One Day at a Time

image attribution

I write this article with reverence, to a POW in a Japanese camp in WW2.

Few people have ever heard of the Kinkaseki concentration camp.

Arthur Titherington has led the fight for justice for the treatment the POW received at the hands of the Japanese Government. For 50 years he has battled to gain a meaningful apology and for compensation for what he and his comrades suffered.

He details what happened to him during those terrible years. 1300 days in a Japanese slave labour camp.

image attribution
'The scars on my body have healed, but there remain scars that I am unable to show. Twenty years old when the Japanese took me prisoner. I spent my 21st birthday working in the copper mine at Kinkaseki Camp. Almost 4 years of irrevocable youth were left in the depths of that mine.
I do not forget. I do not forgive.

As quoted by Arthur Titherington.

Gunner JMM Smith, who with many songs to his credit, wrote nothing that meant so much to the men of Kinkaseki as did "Down the mine my Bonnie Laddie.

There's a song in old Formosa that the Nippons loudly sing. You can hear it every evening, oh they make the welkin ring. And they sing British soldiers who have traveled from afar to fight for King and country, now they're prisoners of war. But they know they'll see their homeland in the future once again. But until the Nippon men will all be heard to say:

Down the mine bonnie laddie, down the mine you'll go. Though your feet are lacerations and you dare not answer No. Though the rice is in sufficient and we treat you all like swine, Down the mine bonnie laddie down the mine. The end.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls, the most massive characters are seared with scars. EH Chapin.

And lastly : Without freedom no one really has a name. Milton Accorda.

Sources: Images without attribution are from Pixabay and require no attribution.
Follow links under images with attribution for further information.