Britons return to Japan PoW mines
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Your support makes all the difference.TWENTY-FIVE former British prisoners of war who were taken to work in copper mines in Japan are to return there today and hold a memorial service for their prison camp comrades who did not live to see the end of the war. The name of the village where they were kept, Iruka, in Mie prefecture, 220 miles south of Tokyo, has since been changed, and the copper mines are no longer in use. But the memories, some bitter and some warm, still remain.
They will be joined by some of the residents of Itaya village, as it is now called. It will be a solemn occasion, the British laying poppy wreaths and the Japanese placing chrysanthemums on the memorial to the 16 PoWs who died.
And there, away from strife
and distant guns,
In solitude and peace lie
England's sons
The lines were written in 1945 by Jesse Adams, one of the survivors of the Iruka camp, in memory of those who died.
In 1944 some 300 British PoWs were taken by the Japanese army from Burma back to Japan to work in the mines. In Burma they had been working on the 'Death Railway', which was to link Thailand and Burma and where tens of thousands of Allied PoWs and Asian forced labourers died. But although the PoWs who were transported to Iruka were living among civilians, and were not subjected to torture or beatings, they found conditions more difficult than on the Burma railway.
'In Japan we were worse off for food than in the jungle,' said Canon Richard White, who was then an army chaplain. 'In Burma we could at least eat snakes, and if you were with the Javanese (Indonesian) troops they knew which wild berries were edible. But in Japan the rice ration was very small. However, the (Japanese) civilians were in the same boat, so some camaraderie grew up between us.'
Canon White was at Dunkirk, and was then transferred to Singapore, where he was captured in 1942. This will be his first visit to Japan since the Iruka camp was liberated in September 1945, and he comes with mixed feelings. Bitterness runs deep among many of the Allied PoWs captured by Japan in Asia. 'You can never forget the hurt,' he said. 'But the younger generation in Japan want the truth to come out about the war, and to put things right.'
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