Japan's wartime children in Philippines search for kin, identity

SAN PABLO - After a lifetime of searching, Jose Villafuerte this month finally found the Japanese father he lost during the dark years of World War II in the occupied Philippines.

The 82-year-old, a former gravedigger, was still in the womb of his Filipina mother, Benita Abril, when her partner, imperial army officer Ginjiro Takei, returned to Japan during its brutal occupation of the archipelago from 1942-45.

His quest ended this month, days before the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945, after an advocacy group found Takei's tomb in Japan, where he had raised a family following the war.

A living half-brother and half-sister were also found, with DNA swabs sealing the family ties.

"I'm excited. My mother had spent years trying to make this happen," Villafuerte, a slightly built father of eight, told AFP at his home in San Pablo city, south of Manila, ahead of his first visit to Japan.

Escorted by his son, he lit a candle and prayed before his father's tombstone in the city of Takatsuki, between Kyoto and Osaka, on August 7.

He met his half-brother Hiroyuki Takei for the first time a day earlier and now expects to get a Japanese passport, as well as visas for his children and grandchildren.

'Time is running out'

Villafuerte is one of more than 3,000 "Nikkei-jin", offspring of Japanese who were in the Philippines before or during World War II.

Japan has in recent years begun helping in "recovering their identity", said Norihiro Inomata, country director for the Philippine Nikkei-jin Legal Support Center (PNLSC).

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba met Villafuerte and two other Nikkei-jin during a visit to Manila in April.

However, only 100 or so are still alive more than two decades after the effort was launched in 2003, Inomata told AFP.

The oldest is 97.

"Time is running out," he said.

'Fate's design' 

"It was fate's design that I would be able to visit my father's grave. I am very much blessed, because I saw my brother and he guided me here to see the tomb of my father and their relatives," Villafuerte told reporters during the Takatsuki visit.

His father Takei, a Japanese army engineer, worked on the Philippine railway system as part of the occupation forces but was sent home during the war, Inomata said.

Growing up in post-war Philippines, Villafuerte was the target of merciless bullying, blowback from a conflict in which half a million of the Southeast Asian country's 17 million people were killed, most of them civilians.

An obelisk stands in the Chinese cemetery in San Pablo as a memorial to more than 600 male residents rounded up by Japanese troops and bayoneted to death in February 1945.

"People kept reminding me my father was an evil person who killed many Filipinos," Villafuerte said, adding that it nearly caused him to drop out of school.

"It hurt, because it was never my choice to have a Japanese parent."

'I've found my identity'

Manila grocer Maria Corazon Nagai, an 82-year-old widow and mother of three, gave up her Philippine passport for a Japanese one last April with PNLSC's help.

She told AFP that her Japanese father, Tokuhiro Nagai, a civil engineer , had lived with her mother in Manila during the war.

"In my family, I was the only one who looked different," said Nagai, who quit school after sixth grade when family finances bottomed out following her father's post-war death.

She went to live with her maternal grandmother when her mother remarried and began working as a sales clerk in her teens.

"I'm happy now that I've found my identity," said the bespectacled, soft-spoken Nagai, who still tends a cramped stall selling shampoo, noodles and condiments in Manila's downtown Zamora market.

Nagai said she hid her parentage as she reached adulthood to avoid the bullying she endured as a child.

She was "relieved to learn my father was not a soldier" when she obtained her birth records at the civil registry in the 1990s.

In this photo taken on August 8, 2025, Maria Corazon Nagai shows a photo of her father Tokuhiro Nagai, a civil engineer, at her home in Manila. Nagai, an 82-year-old Manila grocer, widow and mother of three, gave up her Philippine passport for a Japanese one last April with PNLSC's help. (Credit: AFP)

'The past is the past'

Before the invasion, small groups of Japanese migrated to the Philippines from the late 19th century to escape "overpopulation", with some marrying locals, said Inomata, the legal centre director.

Their offspring went into a "spiral of poverty" when the state confiscated their assets after the war, and many were unable to obtain a formal education, he said.

One male descendant hid in the mountains of the southern Philippines for 10 years after the war fearing he would be harmed, Inomata said.

Views towards Japan began changing in the 1970s as Tokyo completed war reparations that helped rebuild the Philippines, and Japanese investors built factories and created jobs.

The two countries are now security allies.

Nagai has been unable to find any Japanese relatives and couldn't locate her father's grave during her 2023 trip to Tokyo, but she will fly to Japan for a second time later this year for a holiday.

Though she does not speak the language, Nagai said she now considers herself Japanese.
For Villafuerte, the situation is more ambiguous.

"Of course, it is difficult being a Filipino for 82 years and suddenly that changes," he said.

"The past is past, and I have accepted that this is how I lived my life."