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. Some later, after having children who they could not take with them to Japan if they returned, did choose to stay in China. Indeed, their stories highlight a pattern of abandonment by the Japanese government. The lives of the three zanryu fujin in the period immediately after the Soviet invasion cast light on the question of choice and the situations that led them and many women to stay in China.
It is estimated that at the time of the Soviet invasion of Manchukuo in August , there were more than one million civilians from Japan proper living there. Around , were the families of agrarian settlers.
By that time, many of the agrarian male settlers had been conscripted despite an exemption from conscription forming part of the policies that encouraged emigration. As a result, a large proportion of the civilian Japanese population, particularly in the rural areas, were women, children and the elderly. When the last repatriation boat left China in , more than 10, Japanese women and children remained behind Oba and Hashimoto , Following the establishment of diplomatic relations, the Japanese government was forced to develop policies to manage the migration of Japanese in China.
One complication was that a ruling which reduced the number of years that a person had been missing before being presumed dead meant that many of those stranded in China had been declared dead. In contrast, those who did not decide to stay of their own free will should receive assistance.
The government claimed that age alone was sufficient to make this determination. The age of thirteen was set as the dividing line between those who could receive assistance and those who could not. Importantly, gender was not used as a basis for differentiation. The scarcity of men in a similar situation is probably because they were able to negotiate their way to repatriation points or were killed by the Soviets.
