Boys of the Manchurian Dream

The Manchuria Pioneering Youth Voluntary Army sent Japanese youths in their teens to Manchuria during the Second World War. Impoverished farming children thus headed off to the Chinese mainland with dreams of becoming landowners.

Tondokoro Company was formed in the northern part of Japan's Nagano prefecture, central Japan, under educator Yoshifumi Tondokoro. Two hundred strong, it shipped out to Manchuria in June 1944. They were devoted to development and training, but when the Soviets invaded on 9 August 1945, they fled deep into the mountains, in desperation. With nothing to eat, many of them died. Those that were captured suffered even harsher conditions as POWs. By the time they were repatriated, only 82 of them-less than half-returned alive.

We follow a group of these surviving teenage "Pioneers," now in their 80s, as they visit China and the former Manchurian territories in the summer of 2009. In a final pilgrimage to console the spirits of fallen comrades, they travel from the border with Russia to Yanji, near the current border with North Korea. En route, they break decades of silence to reveal, for the first time, the story of their flight and imprisonment, and the incidents of appalling tragedy that they experienced. Company leader Yoshifumi Tondokoro's eldest daughter attempts to retrace her father's last steps: he went missing and was never found. She was only seven years old when she saw him last, and can barely remember him at all; but her longing for him, once dimmed with the passage of time, now revives.

The battlefield deprives us of friends and family. The horrible memories and heartbreak cannot be cured by anything. But this unforgettable legacy of war is almost entirely absent from our historical textbooks. It is this side of war that this documentary program endeavors to preserve and understand, by recording the eyewitness testimony not only of the Japanese "Pioneers" but of the local people, supplemented by archival film and other materials.

This documentary revisits the wartime experiences of teenage volunteers on the colonial front lines, largely through their own eyes as now-elderly visitors. From the personal accounts of survivors and other records, we hear a hitherto untold story, and confront some difficult questions. What do such experiences mean for them now, after 64 years? And what is the purpose of war?