Anniversary uncovers unhealed wounds

TOKYO -- Still stinging with anger and sorrow, Asians on Sunday marked the 60th anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender by honoring their dead, burning Rising Sun flags and demanding compensation amid rekindled tensions over Japanese abuses.

The occasion inspired a rare joint commemoration by North Korea and South Korea, and spurred protesters in Hong Kong to burn Japan's flag and march on Tokyo's consulate chanting "Down with Japanese imperialism!"

In the Philippines, elderly women once forced to act as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers renewed demands for compensation and apologies. Former Australian prisoners of war returned to the Thai jungles where they labored under brutal conditions to build the notorious Death Railway.

China exhorted its citizens to remember Tokyo's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, with "a fresh wave of patriotism," as state-run media whipped up memories of Japanese atrocities.

The outpouring of emotion revealed the unhealed wounds six decades after Japan's Emperor Hirohito conceded defeat in a radio broadcast, just days after the United States incinerated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.

The anniversary comes as Japan's relations with its neighbors are their most frayed in decades.

Regional strains stem partly from anxiety over North Korea's nuclear arms program and a dispute between Japan and China over resources in a contested area of the East China Sea. But there are also bitter complaints that Japan has not properly atoned for brutally occupying much of the region in the 1930s and '40s.

"I can accept the fact that the young generation of Japanese is not to blame. It was their fathers and grandfathers. But until they own up, they'll always be a pariah nation," said 84-year-old Baden Jones, an Australian.

He was among former POWs who honored fallen comrades at a ceremony in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, where many of the 12,000 prisoners who died building Japan's jungle railway were buried.

Bitterness runs especially deep in China. Riots erupted earlier this year over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni war shrine -- which deifies Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals -- and over Tokyo's approval of history textbooks that critics say gloss over wartime atrocities.

The sense of victims' solidarity extended across the Cold War's last frontier as a delegation of about 200 North Koreans arrived in Seoul, South Korea, to pay a first-ever visit to a cemetery where Korean War dead are buried.

Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910. While the war's end brought liberation, it also led to the peninsula's division and a stalemated war between North and South in 1950-53.

"We've proposed the visit to remember the many who died for Korea's liberation," the head of the North Korean delegation, Kim Chi Nam, told South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young.

In the Philippines, Lili-Pilipina, a group of women who say they were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army, demanded again that Tokyo compensate them. While some have accepted payments from the privately run Asian Women's Fund, the women want official compensation and acknowledgment of their suffering from the Japanese government.

Tokyo has generally refused to pay damages to individuals for the war, saying the issue was settled between governments in postwar treaties. Japanese courts have rejected a number of lawsuits brought by former sex slaves across Asia.

In China's anniversary events, national religious associations planned rites condemning aggression and praying for peace, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The northeastern city of Qiqihar put on an exhibit commemorating the death of a Chinese man two years ago from a mustard gas canister abandoned by Japan's army, the China Youth Daily reported. The leak also injured 42 people.

Japan invaded China in 1931. Its troops massacred as many as 300,000 people after taking the city of Nanjing in December 1937, and Japanese scientists performed germ warfare experiments on Chinese prisoners.

Looming over this year's remembrances was the Yasukuni shrine, which honors Japan's war dead, including its prime minister during World War II, Hideki Tojo.

Speculation mounted that Koizumi could visit there as early as Monday to commemorate the end of World War II -- an act sure to further enrage Chinese and Koreans.

Taku Yamasaki, former vice president of Koizumi's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said Sunday he did not think Koizumi would visit on the sensitive date.

"More people are realizing the importance of good diplomatic relations with our neighboring countries," he said.

But Koizumi needs to bolster support among conservative Japanese for next month's parliamentary elections and he hasn't visited the shrine since January 2004. He said Friday he would make "the appropriate decision when the time comes."

North Korea decried the shrine visits as a sign of resurgent Japanese militarism.

"These militarist forces are directly exercising increasing influence on shaping policies," the communist country's state-run Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary Saturday.

On one hand, there were terrible atrocities committed, and a continuing injustice to the survivors in the Japanese government's refusal to acknowledge the crimes.

On the other hand, statement from the government of North Korea ... *shudder*

Ahhhhhhh, the sweet smell of victimhood.

Asians need not worry. If Japan ever gets out of line again, the U.S. will surely solve the problem. Again.

My parents just about flipped when we bought an Infinity SUV. Even tho we could show it was assembled in the US they couldn't get past the Nissan thing.
My mom was in high school when former Jap pow's spoke to the classrooms about what went on in the prison camps.
My great grandma refused to be called german. In her words she was 'Pennsylvania Dutch!".

I have known former prisoners of war who were held by the Japanese. I have also known prisoners of war who were held by the Germans.

The men who were held by the Germans told the same story. that there was some cruelty but not a lot. Their main concern was getting enough to eat to stay alive and the lack of medical care. They pointed out to me that their captors in many instances weren't a lot better off than they were.

When I was in the service, in the early 60s, I knew two former prisoners held by the Japanese and one of them survived the Baatan death march. The tales they told of brutality would curl your hair.

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