The JAPS Picture Gallery has been created to ensure that Japanese atrocities are not forgotten while successive Japanese Governments refuse to recognise their debt to those who suffered from the bestiality of the Japanese military administration.
While no blame may be attached to those born after the war or to those who were children during it, it surely cannot be denied that those same children and babies who have inherited the benefits of Japanese nationality and citizenship have inherited also the obligations of that nationality and that citizenship, the obligations incurred by their ancestors.
Accordingly, it is wholly reasonable that some of the current wealth the present generations of Japanese enjoy should be used to compensate both the survivors of Japanese atrocities and those whose lives were blighted by the loss of their parents or their liberty or their health or their senses or their limbs or their sanity in actions unsanctioned by the international laws of war.
Similarly, while it is accepted that various treaties signed with the Japanese at the postwar conferences may have relieved them of their obligations in international law towards the prisoners they maltreated with "undue hardship", those treaties did not remove the rights of any individual to reparation for individual crimes against individual humanity, or to reparation commensurate with the awfulness of those crimes.
The courts of law in Japan are currently considering the validity of claims for compensation placed before them by representatives of some of the few prisoners of war who are still alive. But there is no necessity to confine the battle for compensation to juridical process when the inhumanity for which the compensation is due was in defiance of all law.
Successive Governments in Japan have recognised that while legal discussion may be prolonged by procedural measures, the numbers of survivors continue to dwindle. Inevitably, there will come the day when the last of those tortured will be dead and, by the Japanese Government anyway, forgotten. And already, among the allied nations, there are some who ask why the war should be discussed at all, for, as they say, "it was all long ago and it is time for reconciliation!"
And, of course, it can be so easy to forget when the human mind revolts against the detail of the atrocities, and generates its own amnesia to hide the awfulness of what was done to living human bodies. This is perhaps why the peace treaties referred to "undue hardship" when all the signatories knew full well that the carefully chosen term "undue hardship" ignored some of the cruellest tortures and the most abominable crimes ever committed against humanity.
But we may not forget.
And the Japanese people have not yet earned the right to forget.
We have a debt of remembrance to those who suffered, and we have an obligation to our descendants that our remembrance will be perpetuated as a warning for all time of what barbarism some men are capable.
To register your support for reparation, click here.
To return to Gallery first page, click here . . . . .