"Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. When Kuramoto's grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family's belief in Japanese supremacy and its "divine" mission to "save" Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place.

As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country's sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor's radio broadcast "...we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable." Japan surrendered unconditionally."--BOOK JACKET.

"Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family's life in Dairen; their survival as a forgotten people during the battle over Manchuria waged by the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, and Communist China; and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan."--BOOK JACKET.

"Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family's experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her "homecoming" to Japan - where she had never been - just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval."--BOOK JACKET.