Imaizumi said he was also bewildered by a gap between the “harmony” praised by the Japanese government and the discrimination by Japanese people against other ethnicities he witnessed daily outside the school. “Although I didn’t want to believe it, all the Chinese students seemed to know that Japan was going to lose, and so we talked very little about the situation or our beliefs compared to the first batch of students,” he said. The atmosphere was tense, he said, as students worried about an uncertain future and speculated about the war's end.
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The university library even gave the students access to then-prohibited books written by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.īy the time Imaizumi was attending the university, just before the end of World War II, life was much less lively and full of discussion.
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The students, about half of whom were Japanese, were encouraged at first to debate each other in an atmosphere of free speech, something that was at odds with the strict, ultranationalist atmosphere in wartime Japan. Imaizumi said in an interview with The Associated Press that he exchanged a few words in Japanese with Qiu whenever he ran into him at the school. Her work has encouraged growing friendships between Japanese and Chinese family members of the graduates.Īmong them is Shigeru Imaizumi, 96, who entered the university the same year as Oka's grandfather, in 1944. Through a graduate-list book and a pile of letters Qiu exchanged with his classmates, she managed to find and meet seven alumni living in Japan. The students lived and studied together in Manchuria under the banner of “the harmony of five ethnicities.”Īmong the university's 1,400 or so graduates were some who played major roles in Asia's rise over the last 80 years, including former South Korean Prime Minister Kang Young-hoon.Įager to learn more about her late grandfather, Qiu Laizhuan, Oka began a documentary project aimed at finding alumni now in their 90s and 100s in Japan. It selected elite male students from Japan, China, Korea, the then-Soviet Union and Mongolia, according to a book by Hideyuki Miura, a reporter for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Kenkoku University operated from 1938 to 1945. The university is a unique footnote in the rocky relationship between Japan and China, which are celebrating their 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations this week. It is built on sometimes surprising friendships forged at the Japan-run university, which glorified official notions of pan-Asian harmony even as imperial troops brutalized much of the region. In recent years, the dwindling number of surviving students, their families and those who have researched its history have come to share a sense of cross-national unity. TOKYO (AP) - Growing up, Fumina Oka knew little about the mysterious university her Taiwanese grandfather attended in northern China's Manchuria during Japan’s occupation in the early 20th century.īut as the 28-year-old journalist studied the little-known Kenkoku University, she became fascinated about a place that started out as a grand piece of imperial propaganda meant to celebrate Japan's prewar colonization of large swaths of Asia.
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