A Chinese Town’s Deep Bonds With Japan Bring Wealth and Hatred

At the end of a narrow road in Fangzheng, a remote town in northeastern China, next to a hushed forest of birch and pine trees, stands the locked iron gate of the Sino-Japanese Friendship Garden.

But inside is no garden. Instead, there are graves of some 5,000 Japanese who died in what was then known as Manchuria when the Japanese Empire collapsed in defeat at the end of World War II, and victorious Soviet armies swept in.

The Friendship Garden was built as a memorial to this tragic period of history, and became a symbol of the unusually close ties that have bound Fangzheng to Japan since the war.