In 1977, a group of Japanese World War II veterans and their family members returned to Pekhon, a small village populated by the Padaung tribe. They sobbed when digging up the bones of the Japanese soldiers who died more than three decades earlier.

Resentful of the centuries-old tutelage by the Burman kings, and looking askance at the alliance between the Aung San-led Burman freedom fighters and the invading Japanese Imperial Army, the Padaungs took the side of the British, whose colonial rule they regarded rather favourably, and repaid the atrocities of the Japanese soldiers in kind.