly identifiedthemselves as Japanese and hoped to eventually go to Japan to seek theirbiological family members. Having failed to return to Japan prior to the 1958break in Sino-Japanese cooperation, however, they had little choice but toremain in China for almost a quarter of a century, and often longer.

Ikeda’s story5

Ikeda was born in the city of Mudanjiang in 1944, the youngest of fivechildren in the family of a Japanese soldier. She was just 10 months old atthe war’s end when her mother, too weak to produce milk while fleeingthe advance of the Soviet army with Ikeda’s four older siblings, chose toentrust her infant daughter to the care of a Chinese family rather than lether die of starvation. This first foster family already had children, soIkeda was subsequently passed to a childless couple surnamed Xu, wholived on the outskirts of Mudanjiang city. Life was pretty good, she toldme. Her foster father earned a good income as a merchant and her moth-er doted on her and dressed her in immaculate white clothes. But Ikeda’searliest memories were of being teased as a Japanese.

“When I went out, other kids would call me ‘little Japanese! LittleJapanese!’ (‘xiao riben renr, xiao riben renr’). Everyone around knew I wasJapanese.” She asked her (foster) mother what the other children meant,but her mother told her not to listen to them. She wanted to play with theother kids, but they refused, saying “If you want to play you have to crawlover here, like a dog…if the little Japanese devil wants to play, she has tocrawl like a dog.” Though she was afraid of soiling her clean whiteclothes, her desire to play with the other kids was stronger. When hermother saw her dirty clothes and heard what had happened, she tookIkeda to the homes of the other children and spoke with their parents,


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who told their children not to bully her. After that she was able to playwith them without being teased. “This is my clearest memory of when Iwas young. It was when I was 4 or 5, before I started school.”

Ikeda was thus aware of her Japanese heritage, “but even though Iknew, I was really afraid,” she continued. Because when the school-teacher would take the class to go see patriotic movies about the war, “myclassmates all knew I was Japanese. So when the kids saw those Japanesedevils killing and burning they would say ‘you little Japanese! Overthrow(dadao) the Japanese devils!’ Some spit in my face. They were kids,” shesaid. “You can forgive them for hating the Japanese, because the Japanesehurt the Chinese, right? But I hadn’t done anything bad. So…they wouldspit on me and later I wouldn’t even dare watch the movies. They all satand watched and I just huddled on the floor.”

After a number of these painful experiences, Ikeda ceased to acknowl-edge that she was Japanese. “I knew in my heart. But I would still say thatI was Chinese, not Japanese. Why? Because all the things I saw in thosemovies were awful things. Japanese did terrible things. I didn’t want to bea bad person. So I thought, I’m not Japanese. I’m not that bad.” Still, shethought often about Japan, even though as an 8-year old she had no ideaof what Japan was like. When she went to school she would look at themap: “There’s Japan! I’m from there! My home is there. It was tiny. But itwas in the east; that’s where the sun rises. It must be nice, because that’swhere the sun comes from.…but why are the people there so bad?”

She went home and asked her mother: “ ’Ma, what are Japanese peoplelike? Are they all as bad as those people in the movies?’” She said no;there are good people and bad people in Japan, just like China. “But thatwas just what my mom said. I still didn’t believe her. Then I asked theneighbors, people who were older. Lots of them told me that Japanesearen’t all that bad. So I felt a little better.”

“When I was 13 the Chinese police came again.6 That was 1958…Thefirst time I didn’t go home, in 1953. Because I didn’t acknowledge that Iwas Japanese. My mom didn’t either. Plus I was so young, I didn’t haveany relatives; who would I look for if I went back? So I didn’t. But theycame again in 1958. At 13, I still couldn’t go if there wasn’t anyone there[in Japan]. Later [the PSB people] told me that if I didn’t want to go backto Japan, then when I turned 18 I should go to the PSB and take Chinesecitizenship. Later, for other reasons, I didn’t dare do that, so I didn’t takeChinese citizenship.”7

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As Ikeda grew older, the bullying gradually ceased and she got on wellwith her schoolmates. But no matter where she went—whether shechanged schools or moved house—her Japanese parentage was known tothose around her. “After I grew older, I gradually became aware that Iwasn’t Chinese after all. But I had grown up in China; I was no differentfrom the Chinese…I thought, The people who raised me are Chinese.What I ate and drank, the air I breathed—all that was Chinese. So I didn’tfeel like I was any different from the Chinese. For my part, I really likeChina. If you were to ask me which country I like better, China or Japan,I don’t make any distinctions or have any preferences—I love both…bothare my homeland (muguo).”

“But although I knew I was Japanese, when I was in China, when I wasyoung, I had no opportunity to look for my relatives. Because Japan andChina were enemy countries. There was no chance to write letters. Evenamong us orphans, nobody dared contact one another.” Were there otherorphans around you? I asked. “There were some. I knew that, but I didn’tdare contact them…if we were to contact one another, that might causeus trouble in the future. They might say we were organizing a ‘reactionarygroup’ (fandong jituan) or something. So we never got in touch. I wouldknow that [such-and-such] person was Japanese, that she was a Japaneseoba--san8 (grandmother; older woman), but we never contacted one anoth-er. But I knew that I was Japanese. And I wondered—how could I not won-der?—Who is my mother? Who is my father? What are my older brothersand sisters like? Who is in my family? I wondered about all of this…Ilonged for my own homeland, I longed for my own relatives. I reallylonged for them. If I was busy, I couldn’t pay attention. But if I wasn’tbusy and had a little time, I would think about my background…What’smy real name? When was I really born? Why does everyone have parentsand I don’t?”

After graduating from middle school and completing a three-yearteacher’s training school, in 1962 Ikeda was placed in an extremelyremote region as an elementary school teacher. She drew this assignmentbecause her Japanese background meant that she was given the leastdesirable opening, far from the urban centers where most graduateswanted to work. Ironically, the isolation helped insulate her from the per-secution that some orphans experienced during the subsequent CulturalRevolution. Still, “during the Cultural Revolution I was terrified. BecauseI was Japanese…I was extra cautious about everything I did.” She was


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enthusiastic and diligent in her work, and was recognized as an “out-standing teacher.”

In 1969, Ikeda married. I asked her if her husband knew at the timethat she was Japanese. He did, she said, and though others warned himagainst marrying her, he did not care. Moreover, they were living in thatremote area and she had a teaching position, so there did not seem to beany “obstacles.” Ikeda continued to work hard at her job, and eventuallyher diligence was rewarded when her work unit sent her to continue herstudies at a two-year teacher’s vocational school in the city ofMudanjiang. When she was busy she would focus on her work, but as soonas she had a free moment, or when she was unhappy, she would wonder“Why am I Japanese? Why was I left here? Why didn’t my parents bring meback with them?” And she would feel resentful. She envied her colleagueswith siblings; during school vacations they would visit their families whileIkeda was left by herself, “ terribly lonely.” “I often wondered: When willI be able to find my home? When will I able to find out who my “own”(qinshen; i.e., biological) parents are? I thought about these things con-stantly. That’s not to say that my Chinese foster parents were bad tome…My Chinese foster mother was extremely good, as kindhearted as aBodhisattva. It’s just that all along I was thinking about my background(shenshi), wanting to know what it actually was.”

Ikeda continued hoping for an answer to her questions until, in 1972,Japan and China abruptly re-established diplomatic ties. During our inter-view, she struggled for the words to describe her elation upon hearing thenews: “I was beside myself. Everything vanished. All of a sudden ‘I saw thesky’…I was so happy, so happy. All along I had been thinking I wasJapanese and nothing would work out: I couldn’t join the Party, couldn’tmove up. Other people constantly said I was Japanese, so I always felt thatI was lower than others. Even if you try harder, you feel you’re not as goodas them. So when China and Japan established friendly relations, I was sohappy…I cried tears of happiness. I couldn’t sleep at night…Ah, [Ithought,] Japanese aren’t the enemy any more…now I’m not the enemy.”

Ikeda’s lengthy depression began to lift and she began to feel happier.“My heart was like a flower that had bloomed. Now I can be like otherpeople, with an equal status.” Because of the positive change in Sino-Japanese relations, she also decided to begin looking for her Japanese rel-atives. This process, and a series of dramatic twists, eventually broughther to Japan with her husband and children.

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Once in Japan, Ikeda’s children all entered Japanese public schools, butprogressed very slowly and were repeatedly held back. They were alsobullied for being “Chinese.” Ikeda explained that when they were inChina, she and her children were teased as being “little Japanese” (xiaoRiben ren), but in Japan people called them all Chinese. “There are stillpeople who call me ‘Chinese.’ The people who know me all know that Iam Japanese. But if it is someone who doesn’t know me, they immediate-ly say ‘you’re Chinese.’”

Do you ever miss China? I asked towards the end of our interview. “Imiss it, I really do,” she replied. “I’ve also felt at times—times like whenI didn’t have work—that it would be great if I could return to China andlive there…Because Chinese are really warm, and they are able to com-municate with one another. If I have trouble, I don’t need to say so—aperson who sees that will help me. But Japanese, if you have trouble theywon’t even look at you.”

I asked Ikeda about the discovery of her biological older sister. Fouryears ago you found your true…I began. “My true family. My true oldersister, older brother, younger sister.” What was that feeling like? “At thetime it was so…you could say that the hope of my life had at last beenrealized. My goal [after returning to Japan] was to not impose on anyone:I’ll work, and I don’t need anyone to take care of me. But all my life I’vewondered, where did I come from? I wanted to know my own identity(shenfen). So when I found out at last I was really happy. Because mywhole life, I haven’t asked any favors—I just wanted to know this onething about myself. So after I found out I was really happy. But, after all,”she continued, “we didn’t grow up together. Although we have the sameparents, the same blood relationship (xuetong), there’s still no feelings tospeak of.” Your parents are both deceased? I asked. “Both deceased. Butas far as feelings are concerned, if we had grown up together and weretogether every day, maybe then there would be feelings. I hadn’t seenthem for over fifty years. Where would the feelings come from?”

Aren’t most orphans like you? I asked. For some fifty years they havenot seen their siblings, parents, and so forth. But still, the feelings…“Arethere,” she affirmed. “There are some…But what I mean to say is, there’snot the feeling people have when they really grow up together. There’s noway that there could be absolutely no feelings. After all, they are family.But the feelings aren’t deep. You could put it that way. Not deep. To saythere aren’t any–that’s not realistic either.”


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Just babies at the time when they were orphaned, many so-called warorphans have no memory of their biological parents and little but the tes-timony of their foster parents as evidence of their Japanese descent.Given the searing experience of Japanese colonialism, many foster par-ents hid their Japanese foster children’s origins to avoid discrimination.Some even moved several times to avoid detection. During the CulturalRevolution and other xenophobic political movements that convulsedChina during the 1950s and 1960s, any physical evidence of Japaneseparentage was often destroyed for similar reasons. Even following the eas-ing of political activity and the improvement of Sino-Japanese relations inthe 1970s, some elderly foster parents continued to hide their children’sJapanese parentage for fear that the orphan would then abandon them inorder to go to Japan. As it happened, many orphans who knew of theirJapanese parentage actually delayed return to Japan in order to care fortheir Chinese foster parents.

Matsui’s Story9

Matsui began our interview by explaining how he ended up in Manchuria.Long after the fact, he was told that his family in Japan consisted of sevenpeople: two grandparents, his parents, him, and an older and younger sis-ter. During the war, Japanese military officials came to his family’s homenear Osaka and, for some reason, compelled his mother to leave withthem. She then went to China, but later returned to get Matsui and bringhim back there with her. “Around 1942 or 43, when I was probably about4 or 5, my mother took me from Japan to China. That time isn’t very clearbecause I was so young, but I remember riding a boat.” Departing Japanhe remembers being impressed by the passengers’ reactions to the sightof spiked balls floating in the water, part of what he now assumes to havebeen a floating minefield. He remembers arriving at a port that night(probably Korea), boarding a train with his mother and a group of otherJapanese women, and later disembarking and then walking with his moth-er over a short bridge and through a city.

Matsui had arrived in Tumen, a small city (of about 20,000 or 30,000peo-ple at the time) in Jilin Province near China’s border with Korea. In 1998,Matsui revisited this place before returning to Japan and discovered that thebridge and the Japanese-style building where his mother had worked stillstood. He remembers that the place was named the “Sho--wa Inn” (Zhaohe

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luguan), “an authentically Japanese-style inn (ryokan). All the people werewomen, with one man, probably the manager.” Matsui shared a single roomwith his mother, while the other women slept four to a room.

His memories of the next two years are fragmentary. Matsui remembersthe kindness of the male innkeeper, a tree flowering in the courtyard, somesort of Japanese celebration that he witnessed on the street in front of thehotel. Then one day the bombing and machine-gun strafing began. The man-ager of the hotel dug a makeshift bomb shelter in the kitchen, where theyall sought shelter and plugged the opening with blankets. One night severaldays later, Matsui recalls, his mother suddenly began packing their things toleave. “I was almost seven then. I carried a backpack, a little book bag, andin the book bag—I remember clearly—was half a rice ball. My motherstuffed lots of clothes into a sheet, tied it up and put it on her back. All theJapanese fleeing the city carried stuff like that.” They and the rest of thehotel’s employees left the hotel and joined a throng of people fleeing thecity under the cover of darkness. Matsui and his mother were soon separat-ed from the others in the crush of people, which was headed out of the cityand into the nearby hills. “We walked a long, long time. Then just beforedawn we arrived at a grove of trees, very dense…after arriving at these darkwoods, it was as if people realized that they had arrived at their destination.So everyone rested there. But cooking food was strictly forbidden” becausethey did not want to risk the smoke exposing their hiding place. He and hismother subsided on the rice ball he had brought “and probably 4 or 5 dayslater we didn’t have anything left to eat.” Others had not eaten for days, andwere preparing to return to the city. There was a big discussion among therefugees: people said that the [Russian] Red Army had entered the city andthe Japanese army was gone, and they speculated about what the Sovietswould do to them if they found them. “But some people had no food, andhad no choice but to walk back. Later, we went back too.”

Matsui and his mother returned to the hotel, which was situated in oneof the city’s major “developed areas” (kaifa qu) and surrounded by otherJapanese-run stores and hotels. All of the stores were looted and stripped oftheir contents and valuables, right down to their doors and windows. “Atthis point we had no choice; we didn’t have any food, so we started to beg.We went other places looking for food but found nothing. There were toomany people [begging]. Lots of Japanese.” Tumen was situated on one ofthe major transportation arteries running from Soviet Siberia into China,and its strategic importance accounted for the large presence of Japanese


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military there. Matsui heard later that the fighting between Japanese andSoviet troops in the area had been intense, with many casualties.

“Since there wasn’t anyone to take care of the rotting corpses left bythe war, infectious diseases started spreading. The infections were seri-ous: If one in four survived he was lucky…Both my mother and I wereinfected. It was severe, like being on the verge of death. One cause wasthe contamination of our surroundings, the other was the food we ate.Most of the things we picked up, or were given…they weren’t very clean.”

One day, Matsui and his mother went to a large factory outside the citythat had been abandoned by the Japanese and was now occupied byChinese. There was a Chinese man who wanted to take them in there, butinstead they decided to seek refuge in the city’s Railway Hospital withsome several hundred other Japanese. “Most were women and children.There were no men.” Though the hospital grounds were large, the num-bers grew and the unsanitary crowding spread disease. Matsui’s motherdecided to leave and return to a factory outside the city, where a Chineseman that they had met earlier took them in.

“My mother remarried with that man, and we lived with his Chinesefamily. But it wasn’t a month, maybe twenty days later, I went to bed onenight and the next morning I woke up and tried to wake my mother tomake breakfast. But she wouldn’t get up. We slept in the same bed, so Ishook her, but she didn’t move. I realized she was dead.” The infectionhad killed her. Matsui remembers that the man who had taken them inwas deeply anguished by his mother’s death. The grieving man gatheredsome friends and made a coffin using wood from the factory, then carriedMatsui’s mother up in the hills for burial.

After his mother’s death, Matsui was determined to leave and return tothe hotel, a place he associated with home. After lengthy searching and abrief stay at a Chinese family’s home, he was overjoyed when he found hisold home. There he also found an old Japanese woman who had donecleaning in the hotel. When Matsui arrived she was pumping water, tend-ing the fire for the kang (a heated sleeping platform common in China’snortheast) and boiling something to eat over the fire in a metal Japanesearmy helmet. “ I was so happy to see her I ran up and hugged her. I said,‘my mom is gone’…At the time, when my mom died, I didn’t feel like cry-ing. But when I was older and understood what death meant, aiya, itbecame painful to remember.” The older Japanese woman took Matsui in,and they began to beg for food together.

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One day while begging, they came to the house of a woman surnamedXu. Xu’s husband had died many years ago when she was only 28, leavingher to support four boys and two girls as a seamstress. When Matsui met her,Xu was around 50 years old, and she was living with her youngest daughter,her 25-year-old fourth son and his wife. The son, who Matsui would cometo address as “Fourth Uncle,” had been exposed to Japanese colonial edu-cation and spoke Japanese. Childless after a year or two of marriage, theman negotiated with the old Japanese woman and arranged with her totake Matsui in as his son. The old woman then left Matsui with this Chinesefamily, admonishing him to stay put there and behave. She said she wouldtry to return if she survived. When she left she took with her a small quan-tity of grain given by the Xu family; Matsui subsequently bore a record ofthis exchange in the two characters of his Chinese given name.10

Matsui was not unhappy at his new home. He survived his illness, whichhis Xu “Grandmother” treated with painful folk remedies. There was food toeat and a place to sleep, and he learned Chinese quickly with the help of hisJapanese-speaking “Uncle.” He started school at age eight and a half, andthough he initially fought with kids who teased him as a “little Japanese kid”or a “little beggar,” this teasing gradually faded as he grew older.

In his elementary school, Matsui met many Japanese children whosemothers had remarried to Chinese men. He spent a great deal of time atthe home of one such child whose mother had known his own mother. In1953, when there was another large repatriation of Japanese remaining inChina, this family agreed to take Matsui back to Japan with them. However,the Xu family’s permission was required and they refused to let him go.

Matsui continued with his elementary schooling, which he receivedfree because one of the older Xu sons had fought with the ChineseLiberation Army and, therefore, his relatives received special benefits. Butthe free schooling ended after elementary, and after one year of middleschool Matsui quit to find work.

Throughout this time there had been successive waves of Japaneserepatriation, and yet another chance for return presented itself to Matsuiin the form of a local Japanese couple, doctors who had run a private clin-ic in Tumen before the war. Like many skilled Japanese in Manchuria, theywere “retained” by the new Chinese government for their technicalexpertise, and set to work training Chinese doctors. Around 1955 or 1956,they were told that they could return to Japan, and Matsui agreed to gowith them. But despite his own express desire to return, again the Xu fam-


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ily refused to let him go. Later, he received one letter from the doctorsupon their return to Japan, in which they urged him to come join them.But that was the last he heard. “Now, later on, I think back and reallyregret this…If I had returned then, who knows what my situation wouldbe like now?” he muses.

“After that there weren’t any more people telling me to go back toJapan…they had all gone back.” For the next forty years, Matsui workedat a variety of factory manufacturing jobs, eventually attaining manage-rial status, married and raised a family in China. His Japanese identity wasno secret from his wife (who he married in 1966), but when he left hishome in Tumen to search for work in the city of Mudanjiang, a friend’sconnections with the police enabled him to initially hide his Japaneseidentity by registering as a Han Chinese. Matsui had actually sought to for-mally change his registration to that of a Chinese, but there was noresponse to his inquiries and he eventually gave up. Matsui’s Japaneseidentity was eventually known to his employers, but he escaped persecu-tion during the Cultural Revolution by being “prudent” and careful toavoid attracting people’s attention.

After the resumption of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations in 1972,Matsui continued as before, focusing on his life in China and deferring anyplans for Japan until later. In 1985 (unbeknownst to Matsui), his Japaneseelder sister visited Shanghai with a tour group, and while there she madeinquiries about him through official channels. This information reachedhim several years later when a Public Security Bureau (PSB) officer sud-denly showed up at his workplace. The PSB official asked Matsui why hehad never expressed an interest in returning to Japan, and Matsui repliedthat he had not given it much thought. At that point in time Matsui wassatisfied with his life in China, where he had become a Communist Partymember11 and held a high-ranking leadership position in his work unit.Like many other orphans that returned in the 1990s, Matsui decided towait until his retirement in China before moving forward with any plansto go to Japan. He knew from the experience of other war orphans that hewould probably have to accept a life on welfare once he arrived, and hewanted to work as long as he was able. But he saw advantages to his chil-dren in living in Japan, and he felt a strong affective connection to Japanas the place where he belonged. In the interval, he refrained from pursu-ing any contact with his purported Japanese relations because he did notwant to invite “hassles” from the police.

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In 1994, nearing retirement, Matsui tried to contact the JapaneseMinistry of Health and Welfare (MHW) but received no response and gaveup. A year later he learned the proper contact address via some otherreturning orphans and succeeded in contacting the MHW. Why did youdecide to go back to Japan? I asked. “It seems to be connected to myblood relation (xuetong guanxi),” he replied. Though he was quite youngwhen he was orphaned and a long time had elapsed since then, “I alwayshad this perspective. This perspective can’t be changed. Namely, that mycountry isn’t there. My country is here. Because my original background(ben shenshi) is Japanese [lit., “Yamato people”: Dahe minzu].”

Like many war orphans, Matsui seems to have a strong affective senseof his Japaneseness that was typically explained to me (if I asked) with ref-erence to blood descent. There is no way to definitively unpack how this“Japaneseness” might be felt, but it was clear that it varied from oneorphan to another. We can imagine, for example, how Matsui’s vivid mem-ories of his mother and a brief “Japanese” boyhood might distinguish hisown feelings of identification from those felt by Ikeda.

Feelings aside, Matsui’s official identification as a Japanese was clear—he was registered as a Japanese in China and his original Japanese namewas accurately recorded in the form of his childhood signature. So he didnot have any difficulty being designated as an orphan by the Japanese gov-ernment. In 1996, he came with his wife to Japan on a state-sponsored rel-ative-seeking tour. As was customary before and during each tour, the tourparticipants’ background information and photographs were widely circu-lated in Japan’s national papers and broadcast on television. Matsui’s oldersister recognized him from this profile and sought him out during the tour’sstop in Osaka. There they met after more than half a century in a reunionMatsui characterized as “cordial” (qinqie), but also—on the contrary—“per-functory” (fuyan). Matsui explained that his plans to return to Japan weremade without any consideration for his Japanese relations, since he did notexpect to find them. Nor did he expect them to find or acknowledge him.For her part, Matsui’s older sister counseled them through a translator tothink hard before deciding to come back and stay in Japan. “Their opinionwas that if China was fine, I ought to stay there.” Matsui showed me the let-ters his older sister had written him after their meeting, reiterating her con-cerns and urging him to reconsider coming to Japan.

Perhaps they worried that you would be a burden, I ventured. “Maybe so.Because these people have no idea what sort of assistance measures their


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government takes. So they feel that if we come back it will be a huge bur-den…Maybe that’s it. So they didn’t really approve of me coming back.” Butyou still wanted to come back, I prompted. “I had made up my mind beforeeven meeting them. Whether you acknowledge me or not, I am still going toreturn to my homeland. I didn’t return when I was young. Now I’m old; if Idon’t return to my homeland now there wont be any more chances.”

Do you have any contact with your Japanese relatives? I asked. “Verylittle,” he responded. He and his wife visited his sister’s family once to payhis respects at their family grave, but after that their contact has beenconfined to the occasional letter and the exchange of simple New Year’sgifts. “They wrote saying they wanted to come and see us. They were sup-posed to come last year, but they didn’t come.” Do you want to introduceyour children to them? I asked. “They [his sister and her family] haven’texpressed an interest in that, or a desire for closer relations. Our siblingrelationship isn’t even that close.”

“Still,” he mused, “having met [my older sister] I’d also really like totalk with her about the impressions I recall from when I was small, thethings that happened in our childhood—but I don’t have the language toexpress it. When I went and visited them, my sister even called together abunch of people that were my friends when I was little. Together we usedbroken Japanese conversation and writing to communicate simply withone another.” His memories of Japan are faint, however, and the Japan heknew has changed dramatically. Modern buildings have long sincereplaced the thatched roof farmhouse and rice paddies he can vaguelydiscern in the memories of his distant childhood.

When Matsui informed his relatives that he had found a guarantor inTokyo, “they never said ‘you don’t need him—come back to Osaka.’ Theydidn’t say that. Even if they really were to say that I still wouldn’t go.”Matsui had already decided he wanted to go to Tokyo, the nation’s capi-tal, where he believed that the “conditions and environment” were bet-ter. He now feels vindicated in his choice, and mentions that his childrenare very happy there.

Fictive KinMy conversations with Matsui and Ikeda, two among nearly fifty orphansthat I interviewed,12 suggested that many of the differences dividing theorphans arise from the timing of their return. Like many recent repatri-

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ates, Matsui had returned to Japan after retirement in China, and he isresigned to a life supported (and restricted) by welfare. At the beginningof one interview, we were flipping through Matsui’s Japanese languagehomework. He was making an effort to learn Japanese, but confessed thatit was difficult—his memory was poor, progress was slow, the Japaneseclass was over an hour away, and he and his wife had no opportunities tospeak Japanese with anyone but the teacher. “People like us aren’t ableto interact with Japanese, and we don’t go out and try to,” he said. Whenhe needs to make himself understood in a public place or at the wardoffice, he says that he uses a combination of spoken vocabulary words andwritten Chinese characters. “For people like us who have been in Japanfor three or four years, writing is our sole means of going outside andinteracting, of being able to express our meaning and wishes.”

Although many war orphans and their family members claim to haveexperienced forms of discrimination in the work place, often due to lan-guage difficulties, Matsui had never worked in Japan and did not reportany encounters with prejudice. In his limited contacts with Japanese, hesays it is easier to just pass as someone who “came from China.” “MostJapanese have no idea what the words ‘war orphan’ (canliu gu’er) mean.They just know that there were people there during the war, but theydon’t know what happened afterwards. And they don’t make an effort tounderstand these things.”

Matsui’s eldest daughter, her husband, and their young daughter hadarrived in Japan just six months before my visits, and they were just about tomove to an apartment of their own. The daughter had already found workin a Japanese department store, and according to Matsui things had gonesmoothly for them largely because she had taken Japanese citizenship.

It became apparent that Matsui had been unusually thorough andmeticulous about planning his return to Japan. During the relative-seek-ing tour in which he participated before moving his family to Japan, hehad done a great deal of research. “I wasn’t like those people who comeback [on the tour], are happy with just a quick look, and then come backand live in Japan just like that. Most people are like that; they think thatJapan and everything about it is wonderful—that after they come back,the government will take care of everything, solve their problems. Thefact is, the government takes care of everything on the relative-seekingtour, but then later after you take up residence in Japan you have to takecare of everything by yourself.” 13


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The ways in which Matsui and Ikeda associate themselves with bothChina and Japan, and describe their relationship with their adoptive and“blood” relations in each country clearly demonstrate the limitations ofethnic identification and categorization as “Japanese” or “Chinese.” Interms of their motivations for returning to Japan, it is clear from theirindividual explanations as well as their descriptions of other war orphansthat there exists a mix of motivations. In contrast to widespread Japanesemedia representations of war orphan repatriation as a simple desire toreturn to their “motherland” (bokoku) or “ancestral land” (sokoku), Ikeda’scomments suggest that her desire to find her direct kin was more impor-tant, and coexisted with a strong emotional attachment to both China andher Chinese foster family. By contrast, Matsui’s comments also evince apragmatic calculation of the advantages that Japanese residence and citi-zenship would confer upon his children in terms of education and school-ing. Both of these attitudes are discernable in many other orphans that Iinterviewed, with the strategic stance being particularly evident amonglater returnees like Matsui. Partly for these reasons, it is also clear thatany attempt to sum up war orphan “identity” in ethnic (Japanese) termsis grossly misleading. In particular, such categorizations distort andhomogenize the intensely specific past experiences that not only distin-guish war orphans from other Japanese of their generation, but also dis-tinguish one war orphan from another.

Loss and CommunityMany Japanese veterans and former colonists intensely empathized withthe war orphans both because of the orphans’ Japanese parentage andbecause many veterans and colonists felt that war orphans shared in thehistorical trauma and dislocation that they themselves experienced atwar’s end (Tamanoi 2000) [IS THIS REFERENCE A OR B?]. Such notions of“Japanese” ethnic identity affirm the role of ethnic membership in con-stituting an individual’s relationship with their government, and showhow personal experience can create an enlarged sense of family, a type ofsubjective descent.

The role of subjective descent in cementing ethnic membership wasfirst pointed out by Weber and later reaffirmed by Keyes (1975, 1981,1997, 2002), who repeats Weber’s distinction between ethnic notions ofdescent and genealogical reckonings of kinship. Although both types of

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descent presuppose common blood, the shared descent of ethnicity dif-fers from that of kin groups that are based upon explicit genealogicallinks to a common ancestor. Instead, ethnicity is established and reaf-firmed in more general terms “through narratives of origin, migration,and especially suffering at the hands of others” (Keyes 1997:153). Asexamples of the emphasis on suffering in ethnic identification, Keyes citesJewish, Black American and “pan-Indian” (Native American) identities.Though Keyes does not offer an explanation for the ethnically constitutiveforce of historical trauma, Renan’s famous essay on the nation (1996[1882]), which emphasized memories of suffering as a compelling force inthe foundation of national identity, makes a similar argument and hintsat a possible reason:

“One loves in proportion to the sacrifices to which one has consent-ed, and in proportion to the ills that one has suffered…More valu-able by far than common customs posts and frontiers conforming tostrategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritageand regrets, and of having, in the future, [a shared] program to putinto effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hopedtogether. These are the kinds of things that can be understood inspite of differences of race and language. I spoke just now of ‘hav-ing suffered together’ and, indeed, suffering in common unifiesmore than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefsare of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, andrequire a common effort.” (Renan 1996 [1882]:52-53)

As Keyes and Renan suggest, the fictive kinship of ethno-national iden-tification often invokes the past experience of “a people” with a particu-lar emphasis upon historical instances of suffering and displacement. It iseasy to imagine how an individual in a situation of suffering or migrationmight feel a particular affinity for such narratives, wherein the prior expe-rience of one’s “people” may offer one’s solitary experience both mean-ing and solace. In such intimate and emotionally charged associationsbetween an individual’s experience and the past experience of her “peo-ple,” continuity with the past lends the present an air of the “meant-to-be” and hence meaningful.

While emphasis upon the war orphans’ ethnic “Japaneseness” kindledwidespread sympathy among Japanese civilians and served as the key justi-


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fication for Japanese government assistance in war orphan identificationand repatriation, it also entailed several unanticipated consequences thatworked to the detriment of the war orphans. Though all three parties to therepatriation process—volunteers, war orphans, and government officials—agreed upon the war orphan’s ethnic “Japaneseness,” the definition of thisethnic category differed dramatically and fostered decades of conflict.

Contrary to the widespread stock images in Japan of teary reunions(namida no saikai) between war orphans and their families, manyJapanese relatives of identified war orphans proved reluctant to serve asguarantors for the return of their long-lost children and siblings. The rea-sons vary, and include fears over inheritance, conflicts with other familymembers, and an understandable absence of affection between peoplewho are family in biology and name only. Even when there were strongaffective bonds and a desire to help, many Japanese relations were simplyincapable of resolving the manifold difficulties that orphans encounteredin resettlement. Given the fact that the Japanese war orphans (and ofcourse their accompanying family members) are culturally Chinese, onemight expect such difficulties. Evidently, however, the widespread empha-sis upon the orphans’ Japaneseness, coupled with Japanese assumptionsof a unity between blood and cultural (e.g., linguistic and behavioral)competence, led many to underestimate the extent of orphan difference.

In reality, the differences proved profound. Prior to their return toJapan war orphans spoke little if any Japanese and were almost whollyunfamiliar with Japanese society. Most came from rural areas of Chinawhere life was dramatically different from what they would experience inJapan. Moreover, particularly during the 1970s and early 1980s there waslittle in the way of post-return government assistance: following theorphans’ “return” to Japan, virtually all of the burden of resettlement wasplaced on Japanese family members and such volunteer assistance as wasavailable. Before the 1990s, postwar Japan had experienced very little for-eign immigration and lacked administrative infrastructure or assistanceto ease the linguistic and cultural challenges that war orphans and theirfamilies faced in learning Japanese, finding work and housing, andadjusting their school-age children to the demanding Japanese education-al system. The lack of public assistance was particularly acute precisely inthe rural areas of Japan where war orphans were encouraged to live withtheir natal families. Given little or no government assistance in the com-plex task of orphan resettlement, many families began to balk at assum-

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ing such onerous responsibilities. Thus a growing number of identifiedJapanese orphans—Japanese citizens by birth—faced deportation fromJapan after being rejected by their own families. Following protests byorphans and their supporters, however, the Ministry of Health, Labor andWelfare and the Ministry of Justice were ultimately persuaded to changethis policy in 1989 in order to allow “identified” orphans the right to per-manent return independent of the wishes of their Japanese families.14

War Orphan “Ethnicity” and Official Identification15

It is clear from the foregoing discussion that in the process of ethnic iden-tification individuals such as the war orphans are both agents and objectsof representation. Their perspectives often compete or conflict with thoseof other individuals, the representations contained in educational curric-ula and the mass media, and those ethnic identifications endorsed andenforced by political authorities. As Williams (1989:428) reminds us, indi-vidual attempts to identify an ethnic affiliation must contend with “theideological creation of the ethnic group as a conceptual category that pre-and post-exists the formation of any particular ethnic group. The estab-lishment of such a category is a fundamental feature of a nation buildingprocess within which the putative creation of homogeneity out of a reali-ty of heterogeneity is an ideologically defined goal.” Williams implies thatdiverse individual ethnic identifications may contradict and conflict withnationalist claims of ethnic unity, but this is not always the case: individ-uals may also affirm such claims of ethnic homogeneity in order toadvance their own agendas (particularly if they identify themselves asmembers of the ethnic majority or dominant ethnicity).

The experiences of war orphans reveal the inconsistencies and limits ofethnic identification, and the limits of ethnicity itself as an analytical andinstitutional category. For example, the Japanese government’s identifica-tion of “war orphans” as ethnically “Japanese” (by virtue of descent) did notinitially convey the rights of citizenship that other Japanese enjoyed, or thatthe orphans expected based on their “Japaneseness.” It did not even conferthe right for a state-certified orphan to permanently return to Japan unlessone of that orphan’s Japanese family members could be concretely identi-fied and volunteered to serve as a guarantor. Until the mid-1980s, in orderfor a state-certified orphan to permanently return to Japan, that orphan’sJapanese family had to be concretely identified and the family had to agree


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to serve as the orphan’s guarantor. [PRECEDING 2 SENTENCES ARE REPETI-TIVE] If the orphan could not concretely identify their family or found theirfamily but could not secure their support, they remained locked out ofJapan. Years of strenuous advocacy by war orphan supporters eventuallyresulted in the 1985 establishment of a volunteer guarantor system underwhich “unidentified” (mihanmei) orphans could permanently return toJapan with the assistance of non-family guarantors.

Conversely, the Japanese government’s categorization of war orphansas “Japanese” but its reluctance to officially acknowledge and address theorphans’ profound linguistic and cultural difference with other Japanesedeepened the orphans’ suffering in Japan. It took more than a decade ofactivist pressure after the re-establishment of Sino-Japanese diplomaticrelation in 1972 for the Japanese government to establish a limited pro-gram of Japanese language training and re-employment assistance for thewar orphans. Before this the government maintained a hands-offapproach under which relatives and volunteers were forced to bear thecomplex and onerous burden of helping war orphans to resettle in Japan.Predictably, this official hands-off approach multiplied the hardships thatorphans and their families experienced in the process and compoundedthe reluctance of many Japanese to assist their long-lost kin.

Representatives of the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfarehave maintained that the orphans’ tragic circumstances are merely varia-tions of the suffering that all Japanese were forced to endure during thewar. As the Ministry official in charge of the office for war orphan assis-tance put it, “ the people who returned from China aren’t the only war vic-tims. To some extent, in one form or another, all Japanese citizens suf-fered due to the war.”16 As such, the war orphans were not entitled tospecial provisions that would spare them the shame and constraints ofwelfare. According to the official quoted above, the orphans simply need-ed to “reform their consciousness” (ishiki kaikaku shite) and see welfaredependency in a more positive light. For many war orphans and theiradvocates, this was the latest outrage in a decades-long pattern of govern-ment passivity, intransigence, and evasion.

Japanese Identity and IdentificationThe experiences of the war orphans might appear to present a naturalopportunity for anthropological reflection upon the definition of Japanese

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“identity.” Of Japanese descent but culturally Chinese, war orphans pose aparadox for conventional Japanese definitions of Japaneseness that restupon an implicit (and often explicit) equivalency between biology and cul-ture. Yet rather than engage in a re-definition of Japanese or Chinese “eth-nic identity,” I have chosen instead to focus upon the practices of ethnicidentification that structure the lives of not only war orphans, but theirfamilies and the Japanese volunteers that assist them. My primary justifi-cation for doing so is the fact that practices of identification are far bettersuited to rigorous historical and discursive analysis than the shifting sandsof “identity.” Moreover, a focus upon the process of identification resiststhe illusion that there is such a “thing” as ethnic identity.

Alas, anthropology seems smitten with the notion of (cultural) identity,and in Japan—where studies of Japanese uniqueness are popular reading—this predilection finds a sympathetic object. Ruth Benedict’s famouswartime study of Japanese identity, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword(1946), has sold far more copies in Japanese translation than it has in theEnglish-language original. In fact, sociological surveys of Japan’s postwarsociety often mention the solipsistic fascination with Japanese uniquenessand homogeneity that is exemplified in this discursive and literary genre,which is known in Japan as Nihonjinron, or “discussions of Japanese(ness).”17

This preoccupation—which has been analyzed using terms such as “civil reli-gion”(Befu 1993:127) and “cultural nationalism” (Yoshino 1992)—may beseen as a reaction to both the traumas and the triumphs of Japan’s 20th cen-tury history, and particularly both the cataclysmic experience of defeat andoccupation during World War II and the spectacular economic growth thatfollowed. Indeed, Japan’s extraordinary postwar economic growth has longserved as the preeminent justification for defining Japanese uniqueness.18

Belief in this “civil religion” necessitates a leap of faith, and the flourishingpostwar economy (which also flattened out prewar class divisions) providedthe springboard. American writings seeking to explain this economic trans-formation often invoked the notion of Japanese identity or, in one book’sphrasing, The Japanese Mind (Christopher 1984), creating a feedback loopbetween these convergent preoccupations.

As a social phenomenon Nihonjinron is thus the product of specific his-torical and economic circumstances, but as an explanatory paradigm it isfundamentally ahistorical, since it describes an unchanging, homoge-neous ethno-national essence that is rooted in a primordial past. Lie(2001), Oguma (2002), and others have amply demonstrated that this con-


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struction of Japanese homogeneity masks the historical fact of Japaneseimperialism and the actual socio-economic, linguistic, biological and cul-tural diversity of Japanese society before, during, and after the war. Butsuch revelations do not in and of themselves pose a challenge to orthodoxnotions of ethnic Japanese uniqueness and uniformity. This is partiallydue to the small numbers of Japan’s “ identified” minority populations,and their lack of political clout. Harumi Befu, perhaps the most incisiveand prolific analyst of Nihonjinron, notes that “because the ethnicJapanese are not only numerically but politically dominant, they are ableto impose their ethnic primordiality as the official identity of the nation.”(Befu 1993:129) Moreover, ethnic Japanese encounters with “foreigners”in Japan may only reinforce feelings of intraethnic uniformity and theneed for a framework to explain these feelings.

Befu’s use of “ethnic primordiality” refers of course to Clifford Geertz’s(1963) famous articulation of “primordial sentiments,” which Befu rephras-es as “the symbolic importance accorded to language, religion, ‘communi-ty,’ ‘shared blood,’ ‘common history,’ and ‘shared tradition’ in defining theethnic group and establishing the identity of its members.” (1993:128) AsBefu notes (1993:115-116), in the Japanese case this takes the form of an“isomorphism of geography, race, language and culture” in which “animplicit genetic determinism” leaves Japanese “incredulous” when a per-son of Japanese descent does not demonstrate the same thinking, behavioror language proficiency of a Japanese born and raised in Japan.

The greatest threats to Nihonjinron orthodoxy may come not frombeyond the boundaries of Japaneseness but from within, in the form ofindividuals and groups that are at once seemingly “Japanese” in appear-ance and kinship or descent terms, yet demonstrably “Other” in culturalterms (language, values, behavior, and so forth.) Encounters with such“Other Japanese” have markedly increased over the past three decades ofJapanese “internationalization” (kokusaika), during which large numbers ofJapanese have gone abroad for work and leisure, and the number of immi-grants to Japan has dramatically increased. In one sense, internationaliza-tion has been a catalyst for the development and (often government-led)propagation of Nihonjinron ideology. For example, Befu (1993:120) writesthat “as Japan internationalizes, accepting foreigners and adapting foreignculture to Japanese soil on the one hand and on the other going abroad andestablishing Japanese economic investments overseas, Japanese increasing-ly become aware of the need to define themselves and their culture.”

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In another sense, however, internationalization has increasingly con-fronted citizens of Japan with “Other Japanese” that confound such defi-nitions. Yoshino (1992) has used British sociologist Sandra Wallman’s con-cept of “boundary dissonance” to explain how certain types of Japanesehave unsettled the framework of Japan’s “cultural nationalism.” Yoshinospecifically refers to kikoku shijo, or “returnee youth,” young Japanesewho have spent time abroad and consequently differ in behavior and lin-guistic proficiency from their Japanese classmates. Other sources of disso-nance can be readily identified. In particular, the large-scale labor migra-tion of Latin American Nikkeijin (people of Japanese descent) to Japansince 1990 has provided a vivid object lesson in the heterogeneity of peo-ple claiming Japanese descent. Takezawa (2002) suggests that theincreased presence and visibility of culturally diverse people of Japanesedescent such as the Japanese Brazilians, “blurred a boundary oncebelieved fixed and essential, the boundary between ‘Japanese’ and ‘non-Japanese’” [PAGE NUMBERS?]. The growing identification of Nikkei as for-eigners (gaikokujin) “demonstrates that the ideology of sharing the same‘blood’ is losing its importance in determining how Japanese peopledetermine ‘Japaneseness’ and perceive difference.” (Takezawa 2002:326)

Broadly speaking, both Latin American Nikkei and war orphans fromChina vividly embody the disjuncture between culture and descent. Willtheir example encourage greater numbers of Japanese to think beyondthe Nihonjinron model of Japanese identity as a stereotype? Or will itmerely provoke a redrawing of the orthodox category? Will it help to raisepopular consciousness (and conscience) concerning the war’s conduct andlegacy? Will it encourage more Japanese citizens to think beyond ethnici-ty? Keyes (1981:18) has written that the “migration of new groups to asociety may lead to ethnic change not only for the migrant groups who areconstrained to adapt to a new social situation but also for the existinggroups whose social context has been significantly altered by the arrivalof migrants.” What will immigrants and hosts alike make of this opportu-nity to recognize one another not as separate ethnic groups or races—butas distant kin?

Conclusion: Beyond EthnicityAs Rosaldo (1995:xv) has eloquently observed, there are two types ofhybridity: “a space betwixt and between two zones of purity” and “an


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ongoing condition of all human cultures, which contain no zones of puri-ty because they undergo continuous processes of transculturation.” Ifthere are no zones of purity and we are all effectively multiethnic, wemay question—as Weber did—the value of the ethnic concept. Yet near-ly a century after Weber dismissed “the collective term ethnic…as reallyunsuitable to a rigorous analysis,” ethnic identification is ubiquitous.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of ethnicity is the notion of descentto which Weber originally drew our attention. We might wonder whetherwe need an ethnic concept that seems to smuggle biology back in justwhen we are waking from the nightmare of “race.” Is it possible to reha-bilitate the ethnic concept as an idea of group membership that is notbounded by “blood?” A “social ethnicity” as some have envisioned a“social race” (Wagley 1968)? Whether we try to use ethnicity in a strictlycultural sense, or avoid using it altogether, the example of the warorphans demonstrates the deceitful, dehumanizing potential in ethnic“solidarities.” Even so, ethnicity remains a powerful means of identifica-tion for both war orphans and the Japanese citizens among whom theylive and work—as well as for many millions of other people around theworld. Why does ethnicity endure as such a powerful marker of identity?

Again, the experiences and sentiments of the war orphans suggest a par-tial answer. A close reading of war orphan invocations of ethnicity showthat they derive their affective strength from the way in which they appro-priate an individual’s concrete emotional attachments and biological rela-tionships to immediate kin, which are then inflated to encompass a muchlarger group of (biologically and socially distant) others. We can see overtevidence of this shift in terms such as “motherland.” But the experience ofthe war orphans and their Japanese benefactors offer subtler testimony aswell, in the ways that the Japanese Manchurian veterans transpose a long-ing for their own lost kin and comrades to encompass the war orphans, andthe ways that war orphans in turn generalize their own longing for theirspecific kin to encompass “the Japanese.” Both shifts are enabled by the useof ethnicity, a concept that unites individuals of otherwise disparate back-grounds, experiences, and orientations with appeals to shared blood andhistory. As the charitable actions of the Manchurian veteran volunteersdemonstrate, much good can come of this solidarity. But other Japanesevolunteers who have worked with war orphans, often younger and morecatholic in their compassion, demonstrate that this ethnic solidarity is nota necessary precondition for charity and voluntary assistance.

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While I interpret the experiences of the war orphans as contradictingJapanese claims of ethnic homogeneity, I do not mean to suggest, there-fore, that war orphans or their children somehow constitute an alterna-tive (multi)ethnic group in a “multiethnic Japan.” In this sense, myemphasis differs from that of much recent research that critiques ethnichomogeneity in Japan and elsewhere by drawing attention to alternative(multi)ethnic groups and identifications. For all their merits, such studiesrisk reinforcing ideas of shared descent and “blood” by affirming theobjectivity of ethnicity. In the conclusion to his “genealogy of Japaneseself-images,” Oguma (2002:389) warns that, “ it is not sufficient to fightagainst myths by destroying one myth and replacing it with another, as in,for example, criticizing the myth of the homogeneous nation by replacingit with the myth of the mixed nation.” Similarly, testimonies to ethnicdiversity often fail to resolve the internal contradictions of ethnicity itself.As Japan, the United States and other countries tout the virtues of multi-culturalism or multiethnicity—the example of colonial Manchuriareminds us of how similar, “multiple” categories can also create and rein-force invidious mutual exclusions.19 Dirlik’s (2002) trenchant critique ofboth diaspora and hybridity reminds us of the risk of perpetuating thevery inequalities that we seek to challenge by uncritically retaining thecategories in which such distinctions were originally cast.

Ethnic identification is very nearly irresistible, especially when it isunderwritten by the “naturalness” of shared descent. But what is lostwhen ethnic identification diminishes the diverse and unique experiencesof individuals grouped as, for example, “Japanese” or “Chinese?” Thereare so many other non-biological bases for self-definition, for community,and for collective action—why the need to pretend in “blood?” If we stripaway the false biology, isn’t ethnicity just culture, and could it not bestudied as such? In place of ethnicity’s fictive timelessness, we can insteadfocus on our membership in historically specific communities of sharedexperience and values.

While focusing my inquiry upon “ethnicity,” therefore, I have hoped tomove beyond it. I bear in mind that although the people discussed in thepreceding pages may be identified (and identify others) in distinctivelyethnic terms, what moves them and moves us most deeply in their storiesand experiences is not “ethnicity.” It is family, loss, justice and injustice,suffering, care, and acceptance. “Ethnicity” cannot contain all these spe-cific sentiments and detail. Thus it is appropriate that we move beyond it,


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to instead affirm the power of sentiment, the porous categories of cul-ture, the irreducible uniqueness of individual experience, and the kinshipof all humankind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The fieldwork research for this essay was conducted under the auspices of a JapanFoundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant between 1998 and 2000, and I would like tothank the Japan Foundation for their support. The write-up of the data was funded bya Seattle University Summer Faculty Fellowship, for which I am grateful. I would alsolike to thank Stevan Harrell and Anthropological Quarterly’s two anonymous reviewersfor their comments on an earlier draft, but the arguments of this essay and any remain-ing inaccuracies are my own.

ENDNOTES1Harrell, personal communication. 7/9/09.2However, many orphans and their Japanese supporters object to the implication that theorphans willingly “remained” in China while other Japanese were repatriated after thewar. These individuals are also sometimes called “repatriates from China” (Chu--gokukikokusha). “Repatriate” is used here in place of the alternative “returnee” because themeaning of the original term kikoku (C: guiguo) is specific in referring to a return to one’s[originating] country. Also potentially confusing is the fact that in English language schol-arship on Japan the term “returnees” is conventionally used to refer to kikokushijo, or lit-erally, “repatriate boys and girls”—children of Japanese expatriate workers who return toJapan after some significant residence abroad. In Chinese, the war orphans are discussedas either yiliu gu’er (the most common expression in Mainland China) or canliu gu’er (theChinese pronunciation of the Japanese term zanryu-- koji, more common in Japan).3According to Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’s 2007 statistics, thereare now 2,808 officially recognized war orphans, of whom 2,519 have “permanentlyreturned” (eiju-- kikoku) to Japan. “Return” is in quotes because some orphans wereactually born in China. See http://www.kikokusha-center.or.jp/kikokusha/kiko_jijo/chugoku/mhwdata/index_f.htm. Accessed 9/6/07.4See Young (1999:409-411). Although Japan surrendered less than a week later onAugust 15th, group repatriations did not begin until some nine months later in May of1946. One reason for this prolonged delay was the ongoing domestic struggle betweenthe Chinese Nationalists and Communists, which forced the suspension of group repa-triations between 1949 and 1952. Group repatriations were resumed in March of 1953with the cooperation of the Japanese and Chinese Red Cross organizations.5The material in this section is drawn from an interview conducted with Ikeda Sumiein Tokyo on October 19, 2000.6The Chinese police (Public Security Bureau or Gonganju) came once before to Ikeda’sadopted home in order to check her status.7This decision was to prove fateful, since the assumption of Chinese citizenship wouldhave jeopardized Ikeda’s subsequent appeal for Japanese registration. Despite the effortsof most Chinese foster parents to hide their children’s Japanese identities, in many casestheir Japanese backgrounds were known to the local authorities, and documentation of

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their identity as “Japanese orphans” was included in their official “file” (dang’an). Duringher shu--seki court case, Ikeda’s lawyer Kawai was able to use these official documents anda testimony to their authenticity from the Chinese embassy to persuade the judge ofIkeda’s Japanese parentage. The same type of documents also proved decisive in manysubsequent shu--seki cases, though their reliability came to be increasingly questioned.8Here Ikeda used a Japanese term. Unless explicitly marked otherwise, all other quotesfrom both Ikeda and Matsui are translations from the Mandarin Chinese in which weconducted their interviews.9The material in this section is drawn from two interviews conducted with MatsuiTomio in his Tokyo home during the first half of 2001. More detail on the interviewswith Ikeda and Matsui is contained in Chapter 4 of my Ph.D. dissertation (Efird 2004).10Matsui’s Chinese given name is Dousheng: “dou” (which means 10 liters) and “sheng”(which means one liter) both refer to the amount of grain that was given to theJapanese woman.11Matsui was vague concerning the circumstances of his Party membership. He said itwas “both simple and quite complicated” and had been accomplished through the“personal authority” (ren de quanli) of certain people in power.12For an extended discussion of these interviews and the war orphans more generally,see Efird (2004).13As part of his preparations for moving to Japan, Matsui had arranged for his son andone son-in-law to get driver’s licenses in China, which they were able to convert intoJapanese driver’s licenses upon their arrival in Japan. At the time of my interviews, theson-in-law was apparently making good money as a driver for a Japanese company. Healso encouraged his wife to study hair cutting, which they could rely on for income inan emergency.14“Remaining women” (zanryu-- fujin) had to wait even longer for this provision, whichwas only awarded in 1991.15For an extended discussion of the Japanese government’s controversial treatment ofthe war orphans and the issue of state responsibility, see Efird (2008).16The official in question was Takane Kazuko, then-head of the Ministry of Health andWelfare’s (later Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’s) Office for Measures ConcerningOrphans and others from China (Chu--goku koji nado taisaku shitsu). As quoted in theSankei Shinbun (12/1/2000), p. 29.17See for example Sugimoto (2003:2-4). Comprehensive analyses of Nihonjinron includeBefu (2001), Dale (1984), Goodman (2005), and Yoshino (1992) in English, and Aoki(1990) in Japanese.18Befu writes that it was in the late 1960s, following a postwar decade or two of“depressed soul-searching” (124) that “the majority of Nihonjinron literature began todiscuss the unique characteristics of Japan as its strength, the basis of its economic suc-cess.” (1993:125).19See Tamanoi (2001) and Young (1999) for discussion of Manchurian racial classification.

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Distant Kin: Japan's "War Orphans" and the Limits of Ethnicity

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