As a Writer at BuzzFeed, I write and curate quizzes, listicles, and articles about everything from pop culture and history to food and fashion.

I've also picked up some responses from this thread. 

The following responses have been edited for clarity and length. 

"Many who managed to escape to the north first bought tickets to a nearby large town where the train station staff didn't care if they bought a ticket to a northern state. Learning about this was an eye-opener because it was like the slavery era in a lesser form." 

"My grandpa was one of them! They weren't necessarily orphans but were often just from poor families who couldn't feed their children because of the economical situation. Grandpa was the only one of 6 kids who couldn't grow up with his parents. While he had a relatively good living situation, it did mark him for life, and it often resurfaced in his last year when he got dementia." 

"I have grandparents who lived through Imperial Japan's occupation. Dementia had taken most of her nightmares away. But the stories stick with us. Head of schoolboys on pikes. Years living in the jungle on wild sweet potatoes. Relatives dying by water torture. We do a weird doublethink where we love anime and Japan but can never forget the atrocities that happened to us. But we also have to compartmentalize it all because here in the West their history with them is not that of brutal occupier but defeated enemy turned loyal ally. It’s also the history that is more or less the most relevant globally."