UC Berkeley

From 1937 to 1958, thousands of Japanese soldiers, medical workers, and civilians collaborated with the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese People’s Liberation Army, some as volunteers and others as captives or conscripts. Many of these Japanese individuals became formal members of the PLA, received medals of distinction, and had their acts of sacrifice and heroism recorded in the official histories of the Chinese military divisions they joined. Japanese soldiers assisted the Chinese communist war effort during the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War, while Japanese nurses and doctors tended to Chinese patients, often on the front lines of battle, and helped establish and manage the earliest medical institutions and public health and inoculation campaigns of the PRC. Japanese filmmakers worked in the production of some of the early PRC’s most iconic films such as The White Haired Girl, and Japanese specialists in practically every field contributed their expertise to the establishment of the Chinese communist state and its civil infrastructure. The experience of membership in the PLA and of work in communist China was a profoundly transformative one for the former settlers of the Japanese empire. For many, it marked an awakening to an entirely novel worldview, an embrace of socialist ideals, the development of lifelong friendships and relationships, and the discovery of China as a ‘second motherland’. For the returnees, contact with Chinese communism proved to be a stigma when seeking entry into the Japanese home island workforce and society, while also serving as a bonding experience, creating a cohort of individuals unified by their extraordinary experiences on the continent.