Michiyo Fujioka let out a cheer and threw her arms in the air in celebration when her hard-drinking, abusive father died.

Born to a farming family in Tottori Prefecture, her father was called up for military service when he was 21. He was detained in Siberia by the Soviet Union after World War II ended and returned to Japan in 1948.

He lost himself to alcohol and became violent at home.

With a 1.8-liter sake bottle in his hand, the father would overturn the table on which bowls and dinner plates were placed.

Fujioka would pick up rice strewn over the floor and eat it after removing the dirt.

When drunk, her father would tell Fujioka and her elder brother to stand up and die together after opening a gas valve. The “suicide game” ended when her mother desperately stepped in.

He once chased her around wielding a knife even after she ran out of their home.

In June, Fujioka, now 64, spoke about her experiences for the first time in public at a meeting organized by a group of family members of former soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

About 100 gathered for the meeting held in Osaka.

“Even today, I cannot look squarely at my father’s photo out of fear,” Fujioka said. “Who in the world made our parent-child relationship like this?

“The government robbed my father of his right to live a happy life. I am full of anger.”

When in a good mood, her father would brag about his battlefield feats, such as trucking relief supplies while enemy shells rained down.

However, he would shake like a leaf in the corner of a room on rainy days, saying, “I will be killed” and “Soldiers are coming.”

Her father became unable to rise and even go to the toilet on his own. Her mother left home with Fujioka and her elder brother.

At one time, her father visited the three. Tears in his eyes, he stroked Fujioka’s head and begged for her forgiveness. Two months later, he died.

Fujioka, who was 9 years old at the time, learned years later that he had killed himself.

Fujioka also impaired her health from too much drinking when she was in her 20s. And she used violence against her daughter when she was under 2 years old.

“I am doing what that person was doing,” she said she thought at the time.

She received counseling and attended an abuse prevention program.

Fujioka did not realize that her father’s problems stemmed from his battlefield experiences until she watched a movie about the Vietnam War. She was in her 30s.

She long thought that her father’s problems were his own. But she began to believe that society at large should think about the issue after learning from the group of family members of former soldiers suffering from PTSD.

The group was formed in 2018 by Akio Kuroi, who said his father appeared to be an empty shell of himself.

Kuroi, 74, said his father, Keijiro, who fought in China during World War II, did not talk to anyone, even his wife and three sons, after the war.

“He was lethargic, and we could not even tell whether he was with us,” he said.

With no regular job, he always kept silent with a sad, bewildered look on his face.

“I will never become a man like him,” Kuroi always told himself.

He did not even shed a tear when his father died in 1990 at the age of 77.

A change came in 2015 when Kuroi watched a documentary program about a U.S. soldier suffering from PTSD as a result of fighting in the Vietnam War.

The decorated veteran, haunted by nightmares about battlefields, would shout at his family members.

His eyes reminded Kuroi of his father’s gloomy, sad-looking eyes.

Kuroi examined his father’s military records and albums for the first time.

His father was promoted from a private to a sergeant, received a good conduct certificate and was engaged in fierce counterguerrilla warfare.

A soldier who belonged to his father’s company wrote about how Japanese soldiers killed non-resistant Chinese prisoners with bayonets.

“My father and many others were wrecked by terrible battlefield experiences,” Kuroi said. “Their sufferings are gnawing the minds of their children and grandchildren decades later.”

Eri Nakamura, an associate professor of modern Japanese history at Hiroshima University’s graduate school, said no systematic records are left about mental scars of demobilized Japanese soldiers.

Still, she estimates that hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered from neuropsychiatric disorders during World War II based on fragmentary military records and U.S. surveys. Many others are believed to have developed such disorders after the war.

“Soldiers’ children finally began speaking up after they entered into their 70s and 80s,” Nakamura said. “The family members’ accounts make us feel that the war has not ended after all these years.”