Kokichi Morimoto knows his father only as a kimono-clad man in a black-and-white photograph dated Dec. 25, 1942 -- the day he joined Japan's imperialist war in Asia as a soldier, never to return.
The family later received a military letter confirming Toshio Morimoto's death on Dec. 3, 1944 at the age of 30 on patrol in Boikin, a town in northeastern Papua New Guinea. But his body has never been recovered or identified.
"If it is difficult to identify each one of them, we should at least bring home as many of them as possible so they can rest in peace," said Morimoto, 62, who has joined bereaved families fighting to identify the remains of lost soldiers.
As the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches tomorrow, Japan faces a grim reminder of the price it paid for its war of aggression in Asia: the government says half of the 2.4 million Japanese who died overseas have never been recovered.
And the odds are rising that they never will be properly accounted for. While families like Morimoto's hope recent advances in DNA testing could help, Health Minister Hidehisa Otsuji says the remains "have become so fragile they almost crumble when you touch them. They have almost turned into soil."
"At some point we should conduct an intensive search and then draw the line," he told a Parliamentary committee.
Of the Japanese who died overseas during the war, including 300,000 civilians, about 850,000 have been identified, most of them from China. Another 350,000 unidentified remains were recovered and are interred as unknown soldiers at Tokyo's Chidorigafuchi memorial. The rest -- about 1.16 million -- are scattered anonymously over the vast war zone, from the killing fields of Iwo Jima, Saipan, Okinawa in the Pacific, to Papua New Guinea in the south and Burma, Mongolia and the former Soviet Union in the west.
The number is far below that given for the former Soviet Union. Some 2.3 million World War II fighters are unaccounted for, according to Defense Ministry figures. Germany's missing total 1.3 million soldiers and civilians. About 78,000 US servicemen are unaccounted for, according to the US.
China and North Korea, still aggrieved over Japan's wartime invasions, bar Japanese search parties. But teams of veterans, bereaved families and volunteers have had greater freedom to operate in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Japan, reverence for ancestors places a premium on proper burial and annual observances. Still, officials say interest is waning as war memories fade and survivors die off. They say of 6,000 families asked to participate in DNA testing, only 1,000 responded.
Morimoto didn't give up. In 2003, just months after his retirement, he joined a government-sponsored trip to Papua New Guinea, where the group excavated a vegetable field and found more than 100 remains of unknown Japanese soldiers. The remains were too decayed to determine whether Morimoto's father was among them.
"The skeletons appearing from the soil just broke my heart ... abandoned for so many years in the middle of nowhere so far away from home," he said.
The effort continues. On Thursday, the remains of eight soldiers who died in the 1939 battle with the Soviets near the border between northeastern China and Mongolia were returned and await examination for possible DNA testing. More than 3,000 other soldiers are believed still buried at that battlefield. But Japan lacks facilities to handle such old remains, and since 2003, only 67 war dead have been identified.
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