What is ihin henkan (遺品返還)?
— a notebook takes sixty years to come home

Meaning

Ihin henkan is the return, often after many decades, of the belongings of those who died overseas to their families in Japan.

On the battlefield, the notebooks and photographs of the dead were often carried home by soldiers of the other side. Decades later, some of these are traced back to the family of the man who wrote them. The notebook of Tamura Yoshikazu is one that came home this way.

How it worked

• Picked up — notebooks, diaries, photographs and name tags left on the field were picked up by soldiers of the other side and carried home.
• Kept — they were kept, often for decades, in a private house or an institution, because there was no way to know where to send them.
• Traced — later, someone sought to return them, and the Japanese family was traced using the names, unit and place names written on the paper.

It was the writer himself who closed Tamura's notebook. On the last page he wrote:

Beyond this sea is my dear homeland. My beloved friends are there.
The relief sentry has come. … And so the days of the battlefield pass, one by one. The End.

Three months after writing "The End," he was killed. That closed notebook was picked up by Australian soldiers, slept sixty years in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and in December 2003 came home to Oyama, in Tochigi.

Source: the closing lines of the notebook and the course of its return — see the detailed page (AJRP / AWM PR02035; the handover ceremony of 10 December 2003).

It came home because of a name — but not one written on it

A return is possible only because something on the paper gives a clue — a name, a unit, a place, a date.

Tamura's notebook, however, carried no author's name. We can call him "Tamura Yoshikazu" not because it was written down, but because someone went and found out. The notebook held more than a hundred poems, and it was their contents that gave the clue. A poem travels together with the outline of the man who wrote it.

Many fragments are still in someone's house, with no known way home.

Fragments where this word appears

• Tamura Yoshikazu (Utsunomiya, 239th Infantry Regiment → New Guinea / notebook, returned 2003)
• Maruta Toshimichi (a diary that carries his name, and yet has still not come home)

(As more fragments touching on return join the archive, they will be added here.)

Tamura Yoshikazu, in detail → Maruta Toshimichi, in detail → The 239th Infantry Regiment →

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