TMCnet News
Japanese war veteran from Ukraine visits parents' grave+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)MORIOKA, Japan, April 21_(Kyodo) _ A former Imperial Japanese Army soldier, who went missing just after World War II and was recently confirmed to be alive in Ukraine, visited the grave of his parents Friday morning in Iwate Prefecture after being reunited with relatives the previous day for the first time in 63 years. Ishinosuke Uwano, 83, visited the grave near the home of his nephew, Yukio Uwano, 59, where he stayed overnight. The former soldier, along with his son, Anatoly, 37, offered sticks of incense at the grave and reported on their return home. According to the Iwate prefectural government, his mother, Haru, died in 1981. Ishinosuke and Anatoly arrived in Japan on Wednesday for the reunion and will stay through April 28. According to the Iwate prefectural government, Ishinosuke went to the war front in 1943 as a member of an infantry unit. He was on the Russian Far Eastern island of Sakhalin at the end of the war but later went missing and a Japanese court declared him dead in 2000. But last October, an acquaintance of Ishinosuke in Ukraine asked the Japanese government to check his identity after hearing of his wish to visit Japan. An official of the local Japanese Embassy interviewed him, and his relatives in Hirono, Iwate Prefecture, confirmed his identity with photos, government officials said. Ishinosuke, who has been living in Ukraine since around 1965, married a local woman and has a son and two daughters. He currently lives in Zhytomyr, west of Kiev, according to the officials. |