Saturday 04th December, 06:59 AM JST
SHANGHAI —
Hiroshi Yamazaki, a Japanese doctor who devoted most of his adult life to the well-being of Chinese people died of old age in the Chinese city of Jinan on Wednesday, the city government said Friday. He was 102.
‘‘For so long, I have carried a sense of atonement,’’ said Yamazaki when he was awarded the Japanese prime minister’s citation by local Japanese consular staff in November last year. ‘‘I will continue to serve the Chinese people till I die,’’ he also said at that time.
Yamazaki, from Maniwa, Okayama Prefecture, left Japan in 1937 and was called up to serve as a veterinarian attached to the Imperial Japanese Army when he was in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, in 1944. Finding himself unfit, he left the military after half a year. ‘‘At the end of the day, I did not even fire one shot,’’ he once said.
After Japan lost the war, he decided to stay in China and later married a Chinese woman. He attained a license to serve as a medical doctor in China and devoted his life to serving the local community as a pediatrician at a small clinic in communal housing in Jinan, where he worked even after he turned 100.
He returned to Japan in 1976 for the first time in many years and was asked to work in Japan. He declined the offer and returned to Jinan. He had by then finished paperwork to donate his body to medical studies. He said at that time, ‘‘I have no regrets at all about staying on in China. I’m happy with my life.’‘
He also received a citation from the Japanese foreign minister in August this year for promoting mutual understanding between Japanese and Chinese peoples.
No comments:
Post a Comment