Over 30,000 Japanese children are in the care of the state. This study describes what happens to them in a country that has no professional social workers and little tradition of adopting or fostering children in need of care.

Yoshiro thinks he might never die. A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan's many 'old-elderly'; men and women who remember a time before the air and the sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe promted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. He may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson - born frail and prone to sickness - might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro's sagacity to keep Mumei alive. As hopes for Japan's youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure - might Yoshiro's great-grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?

World War II was a difficult, frightening time for many people around the globe. In the United States, difficulties arose after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941. People became suspicious of Japanese Americans living in the United States. As a result, many Japanese Americans were put into internment camps

After Japan's defeat in August 1945, some Japanese children were abandoned in China and raised by Chinese foster parents. They were unable to return to Japan even during the mass repatriation carried out by the Japanese government in the 1950s. Most of them returned to Japan in the 1980s. They are called Japanese war orphans. They are victims of the Sino-Japanese War and have been exploited and abandoned by the Japanese government. They are also "border people" who have lived in the interstices between two nations, China and Japan, and are migrants who have exploited the gap in economic development between Japan and China to seek individual happiness. Modern East Asia underwent drastic social change. These drastic social changes affected the lives of the Japanese war orphans and their families in a variety of ways. Over the years, Zhong has interviewed Japanese war orphans, their Chinese foster parents, and Japanese volunteers. The title is an interview-based sociological study of the issue of Japanese war orphans. The first half of the Japanese war orphans' lives were spent in China, and the latter half in Japan. It brings to the fore the dramatic personal histories of the Japanese war orphans surviving in the interstices between two nation-states. Through analyzing the issue of Japanese war orphans, the research on the subject makes the following three points: (1) the powerlessness of civilians caught up in modern warfare and the long-lasting effects of modern warfare on the life histories of individuals and their families; (2) the nature of the modern nation-state, which exploits and abandons its citizens as though they were expendable; and (3) immigration as a product of modernization gaps. Scholars pursuing studies in Japanese society and historians of the Sino-Japanese war would find this an ideal read.

"Mark Jones examines the making of a new child’s world in Japan between 1890 and 1930 and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. Family reformers, scientific child experts, magazine editors, well-educated mothers, and other prewar urban elites constructed a model of childhood—having one’s own room, devoting time to homework, reading children’s literature, playing with toys—that ultimately became the norm for young Japanese in subsequent decades. This book also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context—the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan. The ideal of making the child into a “superior student” (yutosei) appealed to the family seeking upward mobility and to the nation-state that needed disciplined, educated workers able to further Japan’s capitalist and imperialist growth. This view of the middle class as a child-centered, educationally obsessed, socially aspiring stratum survived World War II and prospered into the years beyond."