"I want to see how my homeland has changed, how my fellow countrymen now live, and especially how sakura blooms," said Tanaka who hasn’t visited his home country for the last 70 years.
Akio Tanaka was born in 1927 in the city of Ebetsu on Hokkaido. At the age of 17, fresh out of high school, Tanaka enrolled into the Imperial Army and was sent to Manchuria to become a soldier of the Kwantung Army, where he eventually earned the rank of sergeant due to his bravery.
In 1944 he lost an eye to shrapnel, and in August 1945 Tanaka, along with 600,000 servicemen of the Kwantung Army was taken prisoner by the advancing Soviet forces.
Tanaka then spent the next 10 years in the POW camp No. 16 in the vicinity of Khabarovsk, working at a lumber mill along with other prisoners of war. According to him, all prisoners were treated well. When it was time for their release, former Japanese soldiers started boarding ships heading to Japan, but nearly all of the officers chose to remain in USSR, believing that they’d be executed as traitors upon their return home.
After his release Tanaka moved to Vladivostok where he eventually became a mechanic aboard a Ivan Kulibin steamer. In the 1960s he moved to the Leningrad Region where he found employment at the Fyodorovskoye state farm.
Today he lives in a single-room apartment in the village of Pogi. He was married several times but never had any children – a topic that Tanaka refuses to discuss no matter what.
All these years Tanaka sought to reconnect with his relatives in Japan.
"In 1970s I went to the Japanese consulate in Leningrad and told them my story. They sent a request to Japan and it turned out that my father died a long time ago, and my sister never replied to my letter; maybe she still considers me a traitor and cannot forgive me. According to our customs, the entire family of a person who became a prisoner is shamed," Tanaka explained.
Now, over 70 years since the end of World War II, and on the eve of his 90th birthday Tanaka still hopes to visit his home country. And while the Japanese consulate searches for his relatives, local charities have already started raising funds to make the old man’s dream come true.
