Yasukuni visitors

A telltale illustration of how Yasukuni has become a political symbol for the far right comes today from Britain’s Daily Mail.  It shows the kind of bedfellows attracted by the provocations of prime minister Abe – definitely not the kind of company I would want to be keeping!

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Fury of PoWs after new leader of BNP visits shrine to Japanese war criminals who killed Allied troops in Second World War
By MARTIN DELGADO   26 July 2014 Daily Mail

BNP leader Adam Walker, who plans to visit Yasukuni Shrine, attracted by its far-right associations. (Daily Mail)

BNP leader Adam Walker plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo
Planned trip has outraged veterans’ associations and former soldiers
Shrine is the most potent symbol of Japan’s militaristic past
Honours Japanese commanders and politicians judged to have committed war crimes

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The new leader of the BNP has been accused of insulting Britain’s war dead by visiting a shrine that honours Japanese war criminals responsible for the deaths of thousands of Allied troops and civilians during the Second World War.  Adam Walker’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo has outraged veterans’ associations and former soldiers who worked in horrifying conditions as slave labourers on the bridge over the River Kwai.

Mr Walker, 45, who took over from Nick Griffin last week as chairman of the far-right British National Party, is himself a former soldier.  On its website, the BNP claims to be a ‘patriotic’ party that recognises the ‘huge sacrifice’ of British servicemen and women, yet the Yasukuni Shrine is the most potent symbol of Japan’s militaristic past.  Among those it honours are 14 Japanese military commanders and politicians judged by international tribunals to have committed the most heinous war crimes.

Last night, veterans expressed horror at his decision to visit there.  Robert Hucklesby, 93, spent nearly four years in Japanese prisoner- of-war camps and was forced to work on the River Kwai railway line linking Thailand and Burma.  Taken prisoner in Singapore in February 1942 and transported for hundreds of miles in a cattle truck, he weighed only 7st when he emerged from captivity, after surviving on a diet of rice and watery stew.

Mr Hucklesby, who was a sapper in the Royal Engineers, said: ‘The guards were brutal and hit us with their rifle butts for the slightest misdemeanour.  I am not a vindictive man but I do not have the authority to forgive and forget when so many of my comrades were so badly treated and thousands lie in war graves.’