Japan emperor Akihito's Vietnam visit a sign of improved ties

When Nguyen Thi Xuan said goodbye to her Japanese husband in 1954, she thought he was going off for a year or two on another long assignment. She never imagined it would be more than half a century before she’d see him again.

Like many Vietnamese women married to Japanese soldiers, Xuan’s family was split up, victimized by the stormy relationship between the countries.

On Monday, the former foes enjoy strong bilateral ties, with Japan and Vietnam cooperating economically as well as in other areas, including defense and security.

In a sign of just how far the relationship has come, several surviving widows and families of former Japanese soldiers — including Xuan — will have an opportunity to meet with Japanese Emperor Akihito when he visits Vietnam for the first time this week.

Japanese troops invaded Vietnam in 1940 and remained there until Japan surrendered to the allies in 1945, ending World War II. Xuan’s husband, however, was among some 700 Japanese soldiers who remained in Vietnam after revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence from French colonial rule in 1945.

The Japanese soldiers helped train Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh to fight the French. But after the Viet Minh defeated the colonial forces in 1954, Xuan’s husband was one of 71 former Japanese soldiers who had to leave the communist North without being able to bring their families, because Japan was on the other side of the Cold War. He left behind his two children and his pregnant 29-year-old wife.

“I thought he was on an assignment for one or two years, but we then had no information about him,” Xuan, 92, said recently.

She said that after not hearing from her husband for six years, she and her family thought he had died, and set up an altar to worship him.

Xuan had to raise her three children on her own by working on a rice farm in a village outside Hanoi. Villagers would call her Xuan Nhat, or Japanese Xuan, mocking her marriage to a Japanese man. Her children also were mocked.

“People called me Japanese son, son of a fascist. There used to be a lot of discrimination. But it is better now,” said Nguyen Xuan-Phi, Xuan’s eldest son.

But anti-Japanese sentiment started to dissipate after communist Vietnam launched reforms in the mid-1980s and opened up to the outside world in the early 1990s.

In 2005, Xuan learned that her husband was alive and living in Japan through a Vietnamese woman living in the country with her Japanese husband, also a former soldier. The following year, Xuan’s husband, who had married a Japanese woman, arranged to visit her.