The end of World War II left Japan occupied by hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Relationships between GIs and Japanese women produced children -- known as konketsuji, or mixed-blood children -- who fit nowhere in the rigid social order of postwar Japan. Many were abandoned at train stations, temples, and police boxes. Children with Black fathers faced the harshest rejection in a society already struggling with its own devastation. Miki Sawada established her orphanage in 1948 with the explicit purpose of sheltering these children. The property itself carried its own weight of history: it had been the Iwasaki family's detached residence in Oiso, confiscated by the Japanese government during the war for unpaid property taxes. Sawada bought it back with money scraped together from the sale of her own belongings. She was a Mitsubishi heiress running an orphanage out of a repossessed Mitsubishi mansion, spending her family's industrial fortune on the children that industrial-era nationalism had produced.

The orphanage nearly failed before it truly began. Sawada had spent everything on the land, and running a home for growing numbers of children required steady income she did not have. Then came word, through the intermediary Lewis Bush and Anglican bishops acting as executors, of a charitable bequest. Elizabeth Saunders had been an Englishwoman who spent forty years in Japan as a governess in the service of the Mitsui family -- through the prewar era and throughout the war itself. Before her death in Tokyo in 1946, she asked that her charitable legacy be administered through the Anglican Church in Japan. Sawada never met Saunders. But Elizabeth's money allowed Sawada to register the orphanage as a nonprofit for the first time, opening the door to future donations and institutional support. The groundbreaking ceremony was held on October 26, 1947, attended by Allied Church Club benefactors and supporters including Paul Rusch. Sawada named the home for the woman whose generosity had saved it.

Sawada's work was never comfortable for anyone. In her autobiography, titled "Black Skin, White Soul," she wrote frankly about race in ways that drew both criticism and praise from both sides of the Pacific. As scholar Yukiko Koshiro described in "Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan," postwar Japan and America had tacitly agreed to suppress discussion of the racism each side had practiced during the war. Sawada broke that silence. She argued that the racism directed at biracial children -- especially those with Black fathers -- made it necessary to find ways to get them adopted back to the United States, their paternal country. Her comments were controversial. Some praised her directness; others accused her of reinforcing racial categories. But the children kept arriving, and Sawada kept taking them in. By the time her work was done, nearly two thousand children had lived at Elizabeth Saunders Home.

In 1953, Sawada opened St. Stephan's School on the orphanage grounds so the children would not have to attend local schools where they faced bullying and exclusion. The name carried personal grief: Stephan was the Christian name of her third son, who had died during a naval battle in Indonesia during World War II. The school expanded to include a middle school in 1959. In 1993 -- decades after the original crisis of occupation-era children had passed -- St. Stephan's began accepting students from the general public, joining the Association of Christian Schools in Japan. The orphanage itself was rebuilt in 2009. A documentary that same year, titled "Beyond the Tunnel Was Our Paradise," followed former residents as adults, exploring what their lives had become after leaving the shelter of those walls. The title refers to the tunnel one passed through to reach the home -- a passage from the outside world into a place where, for a time, being different was the norm rather than the exception.