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Article: Still Waiting For an Apology; Historian Gavan Daws, Calling Japan on War Crimes
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- March 16, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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Gavan Daws wears the obsessed, quixotic air of an Australian Peter
O'Toole -- the O'Toole who, as Lawrence of Arabia, insists on raising
moral questions government officials don't want to hear.
In Daws's case the questions concern the charnel house of Japanese
atrocities during World War II and that country's insistent refusal
to acknowledge them. The U.S. government doesn't want to hear about
it. The Tokyo government very definitely doesn't.
Nonetheless, Daws's book "Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World
War II in the Pacific" is a searing 462-page indictment of the
particular and gratuitous savagery Japan inflicted on more than
140,000 Allied prisoners of war, who were starved to ...