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Left Behind: Japan's Wartime Defeat and the Stranded Women of Manchukuo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Rowena Ward
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The zanryu fujin (stranded war wives) [1] are former Japanese emigrants to Manchukuo who remained in China at the end of the Second World War. They were long among the forgotten legacies of Japan's imperialist past. [2] The reasons why these women did not undergo repatriation during the years up to 1958, when large numbers of former colonial emigrants returned to Japan, are varied but in many cases, the ‘Chinese’ families that adopted them, or into which they married, played a part. [3] The stories of survival during the period immediately after the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War on 9 August 1945, the civil war that followed, and throughout the years of the Cultural Revolution, are testament to their strength. At the same time, the history of how the zanryu fujin came to be in China is useful for understanding the Japanese government's colonial policies, its wartime attitudes toward women, and its post war handling of inconvenient war legacies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , March 2007 , e8
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2007

References

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