THE last time Ishinosuke Uwano saw his brother, his sisters and his home town, Japan was a warlike imperial power, Emperor Hirohito was a god, and he was a 20-year-old soldier heading for almost certain death on the battlefields of Manchuria.

Yesterday, 63 years later, he returned to a country transformed — an old man barely able to remember his native language. Mr Uwano is one of a dwindling group: former troops of the Japanese Imperial Forces who never returned home after their country was defeated in 1946.

Over the decades they have emerged from desert islands and tropical jungles. But Mr Uwano is one of a forgotten multitude that was trapped for decades in the former Soviet Union. Yesterday, looking healthy, a little bemused and at least ten years younger than his 83 years, he landed in Tokyo to be welcomed by a mob of photographers.

“I have not spoken Japanese for more than 60 years,” he said in Ukrainian through an interpreter. “So, the first thing that I want to say to all of you is konnichiwa (good day).”

He remembered one other crucial word — sakura, the cherry tree, the most Japanese of plants, which is in blossom across the northern prefecture of Iwate, where Mr Uwano was born.

“Ukraine has become my homeland,” he said before boarding his aircraft to Tokyo, wearing a traditional Ukrainian cap. “(But) I would like to visit my parents’ graves and to see the cherry blossoms.”

Mr Uwano was one of about 600,000 Japanese soldiers who had the ill-fortune to fall into Soviet hands after the end of the Second World War. Rather than being repatriated, they were held in appalling conditions in prison camps, where hundreds of thousands of them died.

By the mid-1950s most of the survivors had been allowed to return home, but Mr Uwano slipped through the net. He was reported to have been in Sakhalin Island, off eastern Siberia, in 1958. Since his existence became known in Japan last week, he has intimated that he was prevented from returning home by the former Soviet regime.

In 2002 he was declared dead in Japan. Then, last year, he turned up in the city of Zhitomyr, 90 miles (145km) northwest of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. He had married and had three children. His 37-year-old son, Anatolii Zaichuk, has travelled with him to Japan.

According to Japanese reports, an acquaintance had made inquiries on his behalf at the Japanese Consulate in Ukraine, which, after establishing his identity, invited him to return home. “I feel very good now,” he said at the airport. “I cannot find the words to express my gratitude to the Japanese Government.”

He will spend a week in his home village of Hirono, in the isolated hills of Iwate. A brother and two sisters still live there. “I’m not sure,” Mr Uwano said, when asked what they would talk about. “I’m sure once we’ve met we’ll find topics in common.”

The fate of former troops scattered by the war still fascinates Japan. In the 1970s there were several cases of former soldiers, stranded in isolated locations, who were unaware — or unwilling to believe — that Japan had surrendered. They included Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who killed 30 local people in the Philippines in 1974. He surrendered after his commanding officer was flown in to convince him that the war really was over.

Last year rumours of two more octogenarian wartime survivors drew Japanese diplomats and journalists to another isolated corner of the Philippines. But the pair never appeared and the whole episode appears to have been a trick designed to extract money from the credulous Japanese visitors.

“He was a quiet lad, and there’s only about two of our class left alive now,” Genichiro Oashi, a primary school friend of Mr Uwano, told The Times yesterday. “We wonder how he managed for all this time. There’s so much I’d like to talk to him about, but he’s here for only a week. So I’ll just say, ‘Congratulations!’ and ‘Welcome back’, and tell him to stay healthy, even if he does go back to Ukraine.”

Japan in 2006

Elected government: led by Junichiro Koizumi, the Prime Minister

Emperor: Akihito, son of Hirohito, who renounced his divinity after the war

Population of Tokyo: 12.4 million

Tokyo subway: 12 lines, 286km (178 miles)

Favourite sportsman: Ichiro Suzuki, baseball player for the Seattle Mariners

Japan in 1943

Government: Military oligarchy, led by General Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister

Emperor: Hirohito, regarded as a Shinto deity

Population of Tokyo: 6 million

Tokyo subway: One line, 12km (7.5 miles)

Favourite sportsman: Futabayama, sumo wrestler

THE MISSING MEN

More recent Russian research suggests that the number of Japanese PoWs was one million, of whom 400,000 died

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Asia exile: Richard Lloyd Parry's weblog

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