War does not choose a homeland

In the cemetery of Miane sleeps a woman whom no one has ever come looking for. The memorial stone was laid on 15 December 2013, on a cold winter morning, in memory of those who, in those hills between Combai and the Quartier del Piave, lost their lives in the turbulent weeks that followed the end of the war. Among the names carved into the stone is that of Jone Yoshikawa.

She was a woman. Japanese, according to the cemetery registers of the parish of Miane. She was the interpreter for the German Command in Valdobbiadene.

Pause for a moment on that sentence.

A Japanese woman, in 1945, in the Prosecco hills of the Treviso area…

What was she doing there? How had she got there, from the other side of the world? No one, for now, knows for certain. The sources are silent. The archives mention her only in a single line, in a footnote to a degree thesis. But that line is enough to make her exist. And to make us think.

May in Combai

To understand the fate of Jone Yoshikawa, one has to understand what those weeks were like, in this land which is also our land. The war was over, or about to end. 25 April 1945 had come, the Germans were retreating, the Italian Social Republic was crumbling.

In many villages of the Marca Trevigiana and the Belluno area, the power vacuum was filled with the settling of scores, summary sentences and justice — or what was then called justice — carried out without courts, without defence counsel, often without any guilt being established.

At Combai di Miane, on the night of 7 to 8 May 1945, a group of prisoners was led on foot, tied in pairs with wire, along a path climbing towards the hamlet of Colmellere. They had been loaded onto lorries from the prisons of Valdobbiadene. Most of them were young, and many had stated under interrogation that they had enlisted in the German forces only because they had been interned in Germany after 8 September, to save their lives.

“I too know they were poor lads. Killed only because they were Fascists.”

— Giuseppe Buogo, witness, Combai di Miane

That night, at the Spinoncia — a chasm in the woods, a vertical shaft some thirty metres deep about two kilometres north of the centre of Combai, at Colmellere — at least thirty-seven people met their end. Perhaps more.

Before the massacre

But Jone Yoshikawa was not among those thirty-seven. The testimony of Giuseppe Buogo, collected in November 2015 by the historian Luca Nardi for his master’s thesis at the University of Padua, is explicit:

“I am sure, though, that one person had been killed and thrown into the hole before this happened.”

— Giuseppe Buogo, referring to the Japanese interpreter

Her body was found near the Spinonce of Combai in the very first days of the liberation, by a witness from the village. And it was taken to the cemetery of Miane. There it has remained.

While the remains of the others, after the exhumations of 1947, were for the most part transferred by the Ministry of Defence to the Croci Bianche cemetery at Altare, in Liguria, Jone’s body stayed here. In this land that was not hers. Perhaps because she was known. Perhaps because her identity was certain from the outset. Perhaps — and this is only a thought, not history — because someone here wanted her not to leave alone.

The war found someone with no way out

There is a question that anyone who studies these events without partisanship asks, seeking to understand rather than to condemn or absolve: how does one end up, while still young, working as an interpreter for a foreign army in a foreign country, ten thousand kilometres from home, in a conflict that is not one’s own?

We do not know. We do not know whether Jone Yoshikawa was born in Italy or had come here. We do not know whether she had chosen or had been chosen. We do not know whether she really understood, in those last days of the war, what was about to happen to her.

“You cannot choose the war you are born into.
You can choose whether to remember those who lost it.”

We know that she had a name — Jone, an Italian female name of Greek origin, derived from Ionía, the ancient region of Asia Minor inhabited by the Ionians — and a Japanese surname: Yoshikawa (吉川), which in Japanese means fortunate river. A name that on its own already tells a story of borders crossed, of worlds mingled, of an identity suspended between two civilisations that at that moment were allies, and yet so very far apart.

And we know that she met her death in a wood in these hills, even before the great massacre of that May night. Alone, in all likelihood with none of her own people there with her. Without anyone on the other side of the world knowing.

The cemetery as a place of truth

The Alpini know well what war cemeteries are. They have built them, they have visited them, they have left their comrades in them. They know that in those places history stops taking sides and becomes, simply, human again.

In the cemetery of Miane there is a woman who came from Japan. We know almost nothing about her. We do not know whether she was good or bad, naive or aware, accomplice or victim.

We know that she had a name, that she had a body, that someone — in the chaos of May 1945 — saw her dead and decided to bury her out of Christian charity.

This anonymous gesture, made by someone we do not know, tells us something about ourselves. It tells us that even in the worst moments, when evil is unleashed and violence no longer distinguishes between those who fight and those who translate, between those who bear arms and those who bear words, there is always someone who finds the time to do the right thing. To cover a body. To give it a place to rest.

The stone laid in 2013 completes that gesture: it also gives a name to that place.

It says that Jone Yoshikawa existed, that she died here, that someone remembers her.

A reflection for all of us

Every war cemetery is an open book. Every name carved in stone is a life cut short that asks only to be remembered, not judged.

Jone Yoshikawa was not an Alpina, she was not Italian, she was not even European. She was a woman whom the war had found in the wrong place at the wrong time, probably without her ever having had the power to change the course of events.

There are many stories like this. In our valleys, in our woods, in our cemeteries lie people whom the war moved like pawns on an immense chessboard: Russian prisoners, Austro-Hungarian soldiers, forced labourers, interpreters. People who had not chosen to be there, and who never managed to leave.

Keeping them alive in our memory does not mean rewriting history, nor putting perpetrators and victims on the same level. It means recognising that war is always, first and foremost, a factory of shattered lives. And that those lives, even the most remote and the hardest to understand, deserve at least the respect of a name.

by Michele Sacchet · Col Maòr no. 1, 2026