Prisoners of Japan

AS the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, it brings the yearly renewed sense of the sadness for the loss of the 80,000 lives in those bombings. And that is right and proper.

However, may I point out that it will also be the 70th anniversary of a hope that flooded the Far East when it became apparent that Japan was on the verge of defeat.

A third of prisoners of war, and 100,000 indigenous people and forced labourers of the Death Railway, did not survive. By the time of my father’s liberation in1945 he weighed only 6 stones. His skeletal appearance was no different from any of his surviving fellow POWs.

When Japan surrendered, my father