FOCUS: Tokyo Museum Preserves Memories of Students Killed in War

Tokyo, Sept. 10 (Jiji Press)--In 1944, as World War II entered its final stages, Itaru Maruo was a promising student at an elite university, dreaming of a career in art. Then the Imperial Japanese military called him up.

Deployed to China under the wartime student mobilization program, Maruo fell ill and was hospitalized time and again. He is believed to have been caught up in the Soviet invasion and died at an army hospital in Manchuria, in what is now northeastern China, on Aug. 30, 1945, about two weeks after Japan's surrender. He was 25. His remains have never been returned to Japan.

In late July this year, a relative donated some 200 items that once belonged to Maruo, including his memoirs, to the "Wadatsumi no Koe" (Voices of Fallen Student Conscripts) memorial museum in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward, a short walk from the University of Tokyo's Hongo Campus.

The museum holds numerous letters, diaries and other personal effects of students who died in the war, most of them young men sent to the front under the student mobilization program. Their writings speak of the anguish of leaving parents behind for the battlefield, and of the bitter regret of lives, and studies, cut short.

Born in Tokyo in 1920, Maruo entered Tokyo Imperial University, the forerunner of the University of Tokyo, in 1942, enrolling in the Department of Aesthetics and Art History in the Faculty of Letters. He studied painting and art history while captaining the university's hardball baseball team. One baseball magazine of the day called him "the finest talent" the university's baseball club had produced since its founding.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]