FEATURE: Japan seeks to remember its war dead as individuals in new memorials

Efforts are under way to give a human face to Japanese casualties in World War II and immediately preceding conflicts by reading their names aloud in a new type of memorial service, despite the difficulty of identifying all individual war dead.From the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 until the end of WWII in 1945, the government estimates the number of war dead at 3.10 million, including 2.30 million military personnel and 800,000 civilian casualties. In the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, roughly 140,000 and 74,000 people were killed, respectively, by the end of…READ FULL ARTICLE