Japan should be honest about its war of aggression against China, apologize to China and be grateful for the Chinese people's generous raising of Japanese lost war children, Sumie Ikeda, head of the association of friendship of repatriates from China, told Xinhua in an interview.

Ikeda said on Friday the war that Japan waged against China had committed monstrous crimes. However, Chinese people gave a second life to the lost Japanese war children by raising them, and sent them back to Japan after they grew up. All these moves symbolized the great generosity and kindheartedness of the Chinese people, she said at the home of lost war children in China in Tokyo.

Ikeda was born on Oct. 14, 1944 into a Japanese family in Hulin county in northeastern China's Heilongjiang Province, which was then occupied by Japanese army.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, Ikeda's father, an accountant in the Japanese army, was taken by the Soviet army to Siberia, leaving Ikeda's mother and five children including a boy homeless.

They late found a shelter in a refugee camp in Mudanjiang city of the northeastern province. But Ikeda's mother was not able to breast-feed her nor could she find anything suitable for Ikeda, who was only 10 months old. Ikeda's mother then decided to find a Chinese couple to adopt the kid. She was fortunate to encounter Li Chengyi and Wang Shuguang, a Chinese couple who promised to help Ikeda and later found her a foster father named Xu Benzhi who had no child himself at that time.

Ikeda's mother took her other children back to Japan, leaving only the youngest kid back in China.