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From Our Own Correspondent

Japan's Second World War Legacy

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's the 75th anniversary of VJ Day today, Victory over Japan, when Japan surrendered to the US, Britain and China. That ended the Second World War. Japan was given a new, pacifist constitution by the Americans, and seems to have left its former, more aggressive and militaristic, path behind. But, as Rupert Wingfield-Hayes has been finding in Tokyo, there's more that connects the current political leadership to wartime Japan than one might think. Colombia's decades-long civil war came to an end in 2016, it had pitted leftist guerrilla groups like the FARC against government forces and right-wing paramilitaries. Now the Supreme Court has ordered the house arrest of ex-president Alvaro Uribe, amid an investigation into allegations of bribing witnesses to deny his alleged involvement with these militias, charges he denies. Uribe remains divisive, and as Mat Charles reports, his arrest has split public opinion along the same fault lines that stoked the violence previously. Tourism accounts for around a quarter of all jobs in Greece, and was a lifeline during the austerity years of the Greek Debt crisis. But this year the pandemic has kept a lot of visitors away, even though lockdown restrictions started to be lifted early. That has hit seasonal workers particularly hard. On the island of Crete, Heidi Fuller-Love went to meet a family, for whom Covid-19 has been the last straw. On the Spanish Balearic island of Mallorca, the German tourists are back. For them, a sunny holiday on Mallorca is an annual ritual not to be missed, be they celebrities on their private estates, or revellers in Palma, on the capital’s party mile. What is it about the Germans and their favourite Mediterranean island, asks John Kampfner. Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

0:04.6

Good morning.

0:05.8

Today, Civil Wars leave many scars, and peace sees a lot of them linger unheeled.

0:11.8

As in Colombia, four years on from the conflict

0:15.3

between government and guerrillas, but with house arrest for a former president

0:19.8

still splitting opinion on the old fault lines. We tread carefully on the subject of holidays

0:26.3

in the Mediterranean sunshine, what with quarantine lists and disrupted travel, but for the

0:32.3

hosts in Crete it's the seasonal worker. and In my Yorker though, the Germans are back, though will they be socially distancing on the party

0:47.4

mile?

0:48.4

First, it's 75 years since Japan surrendered to the Allies, VJ Day. The circumstances are memorable.

0:58.0

The Emperor capitulating after the country had been threatened with prompt and utter destruction as the alternative.

1:06.0

No empty threat when the Americans dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1:12.0

All these years on, says Rupert Wingfield Hayes it's far from finished

1:16.5

business. The last Japanese soldier to formally surrender after the country's

1:21.3

defeat in World War II was Hiro Onoda.

1:24.7

Lieutenant Onoda finally handed over his sword on March 9th, 1974.

1:30.9

He had held out in the Philippine jungle for 29 years.

1:35.0

In interviews and writings after his return to Japan,

1:38.0

Lieutenant Onoda said he had been unable to accept that Japan had capitulated.

1:43.4

To many outsiders, Onoda looked like a fanatic, but in Imperial Japan, his actions were perfectly

1:49.4

logical.

1:50.4

Lieutenant Onoda had sworn never to surrender, to die for the Emperor.

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