During World War II, battles between the US and Japan in the Philippines resulted in thousands of causalities on both sides, and many corpses were never recovered. Since then, the Japanese government has developed a $700,000-a-year program to retrieve the bones of the dead soldiers.

VICE Japan traveled to the Malico, where 4,600 Japanese soldiers and 3,200 American soldiers were killed on the battlefield and where local “bone hunters” are still searching for the soldiers’ remains.