KEY POINTS:
It is always the age that strikes you first - 20, 21, 22, - but the name on the headstone remains remote. There are only initials and a family name, a service number and rank and an age. It is the age that seems real.
Then the research
begins and personalities start to take shape. The initials become names, parents and home towns are identified.
These are no longer granite headstones in a small corner of a foreign country - these are our boys.
There is Edward and John, James and Cyril, Peter, Mike and Hugh. Ivo was a shearer from Fernhill in Hawkes Bay and Andrew a grocer's assistant from Christchurch.
Jack was a carpenter and joiner and Alexander a roof tiler. Alan worked as a civil servant in Wellington and John was a plasterer's apprentice from Auckland. Donald was a bus driver from Lower Hutt and Arthur an electrician in Nelson.
They are the sons of David and Jessie of New Plymouth, James and Iris of Wairoa, Andrew and Janet of Lyttelton, Robert and Agnes of Wanganui, Cecil and Mary of Rotorua, David and Jean of Dunedin.
Ordinary names, ordinary lives but now they lie in the only Commonwealth War Cemetery in Japan.
They did not make it back from the POW camps in Japan, from Jayforce, the New Zealand component of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, or from K Force, the New Zealand component of the United Nations Force in the Korean War.
Built by the Australian War Graves Group after the Japanese surrender, the cemetery lies 30km from Tokyo in Hodogaya, a suburb of Yokohama.
Here lie more than 1700 Allied servicemen. And it is not hard to spot the distinctive flora - the eucalyptus, the titree and the one proud kauri.
Twenty-six servicemen with New Zealand next-of-kin are buried at Hodogaya.
There is the group of merchant seamen from the MV Hauraki, captured in the Indian Ocean in 1942 while en route from New Zealand to the Middle East with war supplies.
Some of the crew were jailed in
Singapore, but engine room staff had to sail the Hauraki to Japan for a refit.
They were sent to the prison camp at Yokohama and set to work at the Mitsubishi dockyard, from where they could see their old ship being changed to a transport vessel.
Three of the men died while in captivity at Yokohama.
The survivors saw Tokyo bombed in 1945. Conditions deteriorated and the POWs were sent to a prison camp near Kamaishi, which was bombed on
August 9, causing the fourth casualty from the Hauraki.
Now when the small New Zealand and Australian communities in Tokyo gather on Anzac Day at Hodogaya, we can look at the headstones in the New Zealand section and think of the lads from Auckland and Christchurch, Dannevirke and Napier, Wellington and Cambridge.
And on behalf of New Zealand, we can say thanks.
* Margaret Pointer has researched the New Zealand connection at the only Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Japan.
