Behind Eucalypts of Hodogaya: A Landscape of Reconciliation

Nestled in the quiet hills of Yokohama lies a place few Australians know about, yet its story binds us to an important chapter of our past. Yokohama War Cemetery is the final resting place of more than 1,500 Commonwealth service personnel who lost their lives during the Second World War.

But this cemetery tells more than a story of loss. It speaks to reconciliation not only between former enemies, but between the very nations that shaped its creation. The story of the cemetery is shared in the Shrine’s special exhibit Eucalypts of Hodogaya.

Join two of the exhibition curators, Professor Anoma Pieris and Athanasios Tsakonas, as we explore how amid the destruction and hostilities, the mission to honour the dead prevailed.

Transcript

LAURA THOMAS: Nestled within the quiet hills of Yokohama lies a place few Australians know about, yet its story binds us to an important chapter of our past. This is the Yokohama War Cemetery, the final resting place of more than 1,500 Commonwealth service personnel who lost their lives during the Second World War. Many died in captivity. All were buried far from the countries they served.

But this cemetery tells more than a story of loss. It speaks to reconciliation not only between former enemies, but between the very nations that shaped its creation. The story of the cemetery is shared in the Shrine’s special exhibit Eucalypts of Hodogaya, and today we will step back to 1945, just after the war, and explore how amid the destruction and hostilities, the mission to honour the dead prevailed.

Joining me to uncover this are co-curators of the exhibition Professor Anoma Pieris and Athanasios Tsakonas. Thanks for being here.

BOTH: Thank you

LAURA THOMAS: Let's start with the Anzac Agency, because they were one of the key organisations involved in this project. Can you explain who they are and why they were established?

ANOMA PIERIS: You can imagine that at the end of the war, Britain found that its troops had been distributed throughout the Asia Pacific area as well as North Africa, the Middle East and all over Europe, and it was not feasible for them to manage such a large geographical area. So, they began to set up affiliated agencies that would have oversight over the burials in these different places. Canada and South Africa were other places, but Australia, being in the Asia Pacific region, seemed the logical partner to manage the war graves creation in this region. Now, there was an exception to that, which is Hong Kong, which Canada wanted to manage because of the number of Canadian service people who had to be buried there. There were some key figures who were involved in discussions from early 1945 onwards. There was, of course, the Australian Government representative, the High Commissioner in London, Stanley Bruce. There was Fabian Ware, the Vice Chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission, which would later be called the Commonwealth War Graves Commission from 1960, and then there was Lieutenant Colonel Athol Brown, who was the Director of the Australian War Graves Service, and the Anzac Agency, which would be the agency that would be creating these war cemeteries, was established in mid-1946. For us, coming from Melbourne, what's important about it was that the Agency was set up in Melbourne in Collins Street, and for me in particular, that four of the five architects who were involved were educated at the Melbourne University's architectural atelier.

LAURA THOMAS: So, a nice link to you and your work there.

ANOMA PIERIS: That's right

LAURA THOMAS: How significant was it that Australia was given the responsibility to do this and to have ownership over this area in particular?

ANOMA PIERIS: Australia's theatre of operations had shifted from North Africa and the Middle East to the Pacific once the Japanese entered the war in December 1941 and they fought alongside US troops, as we know, and New Guinea was a major geography that Australia was involved in. So, you can imagine that there were many more Australian burials in these areas as well as it was more feasible, it was logical to have somebody in the region that would be able to travel to these places to set up cemeteries in often quite remote sites.

LAURA THOMAS: They were tasked with the creation of a War Cemetery in Japan. So why was Hodogaya chosen?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Well, the Allied Occupation Forces began arriving in Japan in September 1945 and high on their list of priorities was to recover the remains of the Allied personnel who had died in Japan's prisoner of war camps. General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, had established his headquarters at Yokohama, because the port had served as an important gateway between Japan and the Western nations since 1859. It was an important location at that stage. The Americans, along with the Australian War Grave units, had actually started the process of consolidating or locating and consolidating the remains, and they had set up a series of temporary burial grounds throughout Japan from the north down to the south. One of those was actually in Yokohama, at the Yokohama country and athletic club on their rugby fields. As to why Hodogaya specifically, one of the requirements from the Australian Government was that the location eventually had to be accessible for families in future, had to be near a place where you can access it for logistics. And there was this one location just on the outskirts of Yokohama, at the time, a former amusement park that had the necessary space and was available. And that's why Hodogaya was selected.

LAURA THOMAS: Why did Australia make the decision not to bring their war dead home? Because we know, on the other hand, the Americans did.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Australia was, in a way, beholden to the British policy at the time that was set out by the Imperial War Graves Commission to keep the dead where they fell. It was a policy that had been started from the First World War. It wasn't something by the Second World War that Australia was comfortable with but had to accede to. Unlike the Americans, who they were working alongside, were able to take their dead back home. In fact, the Americans had offered their families an option of either having their members buried in a select number of war cemeteries in Asia or to take them back to the mainland United States. Australia wasn't able to do that and had to accede to what the British required.

ANOMA PIERIS: So, I believe that during the First World War, the policy was created in order to democratise the war cemeteries, so that it was really an issue of not differentiating between class because, of course, Britain had a very pronounced class structure, which became evident during the First World War. So, we need to think of those cemeteries as designed as democratic spaces, where all have equal headstones that are unified in this kind of military grid. Now this idea of democracy through the war graves was translated to Asia, but when it actually began to include culturally different groups of people, obviously, it created certain forms of inequity. And so, there are in these Christian cemeteries, Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims who are buried in the Christian fashion. And there are also, of course, Indigenous service people who may wish to have the remains repatriated to country. And this has always been one of the issues that comes up when families visit or talk about these war grave cemeteries, because even for everyday Australians, having their loved one buried in a place that they find very difficult to visit, is a real concern. It's really about the absence of the body or not being able to care for the graves through your own religious practices. So, I think that's an important dimension of these war cemeteries.

LAURA THOMAS: In practical terms, how did the Australian Agency go about negotiating the use of this land for a Commonwealth War grave?

ANOMA PIERIS: So, the land was granted through an order issued by the Allied Supreme Command, and its formal acquisition was negotiated between the Yokohama Prefecture, the central Tokyo authorities, and the allies. And you can imagine that Yokohama was, of course, a treaty port which had always been associated with foreigners since Japan opened up. And so, it seems like a logical place. But when you also think about Tokyo as being the more important city, there was some debate as to where it should be located. The cemetery was also to be maintained as a condition of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. So that's also an important dimension of it, unlike, say, the cemeteries in other places, which were negotiated through specific war graves treaties afterwards. The cemetery was built between 1946 and 51 and it was dedicated in June 1951.

LAURA THOMAS: So, let's talk about the cemetery itself and its design. Who were the key figures who were involved in designing this space?

ANOMA PIERIS: So, the key figures were the Australian architects, and they were trained in modernism. The architectural atelier at the University of Melbourne was in the Beaux-Arts tradition. So, you can imagine that they had this very kind of modern aesthetic, unlike, say, when you think of the First World War, kind of Imperial styles that were being used. The architects were predominantly from the atelier, Peter Spier, Brett Finney, Robert Coxhead and Clayton Vize, all of whom studied at Melbourne University. And then there was Alan Robertson, also an architect, who had come through practice. There was a horticulturist who was English, born, Alec Maisey, and more importantly, and that's really the findings of this exhibition, is about the collaboration with the two Japanese modernist architects Yoji Kasajima and Michael Iwanaga.

LAURA THOMAS: Let's dive into that a little bit more, because I find it fascinating the fact that we've just come from war with a certain country, and now there's collaboration. So, Atha, can you shed some more light on that?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: The two Japanese architects actually are quite interesting, because just like the Australians, they were young men who were swept up in the war, and they had similarly undertaken their architectural educations, one of them in the United States, the other in Japan, in modernist practice. Yoji Kasajima, his family actually were running one of the tobacco cooperatives in Taiwan. And he studied in Japan at that time at Nihon University. And he was introduced by the Americans to the Australian Agency at the very beginning, and it was because he taught architecture after graduating in a school that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, that he was exposed to the Oya stone, and he then introduces it to Yokohama War Cemetery, in particular, the main boundary wall that runs along it. Kasajima goes on to have a most interesting career. He ends up, after the war, leaving for Scandinavia, where he gets involved with a lot of work throughout Sweden and that region, and is awarded an order of the Rising Sun by the Emperor for his work in rebuilding relationships with the Western world in that region after the war.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Michael Iwanaga, the other architect, was more heavily involved with the Anzac Agency when they started thinking about the more permanent War Cemetery at Yokohama. And his is a very interesting story, because Iwanaga is actually raised in America. He graduates from the University of Washington. He tops his class in design and gets an AIA, or an American Institute of Architects, medal for the work. But like many of his generation, wasn't able to find work in America at that time, leaves to go work in Japan in the late 1930s, gets swept up in the war by being conscripted. He served in mainland China, Singapore, Malaya, and survived the battles in Burma before being repatriated home. And then he is introduced by one of General Douglas MacArthur's aides, Paul Rush, who was a missionary. He's introduced to the Anzac Agency, and then he begins to collaborate with the Australian architects all of the same generation, and introduces them to a lot of other funereal practices that are going on in Japan, in particular, the way the materials have certain religious and cultural significance and spiritual significance.

LAURA THOMAS: I don't want to come across naive in saying this, but why was it important for the Anzac Agency to have Japanese architects? I'm assuming there are still hostilities there. But was it a matter of, like you said, working with the materials that they had, or being able to be on site? Why was it important to them?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: I think all of them were architects, and I think they were able to use design and architecture to bridge whatever divide they would have had at that time. Michael Iwanaga also spoke English, and as most architects work across different regions, it is important to actually work with the local situation and the local contractors and the local suppliers, because to undertake such projects, in particular at that time, through an Australian establishment was very challenging, and the Japanese architects were able to introduce them to not only the materials, but the way in which they saw the material being used, and the way certain elements of the stone, for example, was used in particular spots across the cemetery.

ANOMA PIERIS: The Australian architects, many of them, had also served and in fact, Alan Robertson had been a prisoner of war in Japan. So, this is an important factor, because if you think about this as an effort at reconciling differences at a time when the hostilities are still ongoing, the war crimes trials are unfolding, what these people are doing is quite remarkable. And if you really look at the cemetery, if you go to Hodogaya, you might go with the expectation that it will be a British lawn cemetery, just like you find, you know, in many other places. But you find yourself in a Japanese hide and reveal garden, and you enter this space where there is this beautiful, mature foliage. And you move from space to space, just like you do in a Japanese garden, it doesn't get revealed in one shot in front of you. And this is really what is wonderful about this, and very different, very distinct about this cemetery space, and it shows you that these architects were willing, or were, in fact, intrigued by the Japanese design style and were willing to work with it, and didn't flatten the site, didn't impose the rather rigid cemetery template that they had inherited, and really worked with it to an extent that they began to also introduce these Japanese materials and elements. That kind of diversity in stones and in flora you don't find in other cemeteries. So, this is an important recognition of the fact that collaboration is what gave them this unique design.

LAURA THOMAS: Let's dive in. Let's talk about the key features of the cemetery. Can you describe it for our audience?

ANOMA PIERIS: Okay, so if you go to a typical lawn cemetery, which you must understand, the reasons behind the lawn cemetery was to have, and if you think about the poem by Rupert Brooke, a piece of England in a foreign land where British soldiers would feel at peace. So, this was the idea behind the lawn cemetery. And in Hodogaya, what happens is, because there is a desire to keep national groups together, there are five different spaces, so they are not integrated as they are in other cemeteries. So that's the first difference. And we have five separate burial grounds for the United Kingdom. Australia has its own section. There is a joint New Zealand and Canada section, a section for post partition India, that is for people from places that are in South Asia now understood as distinct countries, and a post war section, which includes burials for the British Commonwealth Occupying Forces, the BCOF, the Korean War and some civilians.

ANOMA PIERIS: So here's another important point of distinction, because of the prevalence of cremation in Japanese culture, the majority of remains are cremated, and it includes a cremation memorial for those remains that cannot be separately identified, that were often collected from prisoner of war camp sites where burials had occurred or where ashes had been stored. Now, what is evident when you go to this site is that the eucalyptus trees tower over the rest of the foliage. And you know what eucalyptus trees are like, right? They just take off, and they go out in all directions. And because they were planted across the site, because they were Australians, and they were planting it across the site, it's very evident this Australian presence.

LAURA THOMAS: Hearing you speak about those eucalyptus trees, you can almost smell and hear what it would be like to be there. But I'm curious about some of the other symbols of the cemetery. Atha, what else is there?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Well, aside from the eucalyptus trees, it was a long-standing policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission to plant trees in their sites that reflected the nation in which the dead came from. And in the case of Yokohama, we find that in the British section, they planted a silver birch oak to represent the United Kingdom. In the Canadian New Zealand section, there was sycamore trees planted, in the forces of undivided India, they had planted a Himalayan oak. And it was not just the foreign trees. The cemetery itself had been planted or had been enhanced with more Japanese trees, such as the Claret Ash and Atlas Cedar, a lot of more Sakura and more Hinoki pine to embellish that sensibility.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Beyond the landscape itself, the selection of the material through the stone was really important. You had a lot of significance. And there was a wide array of stone used in particular spots. One in particular that struck us when we were researching it was this one stone called a Kokka Sarasa, which is a very unique stone that comes from a particular region in the north part of Japan. They used a single slab of this stone as the countertop to the pedestal that supported the main ashes urn in the cremation memorial. And at the beginning, I couldn't quite understand why, in an entire cemetery, you would pick this one particular stone type for this one particular use. But as we researched it, we realised that this stone has multiple meanings. Its name derives from two words 'kokka', which was referencing a magazine that was set up to challenge the primacy of Western art in the Meiji era Japan. Sarasa has its origins from the original Portuguese word of the 'saracen', which is the chintz fabric, and it identifies its speckled features in the stone. But more importantly, this Stone's placement as the countertop, in a way, represents the funereal cloth placed under urns in Shinto tradition to protect the deceased from the earthly deities, and we found that a really important and soft gesture that only someone who has deep knowledge in a traditional use of particular materials would convey.

LAURA THOMAS: And again, it goes back to the importance of that collaboration between the Japanese and the Australian architects, and knowing that symbolism, like that wouldn't have come out otherwise.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: That's correct. Another instance of the collaboration that we discovered in the research was these two hand drawn sketches, one of a temple and one of a lake scene by Robert Coxhead, and we couldn't quite work out where they were, neither did the family. So, I put it out there on social media, asked a few Japanese scholars to see whether anybody could identify it. Someone came back eventually and identified the temple as being in Tochigi prefecture in Honshu. And what was important about that was that it identified that Robert Coxhead had travelled there, which is the only location in Japan where the Oya stone is mined, and the Oya stone was the predominant material used at Yokohama, made famous by Frank Lloyd Wright's use of it at the Imperial hotel in Tokyo, which they must have all seen. And that just shows you that they were listening to the Japanese architect's advice and being guided to all these places.

LAURA THOMAS: We've spoken a lot about where the collaboration went really well, but I'm interested to know, were there any points of contention or disagreements with the various parties that were working on this design.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: I don't think between the parties that were designing it there was much contention. Where there was some disagreement was in the way some of our more conservative managers were looking at the cemetery, and the way it was starting to evolve in this almost Japanese landscape. And there were cases where they were asked to pull back a little bit on the design and try and make it a little bit more European in that sense. But one of the things that was happening was that there were two supervisors at Yokohama War Cemetery. Firstly, from the outset, until its dedication in 1951 was Jack Leemon, and then Len Harrop took over thereafter. Len Harrop lived in Japan for almost 50 years. When he passed away, his remains were actually buried at the post war section of Yokohama War Cemetery. Both of these men, because they lived on the site in the accommodation that was provided, were able to have an almost daily interaction with the site and took great pleasure in developing its garden throughout the decades after its inception. And I would like to say that you could attribute a lot of the Japanese elements in the landscape to both these men who maintained that sensibility going forward.

LAURA THOMAS: So, we've heard about who designed the cemetery, but who actually built it?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: The primary contractor for Yokohama War Cemetery was a company called Yabashi Marble, which had been established at the turn of the century in 1901 in Akasaka Gifu prefecture. They grew to become one of Japan's leading stone contractors, and were, in fact, also responsible for the interior stone supply and installation in the National Diet building, which, if one takes a look at it, has similarities to the Shrine of Remembrance here. The landscape contractor responsible for establishing Yokohama was Tokio Nursery, and they also provided the daily maintenance staff that would be there on a day-by-day basis, contributing to the weeding and the trimming before there was a series of permanent gardeners.

LAURA THOMAS: It's one thing to be creating this whole cemetery, but another to actually repatriate the remains of the people who had died overseas. Where were these service people buried before the cemetery was established?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: We touched upon it earlier, when we discussed the temporary burial grounds that the Americans and the Australians had established across Japan to consolidate the remains before any decision was made as to where their permanent places would be. When they first arrived after the end of the war and started to look for the remains, they discovered that a lot of the ashes had been stored in temples. The Commandants of many of the prisoner of war camps in which a lot of these men had passed away, would take the remains to the temple, and the temple priests would keep them in his care. And this was the case in particular in two of the larger areas in Naoetsu and also just outside Osaka at the Jugan-ji Temple.

LAURA THOMAS: What was the reaction to the cemetery when it was finally opened?

ANOMA PIERIS: I believe that at that time, and because of the way that perhaps wartime hostilities had unravelled, and also maybe wartime propaganda, there must have been a certain, I guess, less of a sense of the familiarity of Japan, and perhaps for Australians, the difficulty of going into a culture where there is no English language, not understanding how to get to the cemetery, I could imagine that it would have been very difficult for families that their loved ones were buried in Japan. When I compare it with, say, Changi in Singapore and Kranji War Cemetery there, because it was a colonial place at that time, and you know, only until 1965 basically, there was much more possibility of them going to Singapore. So, in the first place, I think Japan was a kind of unknown quantity for Australians. Publicity through newspapers and radio broadcasts described Yokohama War Cemetery as idyllic and a very reverent setting. So, they tried to convey the quality of this site to these families overseas.

LAURA THOMAS: Do you know if many families did go over and visit and see their loved ones buried there?

ANOMA PIERIS: We don't really have a record of numbers. There would have been military personnel and the officials and diplomats in any of these ceremonies, but the numbers who actually visit many of the war cemeteries in the Asia Pacific region are typically few, except for the key sites that we associate like New Guinea or Singapore or on the Burma Thai railway. Would you say Atha that that's the case?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Yes, it is. And I think Japan itself wasn't really open to foreigners visiting in a more leisurely way, until about the mid-50s onwards. And I think for a lot of Australians, it wasn't on their radar to go.

ANOMA PIERIS: Also imagine the level of destruction in Japan, because there was firebombing of cities. So, for many years, it was post-war reconstruction, which meant that even travelling to Japan and moving through Japan would have been very difficult. There wouldn't have been the transportation infrastructure that you have today. So, this is important to take into consideration.

LAURA THOMAS: You've both been to the cemetery. I'm interested to get your reflections on what it was like and maybe how it's changed since it was opened.

ANOMA PIERIS: So, we went much earlier, many years ago, more than a decade ago, to the cemetery. And then as we got more interested and researched it, we went most recently in 2023 and it was actually quite a remarkable visit, because in the first place, we were visiting in November, when the autumn leaves had turned. So, it was just amazing to be in this beautiful space. And we were looking at the brochure for the opening of the cemetery, and we saw these features. For example, there was a soribashi bridge, which is a curved bridge, which, you know, when you think about the Japanese wood cuts by Hiroshige or Hokusai, you always think of these curved bridges. And there was this bridge that had been introduced by Alex Maisey, the horticulturist, over a kind of a creek that was running through the site. And we were keen to identify this, but when we went there and we asked the gardeners, they seemed to not recognise what we were asking for, and so we began searching. So, we call it the Lost Bridge. We kept searching for this, and found it had been covered by undergrowth, and there was also a swimming pool that had been in the original children's park that had been reduced to a pond in the design, and that too had got filled up with weeds and basically bamboo. And so, there were these features that the Australians had actually introduced that were Japanese features, which the ground staff had thought were the residual features of the previous park and allowed it to get overgrown and lost.

ANOMA PIERIS: So, it was these things that were really interesting. The snow gums were very prominent, and they were looking really quite wild. The site is 27 acres. I mean, this is a very large site. It has an undulating landscape, which means that you are sometimes climbing quite steep inclines. There are hills within the site. It makes a very different sort of landscape to your flat lawn cemetery. When we visited the cemetery in 2023 we also met the manager and the ground staff, especially Asako Ando, who is managing this massive site, and the head gardener, Shingo Makita, who provided us the photographs of seasonal changes that you will see at the exhibition. It's quite remarkable that the small number of four people are able to actually manage this beautiful space. And I think the gardeners tend to be forgotten when we look at these places, and they fade into the background, but whenever I took photographs, you would see them somewhere in that space.

LAURA THOMAS: Atha, what stood out to you when you visited the War Cemetery?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: I think, as Anoma mentioned earlier, one of the striking things was the carpets of Ginko leaves that had been spread out over the lawns, creating these yellow patches. And it was the right time to be visiting Japan, at that time in autumn, to see them all drop at once. The amount of bird life and the noises in a park that completely obscures the sounds of the city, because if anybody's been to a Japanese city, you automatically get drowned out by the sounds of traffic and what have you. And there's a sense of calmness in the place because you're walking through it. I found that really enjoyable.

LAURA THOMAS: It sounds like an absolutely beautiful sight. How is it received by those who live around there now?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: A lot of people who live in the area probably don't know its history or its dark history in that sense. It is used as a recreational park. A lot of people walk through it, take their lunch there, anybody who is working in the area, because it provides this quiet respite.

LAURA THOMAS: Beyond the Yokohama War Cemetery, what other work did the Anzac Agency do?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Well, the Anzac Agency undertook a lot of war cemeteries in the region, and what most people don't seem to realise is they also did a lot of the war cemeteries in Australia itself. So there are Australian War cemeteries in all the major cities across Australia, but at the same time in Victoria, there's also the Tatura German military cemetery and the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery, which was designed in 1964 by a visiting lecturer to the University of Melbourne, Shigeru Yura.

ANOMA PIERIS: I just wanted to mention, for any University of Melbourne people who might be listening that Shigeru Yura designed the Japanese room in the Melbourne School of Design, which is still intact in the way that it was designed by him. So, he's the same architect who designed the Cowra Japanese cemetery.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: In itself, that's quite interesting, and it's something that could be explored much later. But the Cowra Cemetery for Japanese former prisoners of war who died in Australia, almost like a...

ANOMA PIERIS: …beginning of reconciliation. The beginning of reconciliation around the Cowra Japanese garden and this cemetery, which also has the Japanese internees who died in the internment camps, including at Tatura in Victoria. So, this story of the two countries coming together in order to create these reconciliatory gestures around cemetery spaces is an important part, and of course, a difficult resolution of wartime hostilities.

LAURA THOMAS: What war cemeteries did the Agency work on overseas?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: The most prominent ones overseas, aside from Hodogaya, are located in New Guinea being Bomana, Bita, Paka and Lae, then there is the Bourail New Zealand War Cemetery in New Caledonia and Labuan in East Malaysia. The Agency also designed another cemetery in Celebes, the Makassar War Cemetery, but the troubles at the time would see it having to be decommissioned and the graves moved to Ambon.

LAURA THOMAS: Subtle plug for the exhibition here is that people will be able to learn more about these cemeteries within the space.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: That is correct, yes.

LAURA THOMAS: And what do you both hope that people who come and visit the Shrine and see the exhibition here take away from this?

ANOMA PIERIS: When we began to engage with this material, what became evident to us was that collaboration was the most important thing. And often you go to exhibitions about the war, where it is just the story of what happened during the war and who was victorious, and there isn't really any effort to look at the kind of transitional justice processes that allow people to build peace. So, peace building becomes an important activity in the aftermath, and we are all aware of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the kind of, the horror of the atomic bombing, and we understand that these are all very difficult stories to tell. So the fact that Australia contributed in this way to creating a reconciliative space, I think, is important, but from our point of view, in order to extend that sentiment and that commitment, we would have to take some form of exhibition, or some portion of what we are showing here to Japan, hopefully, if we get funding for a bilingual exhibition, and we are already in conversation with colleagues in Japan and the possibility of holding it in Yokohama.

LAURA THOMAS: Keep an eye on this space for that. Atha, what do you hope people take away from the exhibition?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Well, one of the things that's really important about the exhibition is that it highlights these architects who otherwise would never have been known. They, by and large, all served during the war, taking away four to five years of their careers that they were just starting to establish. And it's the same for the Japanese architects. And then there was this period in which they worked for the war graves thereafter. A lot of other architects who might not have gone were able to maintain their practices, maintain their relationships with clients, and build professional portfolios thereafter and be prominent. And we see that today, how certain architects have been lionised in that sense across Australia. These men just came back and had to rebuild their careers from scratch, and I think it's a testament to them that they were able to achieve that, and hopefully the exhibition gives the viewer a little bit of an insight to that.

ANOMA PIERIS: We were also hoping to plant some seedlings from the sole surviving, or atomic bomb surviving eucalyptus tree at Hiroshima, which is at Hiroshima Castle, back in Australia, so bringing back the seeds, and if they germinate, to plant them at the Springvale Cemetery. And this was in order to commemorate the Australian War Graves Service and the Anzac Agency.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: This is quite interesting, because when we visited Japan, we went to visit this one sole eucalyptus tree, which managed to survive the blast and was scarred for a long time. And we made contact with Green Legacy Hiroshima, who are the custodians of the trees over there. And this was the first time a request to possibly retrieve some seeds from that tree was made, and we're hoping with them, and also the Botanic Gardens just next door to the Shrine and the University of Melbourne, to help us cultivate this tree. One of the other important aspects about this exhibition is the invaluable help the families of these men gave us, not only here in Australia, but overseas. And one of the things that we hope to change in the mindset of the people who visit this exhibition is that the War Graves Service is not some discrete, little unit that does not get recognised. It is important those people who worked in the War Graves Services were not necessarily walking on ANZAC Day parades. And I think this exhibition goes, hopefully it goes a little way towards just giving them that recognition that they deserve for the task that they do for the many of us who then visit these sites across the world and pay our respects.

LAURA THOMAS: Well, thank you, Anoma and Atha, so much for joining me today and shedding light on the exhibition. It is on display at the Shrine until August 2026 and I strongly recommend anyone listening to come in and have a look. Thank you so much for joining me.

ANOMA PIERIS: Thank you, Laura.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Thank you, Laura.