A small gourd-shaped island, Huludao in China's Yellow Sea deserves a page in post-World War II history as a witness to the repatriation of about 1.05 million Japanese emigrants, victims of their country's colonial expansion.
When Japan's military collapsed 60 years ago, its emigrants in China were not cast adrift.
On May 7, 1946, nine months after Japan surrendered to the Allies, about 2,500 Japanese emigrants began their voyage home from Huludao, marking the beginning of their repatriation effort that lasted into 1948.
The small island still lives as a landmark in their life in the memories of repatriated Japanese emigrants like Shuyoshi Manase, a retired professor of Chinese history in Nagoya, who said that he would cherish the island as the place of his rebirth.
Limited by shortages of natural resources, Japan adopted a national policy of emigration and colonization. Japanese emigration into China saw a surge after 1931, when the Japanese army occupied China's northeast.
By the end of World War II, there were more than 2 million Japanese emigrants in China, most of whom were farmers in the northeast.
These followers of the Japanese emperor's dream of conquest were deserted by the Japanese Imperial Army after its defeat, according to deceased Japanese playwright Takeo Kunihiro and his wife Yuko, two returned emigrants from Huludao, who researched the period for four years.
After the war ended, the Japanese government urged its emigrants to stay in China, even to die there, rather than come back, Yuko Kunihiro said.
Kunihiro said she and her husband found documents showing that in China's northeast, more than 170,000 Japanese emigrants committed suicide to show their loyalty to the Emperor or died of hunger and illness during their desperate flight after Japan's surrender.
Two months after the Japanese surrender, however, China and the United States made a plan on the repatriation of Japanese emigrants. China began to concentrate Japanese emigrants scattered throughout the country into major cities in preparation for the repatriation.
To commemorate the event, the playwright and his wife shot a documentary about the repatriation a decade ago. Takeo Kunihiro died in 2002.
Huludao was just one of the places Japanese emigrants were gathered before their deportation.
Manase said he still remembers a Chinese village called Shitou, or "stone," where he and more than 100 other Japanese boys aged 15 spent a "warm and peaceful night" during their fugitive odyssey after Japanese troops were defeated by the Soviet Army in 1945.
These teenagers were forced by the Japanese Imperial Army to give up school and sent to the far-away China-Soviet border to block Soviet tanks by making the land too muddy for them to pass.
People at Shitou Village, now in Ning'an County of Heilongjiang Province, opened their doors to these boys when they arrived there, tired and hungry, on an autumn evening, after days of fleeing in fear and despair.
Takeo Kunihiro was also among the fugitive Japanese boys. His play, "A Tale of the Stone Village," is based on his experiences in the postwar chaos at the China-Soviet border and in Shitou Village.
His wife Yuko is preparing the shooting of a film based on the play. She said that she hopes the film can provide young people "true historical scenes" about the war.