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SHIJIAZHUANG: In the middle of an east China martyr's cemetery, where hundreds of Chinese soldiers lie after giving their lives fighting the Japanese invaders, a special tombstone stands with a Japanese name on it.
"Hideo Miyagawa--Japanese anti-war fighter", reads the tombstone. There is no picture, no epitaph, nor the birth and death dates of the diseased on the stone.
Miyagawa, the man resting in the tomb, was one of over one thousand Japanese peace lovers who sweated, or even sacrificed their lives in China, to stop the aggressive war initiated by Japan's Imperial Army from 1937 to 1945. More than 20 million Chinese soldiers and civilians lost their lives in the war.
The 25-year-old young man shot himself with the last bullet in his gun after being surrounded by Japanese soldiers following a battle in 1945. A fellow Chinese soldier's family has swept his tomb for the past 65 years.
"Miyagawa's tomb is always tidy and has fresh flowers," said a cemetery keeper in Changqing District of Jinan City, east China's Shandong Province.
The contributions of these Japanese was described by historians as "irreplaceable" and "honorable".
However, most Chinese remain unfamiliar with this historical episode. Meanwhile, these Japanese peacekeepers could hardly receive public recognition in their own country, either.
To honor them, the Party history research office of the Hubei Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China set up a research team of four experts in 2004 to study and document this unique history.
"We just want both Chinese and Japanese to get a full picture of what these anti-war activists had done for world peace, "Hu Zhenjiang, a historian with the research team, told Xinhua on Friday, the 65th anniversary of China's victory over Japanese aggression as well as the end of the World War II.
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