Fangzheng’s bonds to Japan go back to the 1930s, when this region of China, now known as Heilongjiang Province, was part of a Japanese-created puppet state in Manchuria. In its efforts to control this de facto colony, Japan sent over some 380,000 settlers, mostly impoverished farmers.

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, about 10,000 of these colonists were trapped in Fangzheng by the advancing Soviets. Cut off from escape, thousands died from cold, sickness and starvation, as well as group suicide.

Thousands of other Japanese stayed, many of them children who were given to Chinese families by desperate parents, or abandoned as orphans.

Their story was forgotten until 1963, when Zhou Enlai, China’s No. 2 leader under Mao, ordered the town to excavate the Japanese bones from the hills and forests around the town for cremation and burial. The ashes were interred at what later became the Friendship Garden.

Image A picture of Ms. Gao’s Japanese mother, Shoko Kobayashi, with two of her children. Credit... Giulia Marchi for The New York Times

When Japan became prosperous in the 1980s, it began repatriating its war orphans from northeastern China. They, in turn, helped their Chinese relatives and friends move to Japan for work, study and marriage.

According to the Fangzheng government website, 38,000 people from the town — one-fifth of Fangzheng’s population — now live overseas, overwhelmingly in Japan.