Flags of our fathers: a Japanese couple’s incredible story

Inspired by the recovery of her grandfather’s ‘Yosegaki Hinomaru’ flag, a woman and her husband have since helped send scores of second world war flags home to loved ones

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Rex and Keiko Ziak operate the Obon Society, a humanitarian initiative to reunite the flags of fallen Japanese soldiers with their surviving families. Photo: Handout

Published: 8:15pm, 13 Jan 2018Updated: 6:05pm, 19 Jan 2018

In a hamlet deep in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Keiko Ziak’s uncle took a phone call in 2007 that shook her family’s world. The speaker identified himself as a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Tokyo and asked if he recognised a name.

Ziak’s uncle was stunned. It was a name he had not heard uttered in decades. It was his father’s name.

“My uncle was an infant when his father went off to war and he and my mother have no memories of him,” Ziak recalled. “My grandmother would never talk about him either, so for a stranger to call out of the blue and say his name was a shock.”

Ziak’s grandfather had been sent to the Burma front during the second world war but nothing was heard from him since. Some time after Japan’s surrender, the family received official notification from the government that he had been killed in action on June 27, 1945. The letter was accompanied by a small box containing a stone to represent the human remains they would never receive.

US Marines pass through a small village in Okinawa, where Japanese soldiers lay dead, during the second world war. Many ‘Yosegaki Hinomaru’ flags were taken as war souvenirs by Allied soldiers. Photo: AFP

The family’s shock only deepened when the bureaucrat said he had something that belonged to Ziak’s grandfather in a package dropped off at a hotel in Narita by a Canadian man.