"Japan’s prime minister used a rare word on Friday to mark 80 years since the country’s surrender at the end of the Second World War: “Remorse.”
"Speaking at an annual government ceremony for the war dead at the Nippon Budokan arena in Tokyo, Shigeru Ishiba said Japan would remain committed to peace.
“ 'We should never repeat the devastation of war. We will never ever make a mistake in choosing the path to take,” Ishiba said. “The remorse and lessons from that war should once again be engraved deeply in our hearts.”
"It was the first time since 2012 that a Japanese premier used the word at the ceremony, which is held to mourn the 3.1 million casualties of war in Japan.
"A moment of silence was observed at noon, exactly 80 years after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration in a radio broadcast.
"The four-and-a-half-minute address, delivered a few days after the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and replayed from a scratchy phonograph recording, stunned the nation in 1945, when Hirohito said that 'the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage' ”. . . More...
80 years after VJ Day, time to honour the troops who fought Japan. "One by one they are passing away, many of them centenarians whose lives have been scarred for the past 80 years by the unspeakable atrocities they witnessed in the jungle, in prison camps and in forced labour on the Burma Death Railway. VJ Day — victory over Japan — was almost an afterthought for most people in Britain in 1945, who for three months had been rejoicing over the defeat of Nazi Germany. Some 71,000 British and Commonwealth troops died facing fanatical Japanese fighters in Burma, Malaya, in the South Pacific, and on ships targeted by kamikaze pilots. A further 12,000 prisoners of war perished in atrocious conditions, starved, bayonetted, and abused in Japanese camps. An end to the cruellest combat of the Second World War saved thousands preparing for a devastating invasion of Japan itself." . . . More...
