Asia marks anniversary of Japan surrender
(AP/Xinhua)
Updated: 2005-08-15 09:09

Wounds unhealed after six decades

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 laboured under brutal conditions to build the notorious Death Railway, according to AP.

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 Associated Press reported.

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 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 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.