Tokyo – Japan’s leader apologized for Tokyo’s World War II colonization and invasions today, after other Asian nations marked the 60th anniversary of the Japanese surrender by honoring their dead and demanding compensation.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi pledged that Japan would never forget the “terrible lessons” of the war, and he expressed his “deep reflections and heartfelt” sorrow for the damage.
The occasion inspired commemorations across Asia on Sunday and today. North and South Korea held a rare joint event, while protesters in Hong Kong on Sunday burned Japan’s flag and marched 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 at 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 also are 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.
