Two octogenarians from the Philippines, who claim to have been born to Japanese fathers in the Southeast Asian country, arrived in Okinawa Prefecture on Thursday for a planned reunion with relatives, according to an organization supporting war-displaced Japanese descendants.
Before embarking on the trip, Samuel Akahiji, 81, from Palawan province, and Rosa Antipuesto, whose Japanese name is Masako Kanashiro, 80, from Davao City, expressed their desire to visit their fathers' homelands, seeking acceptance from relatives, as part of their preparations to formally seek Japanese citizenship.
"I think he will be happy. And I will be very happy, too, because finally I will see his birthplace," Kanashiro, referring to her father who left her and her mother during World War II to join the Imperial Japanese Army, said in a press conference Wednesday in Manila.
Akahiji, speaking at the press conference, said, "I am going to tell them, 'I just want to meet you. It makes my heart full to finally meet you.'"
After releasing the profiles of Akahiji and Kanashiro earlier this year and soliciting funds for their travel, the Philippine Nikkei-jin Legal Support Center received information about individuals believed to be relatives of the two, the organization said.
Kanashiro and Akahiji are among more than 3,800 Japanese descendants in the Philippines that the PNLSC has documented. Of them, 308 have obtained Japanese citizenship.
The two have yet to file their petitions before a family court in Japan to be recognized as Japanese nationals due to a lack of supporting documents, according to the non-profit organization's Norihiro Inomata.
In interviews with the PNLSC, which has been assisting war-displaced Japanese descendants in the Philippines for over the last 20 years, Kanashiro and Akahiji said their fathers arrived in the Philippines before the war and met their respective Filipino mothers with whom they started their own families.
Kanashiro identified her father as Koshie Kanashiro, who worked as a barber in Davao, while Akahiji identified Kametaro Akahiji, a fisherman, as his father. The former reportedly never returned to his family after enlisting in the Japanese army, while the latter is said to have been killed by Filipino guerrillas in the early period of Japan's occupation of the Philippines.
Due to the hatred against the Japanese and the circumstances during and after the war, Akahiji had used his Filipino mother's last name, while Kanashiro had used her Filipino stepfather's surname.
Inomata has said several war-displaced Japanese descendants are waiting to obtain Japanese nationality from family courts after they filed petitions.
