
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, September 7, 1993                   TAG: 9309070018
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TOKYO                                LENGTH: Short

12 JAPANESE WOMEN, STUCK IN CHINA, RETURN

Twelve Japanese women left behind in China after World War II received temporary permission Monday to stay in Japan while the government decides how to handle their desperate attempt to return home.

The women flew in from Beijing Sunday on one-way tickets and without money. Their plight has captured media sympathies and renewed pressure on Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa to deal with the results of Japan's past militarism.

"I will never go back to China," said 81-year-old Hatsue Yokota, her lips trembling and her eyes filled with tears, in a nationally televised news conference. "Please, my fellow Japanese, help me stay."

The women range in age from 57 to 81 and apparently all have Japanese passports. Immigration officials have provided them each about $3,000 in cash and set them up in a temporary shelter.

Most of the roughly 600,000 Japanese who lived in Japan's puppet state of Manchuria, or Manchukuo, in China in the 1930s and 1940s fled in chaos back to Japan after Tokyo's defeat in 1945.

But about 6,000 Japanese children and women married to Chinese men were left behind. About 4,200 have returned, but 1,800 more are unable to do so.

by CNB