Bücher von Xiaping Jiang

On August 15, 1945, the Emperor of Japan announces his country's unconditional surrender to the Allied powers. Tens of thousands of Japanese settlers in a Japanese-controlled region called "Manchukuo" are abandoned by their government, which even demands that they demonstrate their loyalty to their emperor by taking their own lives.Thirteen-year-old Okamura Hanako, a Japanese war orphan, is adopted by a compassionate Chinese couple.In 1972, relations between China and Japan are normalized, and many Japanese orphans return to Japan, but Hanako declines her father and brother's call to come home.Duanmu Zhengliang is born in China to Hanako and her husband Ikeda Yao, another Japanese orphan. He is shocked when as an adult he learns of his Japanese ancestry.Zhengliang meets Tong Xin, an intelligent, principled, and beautiful journalist, and develops feelings for her. He agrees to do an interview with the newspaper she works for, and they decide to write an article about the Japanese orphans of Manchuria. However, while in Japan for an academic exchange program, a lovely doctoral student named Arikawa Kikumiko asks him to remain there with her.Hanako is torn between her two homelands, Japan and China, and between her ties to her birth parents and affection for the Chinese parents who adopted her.Zhengliang, a descendant of Japanese war orphans, struggles with his identity, "neither Chinese nor Japanese."Why have two generations of Chinese journalists spared no effort in documenting and tracking the history of the Japanese war orphans?Many Japanese are descendants of the Japanese settlers of Manchuria. Why do they gather every year on the outskirts of Tokyo in front of a monument that faces the land where their ancestors lived, singing songs, proclaiming "Manchukuo is our homeland"?

Due to differences of political convictions, religious beliefs, and cultural traditions, the Republic of Yugoslavia broke up in 1991, as Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia fought for autonomy and independence. Under Milosevic's rule, Serbian military and paramilitary forces carried out a carefully planned "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Kosovo that claimed at least two hundred thousand lives. Not since the Nuremberg trials five decades before had there been such urgent calls to bring war criminals to justice.Under the authority of the United Nations, detective and forensics expert Dr. Henry Lee, at the invitation of his student Dr. Dragan Primorac, formed a "United Nations Investigative Team," which with Dr. Michael Baden, Dr. Cyril Wecht, and other experts traveled to Croatia to investigate a "mass grave" -- to find the truth behind the brutal murders of the people there. This investigation would not only determine whether the war criminals who led these massacres could be brought to the International Court of Justice to pay for their crimes, giving justice to their victims; it would also address the problem of training a new generation of forensic scientists in a post-war Croatia.