In last Monday’s commemoration of Bataan day, Japanese Ambassador Toshinao Urabe once again expressed his country’s “heartfelt apologies and deep sense of remorse of the tragedy” that occurred 70 years ago.
It’s good that we commemorate what happened on April 9, 1942 so the younger generation would be told what our forefathers sacrificed for us to enjoy the freedom that we have today.
Time heals wounds but it is something to be concerned about when history is revised and mistakes are justified.The book “Under the Stacks” by Saul Hofileña, Jr. tackled a number of those historical distortions.
There is a chapter “The Yasukuni Shrine and the Japanese War Monuments in the Philippines” where he talked about his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo which pays homage to the millions of Japanese war dead.
Hofileña said, “In the Yasukuni Shrine, the spirits of Japan’s war dead are enshrined as deities. They are their country’s guardians. The guardians or protectors of the Japanese nation who sacrificied their lives for their country.”
Hofileña said 11 of the enshrined heroes have been classified by the International War Crimes Tribunal as Class “A” war criminals. They include Hideki Tojo, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and Masaharu Homma.