An 80-year-old Japanese man joined two friends for a bicycle journey from the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang province, on July 16, down through Jilin province, to the city of Huludao, Liaoning province, estimated distance of about 970 kilometers, to relive the past.

The Japanese with two friends from Japan on their journey in NE China [Photo by Bai Shi/ news.xwh.cn]

The Japanese was born in Harbin, in 1935, when his father was the secretary of a senior Japanese official and his mother a housewife, who were evacuated from Harbin to Huludao in 1946, a year after Japan's defeat in World War II, and from there, back to Japan by boat.

Now, on the 70th anniversary of the victory in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, the elderly Japanese decided to come back to the city where he was born and retrace the retreat from Harbin to Huludao, as a call for peace.

Along the way, he took part in a seminar with some Japanese language majors at Jilin University, in the city of Changchun, Jilin province, on July 20, and said that his generation would soon be leaving the stage of history so that exchanges between China and Japan should depend on the younger generations.

The Japanese in a seminar at Jilin University students, in Changchun, on July 20 [Photo by Bai Shi/ news.xwh.cn]

He and his friends fielded questions from the students and answered with sincerity. When one student asked him what he thought of the Abe government and the new Japan security bill, he answered that he held totally different views from Abe and that Abe's deeds didn't seem to match his words when he said he wanted more peaceful talks with the Chinese then did things that harmed relations. He also said that Japan's younger generation don't completely understand China, but that the public are mainly peace-loving. He said Japan also has anxieties about resources and that solving the problem depends largely on leadership.

Another reason for the bicycle trip, he noted, was that he wanted to look for his Chinese neighbor, Liu Chengjiang, in Harbin, who had generously offered help to his family, in the early post-war period when Japanese life in China was extremely hard. He said that his neighbor always gave some financial supports to his family and that meeting the neighbor again was one of his wishes. However, to his disappointment, he couldn't locate Liu in Harbin.

He said that 'kind and generous' were his impression of the Chinese. He is also a cycling fan and had another trip by bike in East China, starting from Shanghai, two years ago and met many problems along the way, with tire blowouts and getting injured, but thanks to local Chinese, he managed to complete his trip successfully.