80 Years On: Woman Orphaned by Tokyo Air Raid Had Her Life Turned Upside Down

Newsfrom Japan

Society

Aug 17, 2025 09:00 (JST)

Tokyo, Aug. 17 (Jiji Press)–A Japanese woman orphaned by a massive U.S. air raid on Tokyo 80 years ago, in the late stage of World War II, had her life turned upside down.

“Many people had their lives ruined by a single war,” Yoriko Suzuki said, before her death at the age of 87 in June this year. “War must never ever happen again.”

Suzuki was one of the many children who were orphaned by the war and left with no choice but to fend for themselves on the streets of the Japanese capital’s Ueno district and other locations throughout the country.

According to a welfare ministry survey in February 1948, shortly after the end of the war, about a quarter of 123,511 orphans in the country, except Okinawa, were in the situation because of the war.

A total of 28,248 people aged 20 or below under the traditional East Asian age reckoning were orphaned due to their parents being killed in air raids or in battles, while 11,351 returned to Japan after the end of the war.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]

Jiji Press