Bitter memories as Asia marks war's end

MANILA - Many in Asia found it difficult to forgive and impossible to forget the Japanese aggression that still haunts the region 60 years after the end of the Pacific war but others let the anniversary pass with barely a mention.

Southeast Asian nations that suffered in the war but benefited afterwards from Japan's economic might marked the end of the war on Monday with little fanfare and few official ceremonies.

But for those who experienced horrors such as the destruction of Manila, the "Death Railway" in Burma or the rape of the Chinese city of Nanjing, the anger and sadness remained raw.

"Filipinos have very short memories," said the famous Philippine author Francisco Sionil Jose, who lived through the Japanese occupation and who approves of the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

"My ambition was to run amok in Japan and kill as many Japanese as possible."

Historians estimate that about 15 million people, less than a third of them soldiers, died as a result of the conflict that spanned Japan's invasion of China in 1931 and Emperor Hirohito's declaration of surrender on August 15, 1945.

For Chinese and Koreans in particular, the pain of the war and occupation has been sharpened by the perception that Japan has still not shown genuine contrition for its actions.

On Monday, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi again apologised for suffering caused by Japanese military aggression and pledged that Tokyo would never again go to war.

But Japanese prime ministers have made such apologies before, with little effect on the feelings of North Asians who also want leaders to stop going to Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine that is home to the spirits of executed war criminals.

"I don't like Japanese people. They still don't recognise their past mistakes," said a Beijing man surnamed Fang.

In Australia, thousands gathered at ceremonies around the country to mark the end of the war, with Prime Minister John Howard joined by Japan's ambassador to Australia Hideaki Ueda in laying a wreath at the national war memorial.

But that didn't mean the ghosts of the past had been laid to rest Down Under.

Max Williams, who fought in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, speculated that it would be easier for future generations to accept a Japanese presence at commemoration services.

"Politically, we've got to have them here. But that's as far as I'd like to say," Williams told Reuters.

More than 40,000 Australians were killed and 30,000 taken prisoner by the Japanese, including 20,000 detained in 1942 following the fall of Singapore to Japanese forces.

NATIONAL AMNESIA

In Indonesia, little visible notice was taken of the anniversary.

While many Indonesians were ill-treated by the Japanese and Tokyo offered little in the way of real freedom, no love had been lost earlier between most Indonesians and the Dutch colonialists that the Japanese ousted.

The Philippines suffered more than any other southeast Asian country but the only sign of the anniversary was the presence of a dozen Chinese-Filipino veterans who laid wreaths at a memorial.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo failed even to mention the war in a speech to the army on Monday. In fact, a local government near Manila last year erected a statue of a kamikaze pilot that has become a magnet for Japanese tourists and veterans.

About 100,000 Filipinos died just in the month-long battle in Manila between Japanese forces and American troops that turned the former "Pearl of the Orient" into a wasteland.

Some put the lack of national outrage at Japan's actions down to the fact that Japan was only the latest in a series of brutal colonisers after Spain and the United States.

Even in South Korea, which was formally colonised by Japan from 1910 to 1945, ceremonies marking Liberation Day on Monday chose to focus on hopes for an era of brotherhood on the Korean peninsula, divided at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Unlike his remarks a year ago that ignited diplomatic tension with Tokyo with calls for true repentance, President Roh Moo-hyun gave a speech heavy on Korean national reconciliation and skirted direct calls to Japan to make amends for its past.

Hu Jintao, the Chinese president and Communist Party chief, marked the end of World War Two with a low-key visit on Sunday to a war exhibit. In fact, Beijing plays down the end of World War Two in the Pacific because the Japanese surrendered to the Chinese Nationalists before the Communists seized power in 1949.

- REUTERS