NEMURO, Japan: Yoi Hasegawa still remembers when armed Soviet soldiers burst into her house just days after Japan’s World War II surrender and tried…
NEMURO, Japan: Yoi Hasegawa still remembers when armed Soviet soldiers burst into her house just days after Japan’s World War II surrender and tried to drag away her teenaged sister.
At gunpoint, her father shielded his daughters at their home on an island north of Japan’s Hokkaido.
“Only after you kill me!” he screamed at the soldiers, who left without harming the family.
“I thought we would all die,” Hasegawa tells AFP.
Nevertheless, Hasegawa, then 13, now 86, has fond memories of her home on the island of Etorofu, off the northern coast of Japan, one of the Kuril islands invaded by the Soviet Union at the end of the war.
Four of the islands known as the Northern Territories in Japan and the southern Kuril islands in Russia are disputed and remain a bitter sticking point between Tokyo and Moscow, preventing them from signing a formal peace treaty.
Now, former residents who were children when the Soviet troops arrived are heading into their twilight years with little expectation of returning to their former home.
More than 60 per cent of the 17,000 former islanders have already died and the average age of those still alive is 83.
After the Soviet invasion, the father of Kimio Waki, a former resident of the island of Kunashiri, buried his important documents in a pot, for the day he and his family returned.
But he didn’t live to see that day and Waki, 77, doesn’t expect to either.
“No progress at all for 70 years… I have nothing to say but it is truly regrettable,” he told AFP.
He too remembers the Soviet arrival clearly.
“Big men I’ve never seen before, carrying machine guns, came into our house, ransacking rooms… I was frozen with terror,” he recalls.
The four-year-old Waki later became friends with Russian children, who came with families after the invasion.
But the friendships came to an abrupt end three years later, when hundreds of Japanese residents were expelled, some gathered inside a fishing net with a wooden bottom and hoisted onto a cargo ship.
