Live at the Shrine: Landscapes of Remembrance and Reconciliation

Recorded just after the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, this enlightening panel conversation traces the vision, people and politics behind the creation of key post-war cemeteries.

Convened by broadcaster and author Jon Faine AM, listen as the panellists uncover the importance of commemoration through architecture and the challenges architects faced in creating places of remembrance in the post-war period.

Transcript

JON FAINE: Neil mentioned that I have a connection, well, multiple connections, and my immediate family, my father was a student, a medical student, during World War Two, and was being trained on tropical medicine, specifically because it was such an important issue in the Pacific theatre. But as he graduated, the war finished, so there's no, in that sense, immediate family connection. But his uncle died in the war. Well, that's not accurate. His uncle died coming home from the war. He was in a DC3 that vanished in cloud near Vanuatu as they were on their way home two weeks after the war finished. It devastated that generation of that family to survive the war but not survive coming home was beyond anyone's contemplation, but going back further in my family's history, my wife and I joke about the fact that her grandfather was trying to kill my grandfather in World War One, and my family escaped from Hitler in World War Two, but my grandfather refused to leave Germany. He said, "I fought for the Kaiser in the war, in the Great War. Why would they dare do anything to me?" And we always joke about how our children are lucky to be alive given the odds of their ancestors trying to kill each other.

And that's not an uncommon story in multicultural Australia these days, things have changed so dramatically, and it was a great privilege when I was working at the ABC to be asked to host the Anzac Day Services year after year after year, and it never failed to leave me in awe of the stories that we heard and the people who were prepared to open up to our microphones and talk about their service, sometimes for the first time. And it was so random, because there's thousands of people going past we only ever got to interview a handful of them, but every single time, people just left you breathless, whether their service was heroic or cooking or driving a truck or nursing or whatever it might be, it was never anything other than astonishing.

But one year and very briefly, we interviewed someone from the War Memorial in Canberra who announced that people were able to access their military records of their ancestors. So, with great excitement, my wife accessed her grandfather's records. And our friend Ian accessed his grandfather's records, having been brought up being told that he was a Gallipoli hero, but Ian discovered that his grandfather was sent home from Port Said with venereal disease before he got to Gallipoli, so be careful what you wish for is my only advice.

The idea that architecture can advance reconciliation is really quite remarkable, and that's what brings us here and this exhibition to life. And if you've seen it, you'll see how it works, and if you haven't, you get the chance afterwards. So, each of Anoma, Atha and Keiko, are going to give us their take on what we're here for. Anoma is going to focus on reconciliation. Atha will talk about the war graves architecture, his specific area of expertise. And Keiko has got all sorts of contributions from the Japanese historical and cultural perspective, as well as linking it to the Cowra breakout in 1944 which is a remarkable episode, and one that many people either have never heard or forgotten about. So, let's get into it. Anoma, your time starts now.

ANOMA PIERIS: Thank you, John, and also, thank you Neil, for your generous words. I wanted to give you a little sense of why we framed the exhibition in this way. So, when you say Eucalypts of Hodogaya, it's kind of an enigmatic kind of phrase, which doesn't suggest that it's the Yokohama War Cemetery, doesn't suggest that it's the Anzac Agency. So, we're very grateful for the Shrine for sticking with that title. But it's about reconciliation. It's about these two groups coming together, and that's really important at a time when the representations of any anniversary, a special anniversary like this one, the 80th, from an institution as important as the Shrine does influence the way public memory is shaped. And I think that if you have an exhibition that is not talking about victory or surrender or defeat, but is focused on reconciliation, you have the chance to actually shape the imagination of the public through the orientation of what you present. And we were very lucky that this group that we are looking at embarked on this project of reconciliation at a time when it must have been very difficult to do so. At a time when hostilities were still simmering. War crimes trials were ongoing and also post-war reconstruction made Japan a very difficult place to undertake any such endeavour. So early in this process, these two groups came together, the Japanese and the Australians to create this beautiful cemetery.

So let me describe to you the context for the war grave cemeteries, so that you get the broader understanding. There are hundreds of cemeteries across the world. You may be most familiar with the World War One cemeteries in France and Belgium, because the Western Front has always been the focus of the Australian sort of narrative of the war and the Pacific has been left behind to some extent. Across the Asia Pacific Theatre of the war, there are two groups who are creating major cemeteries. That is the Imperial War Graves Commission, later called the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the American Battle Monuments Commission. And most of South and Southeast Asia fell under the British kind of Imperial War Graves Commission. And the Americans had, you know, the Pacific, Manila and Hawaii, and some of the islands in between. And it fell to Australia to manage for Britain the design and creation of cemeteries in our region or our sphere of influence.

Now, why is this cemetery different from the typical cemeteries that were created? So if you imagine the ones you are familiar with in the First World War on the Western Front, there are British lawn cemeteries with either recumbent or upright headstones, and they tend to be located in places where the entire cemeteries and integration of the different nationalities, the graves of the nationalities. So, it's a kind of a large, spectacular field in which you see everything in one glance. The Yokohama cemetery is different because you come into a parkland. It was a parkland before it was created, so it's a mature parkland with large trees, and it was kept as a hide and reveal garden. This is a Japanese garden where you see things in increments, where you move from space to space, and you discover what is next. And so, because of this, it has a very unique quality to it. And at same time, there were different types of stone used in this cemetery, stone from all over Japan with specific meanings to them, and the meanings were often tied to funereal traditions that the Japanese could understand, and this is different from the use of one or two types of stone in the cemeteries across the Asia Pacific region. So, these make it already quite distinctive, along with the foliage and the beautiful topography, and this is really what makes it specific to and an important 27-acre site of a very unusual context with dispersed sections for the different nationalities.

JON FAINE: When you're designing something that is so significant, how do you take into account that you're doing it for eternity, not just for sensibilities at the time?

ANOMA PIERIS: So I think one of the tensions within the cemetery scape in the Asia Pacific is that it was created at a time when these countries were actually decolonizing, and these cemeteries were created in perpetuity, and there's always been tensions in several countries about retaining what is seen as an imperial space in a country where the Empire is retreating. In that sense, Japan was different because it was a condition of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951 September, that they maintain a cemetery in Japan. And so, I think that the integration of or creation of a hybrid space, means that there is more resonance for both cultures in this context.

JON FAINE: The architecture, though, often represents, dare I say it, a fashion or a fad. How do you overcome that?

ANOMA PIERIS: In this particular cemetery, I think one of the things you need to understand is we too often think about Orientalist images of Japan when we think of garden design. These architects, and Atha will tell you more about it, but were modernist architects. In other words, they were trained in modernism. Four of them were trained at the architectural atelier here at the Melbourne University that was the former version of the Melbourne School of Design, and so they had a very forward looking understanding of what design meant, and they weren't trying to revert to some image that was in some ways related to Imperial Japan, which is the Japanese of the interwar period.

JON FAINE: And just finally, on the botany, was it controversial at the time to have foreign species, not just planted, but they're implanted into Japanese soil, which I don't know a lot about it, but that seems to me to be likely to cause sensitivities. Did it?

ANOMA PIERIS: So, what's interesting is, when you enter the cemetery, the eucalypts tower above everything else. And you know how unruly a eucalypt looks like in the landscape. It's sort of, you know, is there in every part of the cemetery, because the Australians planted it everywhere. Whereas when you go to the different national sections, there are national trees that were deliberately planted in those spaces. But to answer your question, John, in the interwar period, particularly as Japan was using garden design in a diplomatic way, and through the world's trade fairs, was extending ideas of the Japanese garden, and there was export and import of three species. Eucalypts actually travelled to Japan, and there were eucalypts in different places, and Atha is doing a special study on it to understand how they got there, partly for their anti-malarial properties and others, you know, for different reasons. But most importantly, there's one at Hiroshima which survived the atomic bombing. So that's also part of the story we are hoping to tell.

JON FAINE: We might come back to that. It's fascinating, thank you. Atha?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Thank you, John. I guess my reflections on this is to explain a wider understanding on how the war grave services work and we all understand that inevitably, when there's a conflict or a war, there has to be a time in which you recover the dead and give them a burial. In this case, after World War Two in our region, it fell upon the Australian war grave service, which was effectively a unit from the army that had to establish a whole series of units that followed Australia's military across the many theatres in our region, including New Guinea, Borneo and the South West Pacific. These units were all headquartered in Melbourne, because the centre of the operations was from here, and they would follow the military units straight after the battles to both recover, identify and then bury these men and women, often in temporary grounds, temporary burial sites, until such time as a decision was made where to locate them permanently. In the case of Japan, which is quite interesting, it was the 27th Australian War Graves Unit that was dispatched, and it was actually dispatched originally to Manila in the Philippines in September of 1945 immediately after the war had ended, where it had a period of induction, probably under American supervision, before it went to Japan at the end of the same year to begin operations to recover the dead there. The Americans had already been operating in Japan, and together with the Australians, had started establishing a series of temporary burial sites throughout the country, in the various regions in which a lot of the prisoner of war camps were found, and their task was to try and identify where these remains would be, who was missing, who was still alive. A lot of the remains were actually, because it was Japan, and it was the tradition those who died would be cremated, a lot of the remains were actually kept at local shrines, often near the camps in the care of the priest, and they would scour the country and then bury them in these temporary, these vast burial grounds. One of them in Yokohama was actually at the Yokohama country and athletic club on the existing rugby fields.

The task then fell to a different unit, which became known as the Anzac Agency, going back one second, going back a little bit, the Imperial War Graves Commission was aware that there was going to be a need for a lot of war cemeteries and such places in Asia and the Asia Pacific before the end of the war, and they had started thinking how they could do it, given the logistical challenge operating such a thing from London. They approached the Australian War Grave Service, which was modelled after the British version, and decided that they will establish an Australian agency that could, in effect, become like a subcontractor to them to undertake the task at hand, similar to how they had set up a Canadian and a South African version much earlier on. So, the Anzac Agency came into being in middle of, or June 1946 under the command of Brigadier Athol Brown, who used to run the war grave service from Melbourne. It was based in Collins Street in the city, and they established a small architectural division, a design division with a few architects, a horticulturalist, and probably a few drafts people. The architects were predominantly returned servicepeople. Most of these men, as Anoma alluded to earlier, had studied at the architectural school at the University of Melbourne, and their names were Peter Spier, Brett Finney, Robert Coxhead, Clayton Vize and Alan Robertson. Robertson himself had actually been a prisoner of war of Japan, firstly in Changi, Singapore, before being transferred to Zentsuji in Japan itself.

They also engaged two supervisors to undertake specific work in Japan, the first-person being Jack Leemon, who was there for the first four years to ensure that temporary burial became a permanent site. And this was followed by Len Harrop, who took over thereafter, and in fact, lived in Japan for 50 years after the war, and is now buried at Yokohama itself. But to undertake this kind of task in a country so far away from Australia, without the opportunity of logistics and ease of access to materials required that you work with your local partners, and in Japan, they found ready architects, contractors and landscapers that could do this. Through the Office of General Douglas MacArthur's allied Supreme Command, they were introduced to Japanese architects, Yoji Kasajima and Michael Iwanaga, who would help them, at various stages, start considering how you would design such a site, and how would you get it built? The landscape contractor was Tokyo nursery, which had been established at the end of the war specifically to undertake a modern way of landscaping. And Yashabi Marble, which was arguably Japan's largest stone contractor at the time and had in fact constructed the interior of their National Diet building, which is their parliament. And in a sort of irony, the National Parliament, or the National Diet building in Japan, is modelled on the same temple as the Shrine of Remembrance is today. And these architects have their own stories, which is a lot more complicated, again return service people who survived the war from that side. And I think one of the challenges in preparing for an exhibition like this was, how do you firstly identify all these families of these men, and what kind of material would you need to tell the story for an exhibition like this?

JON FAINE: Given scarce resources in the immediate post war era in Japan, as well as here, was there consideration given to simply repatriating the remains, burying them back in Australia, instead of establishing a site in Japan?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: That's actually a very important question, and one I think the Australians were really grappling with, because they would have liked their men to come back home, but the edict from London was following the same principles of the First World War. They needed to be buried where they fell. And the quandary the Australians had was they were working alongside the American war graves teams, and the Americans had made a decision, all their men must go back home. So, as the temporary cemeteries were being emptied and the remains were headed back to the United States, with options. The Americans had actually given the families options. They could be buried, either at Manila in Hawaii or back home on the mainland. The Australians were effectively left behind with the other allies in which to establish a permanent cemetery there.

JON FAINE: Were these, so the people buried there, were they prisoners of war who were taken back to Japan?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: For the large part, the majority were prisoners of war. But there were also a few allied servicemen who had died in air crashes in the years leading up to it, including also from mainland China. So, they had been repatriated there.

JON FAINE: From China to Japan.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Yes

JON FAINE: Who by?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: The Australian War Graves Service. There was, for example, in the research that we were doing, we identified that there are 91 Victorians who are buried in the Australian section. And of those 91 two thirds of them come from the 2/21st Battalion, which served on Ambon. Most of those men had actually died whilst prisoners of war in Hainan Island in China, and at the end of the war, their remains from Hainan Island were transported firstly to Hong Kong for preservation and temporary burial, before the decision was made to send them to Yokohama.

JON FAINE: So, the principles that the English tried to impose, is that the right word, on Australia or that we chose to follow were not consistently applied anyway?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: No, they were not. The decision came from London because the Anzac Agency ultimately was an agency of the Imperial War Graves Commission. And it was also a time in which Australia was starting to assert its own independence, in particular the way it demanded that a certain part of our region be under their responsibility. I guess another factor in this was the British Commonwealth Occupation Force that was allied to the Americans in the post war occupation of Japan was commanded by an Australian, John Northcott, who comes from Melbourne, at the angst of the British. And I think this is a way of asserting Australia's closer alignment post-war to the Americans.

JON FAINE: So, what happened to all the prisoners on the Thai Burma railway, or Sandakan. My wife's uncle, Morey Brennan, was one of the very few survivors of Sandakan. What happened to all of those people? And there were huge numbers of them.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: The prisoners on Sandakan and places in Borneo and New Guinea, they had established cemeteries closer to those locations. So, there are a series of cemeteries. There are three in New Guinea alone, in Bomana, Port, Moresby, Rabaul and Lae.

JON FAINE: Bomana is just on the outskirts of Moresby.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: In the case of the Thai Burma railway, they were buried in two locations, either in on the Burma side of the railway or in the Thailand side of the railway, at war cemeteries that were designed by the British. And in fact, they had, they also had a similar dilemma in that this was a different region, and they needed someone special to design those cemeteries for Asia. And they actually had an architect who I had researched many years earlier, who was a modernist, similarly, but also an architect of that war, as opposed to the older generation of architects who were from the First World War.

JON FAINE: So, there's a significant, there's step shifts, both in the generations of the individuals, but also in that do we go more the American way or the English way? Do we assert our independence and find our own way? Is that correct as a way of describing what was going on in the immediate post war times?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Yes, yes, it was, I think Australia had certainly seen after the Fall of Singapore that it needed a new direction. It needed a more reliable ally, and the American approach was probably more akin to what Australia wanted. But at the same time, it still was beholden to the English.

JON FAINE: These are broader themes, really, aren't they? Not just to do with war graves. And just finally, before we move on, was cost an issue?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: The British, the Imperial War Graves Commission did have this odd edict that it was allocated about 10 pounds to a grave in which to organise the cost of building a War Cemetery. Depending on the number of graves in the War Cemetery, that would be the sum allocated to the entire cemetery and by and large, it would sort of stick to it, unless there were more significant cemeteries that they built in the United Kingdom. In the Australian examples, I believe that there were similar budget constraints. They had to work within their means. But at the same time, what a lot of people don't seem to realise is that Australia is actually a signatory to the then Imperial War Graves Commission. And in fact, it's a co share owner of the War Graves Commission, and annually, we pay a sum to fund the War Graves Commission proportionate to the number of Australian dead. So, we now do have a say very much so in how those sites are maintained.

JON FAINE: Were there arguments about the amounts allocated to, for instance, offshore cemeteries compared to other ways of commemorating and memorialising the war?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Yes, there were plenty of arguments in that sense, in terms of the cost, because for some there was the need, for example, to have a memorial or a more significant structure in a cemetery over a certain size, there would be haggles over whether or not we needed one cross of sacrifice or two depending on nationalities. I think the national interests sometimes played a hand, but by and large, they had to stay within the cost structure that they had set up, because it wasn't meant to be a gratuitous expenditure of money on these sites. They were meant to be dignified. They were meant to be in perpetuity. And one of the considerations that always went into these sites was, how do you maintain something knowing full well that it would be 50, 60, 100 years or more in the future, and how do you allow for that in these times?

JON FAINE: I'm sure we'll come back to lots of these themes, and I'm sure many people will have specific questions. But thanks very much, Atha, which brings us, Keiko, to your contribution.

KEIKO TAMURA: Thank you very much. First of all, thank you very much for inviting me to this panel talk. It's been a privilege and honour, and it's been so interesting. My contribution is to tell you share the story about the Cowra Japanese cemetery, which is a very unusual, unique place, the only War Cemetery the Japanese government established after World War Two outside Japan. And in order to tell that story, I have to start with Cowra location, which is about, I think, 600 kilometres from Melbourne. It's a country town, inland country town in New South Wales, near, well, we can say near but it's about 100 kilometres from Orange and Bathurst. When the war started, the Australian Government established the prisoner of war camp in Cowra, and from 1943 the Japanese prisoners of war, was kept in Cowra POW camp, and when we talk about Cowra, we can't really say anything without talking about breakout. I don't know how many of you might heard of the Cowra breakout, but it's been 80 years since the breakout. So, the POW, Japanese POWs started arriving in 1943 and the number started to increase as the Japanese kind of fighting was subsided, and more and more Japanese soldiers were captured, and the numbers started to increase in the camp. It went over 1000 by 1944 kind of mid, 1944 and on the fifth of August 1944 the breakout took place. Almost all the Japanese POWs broke out from their hut and campground, and as a result of this breakout, 234 Japanese POWs died, and Australian guards, four of them also died.

And then, after this breakout, those who died, Japanese who died, were buried in Cowra. There was an empty plot behind the Australian war grave. So, the Japanese soldiers’ bodies were buried there. And then war ended, as you know, in 1945 August, and Japan became an occupied nation, and all those POWs and other almost all the Japanese who were living in Australia were repatriated back to Japan. And also, Australia and Japan did not have a proper diplomatic relation. So, there was no Japanese diplomacy in Australia. And during that time, this plot in Cowra, where Japanese soldiers, POWs, were buried, for some time, it became not maintained, and grass started to grow, and what happened then was quite marvellous, amazing. Cowra RSL branch was in charge of maintaining the Australian war cemetery, but when the members realised that the Japanese plot was not maintained and the grass was growing, they decided to cut the grass of the Japanese plot, and that continued until 1952 when the proper diplomatic relations was resumed. And then when the Japanese Embassy was opened in Canberra, initially in Melbourne, later in Canberra, one of the main tasks, other than, you know, resuming the proper diplomatic relations was to do work on the war graves, Japanese war graves, which was scattered throughout Australia.

Cowra was a major location, but there were other POW camps in various parts in Australia, and also civilian internment camps were located in Australia. So, during the about four years and half of war and internment, people died, Japanese people died, and they were buried nearby. And in the 1950s they started to look for a proper place for a Japanese war grave. And in the 60s, at the beginning of 60s, they decided to locate this War Cemetery in Cowra. In order to establish the War Cemetery, well, 230 soldiers were already buried there, but all those other graves have to be moved, and also remains have to be interred and reburied in Cowra. That took place in the 1960, beginning of 1964 and I have to say that Anzac Agency played quite a significant role in that. And the cemetery opened in November 1964 and after the cemetery was opened, it became a place for reconciliation. Cowra people at a community based level, they in many ways, embraced the presence of this Japanese War Cemetery, and from say, 1970s Japanese ex POWs who survived the breakout, they started to come back to Cowra to pay their respect to the comrade who died in the breakout and Japanese Buddhist priests and also Australian Christian priests, they also got involved in this reconciliation movement or activities. So, the major gathering was usually the 40th anniversary. That was 1974 and then 50th, 60th, 70th. And last year in Cowra, there was an 80th anniversary of the breakout, and up to 2000 people participated in the commemorative events which took place, I think, which run about three days, various events. When I talk about Cowra, and when people talk about Cowra, since the breakout was such a dramatic and tragic event, people tend to focus on the prisoners of war, but I like to point out there are also civilian internees graves in the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery, as well. Japanese who are living in Australia at the beginning of the war, and also Japanese who are living outside of Australia, places like Java, New Caledonia, New Zealand. Those civilians, just like one of us., you know, they're not soldiers. They were just either working in the field, butlers, laundromat owners, they were interned and sent to Australia and kept in the camp for almost four years, and during that time, many elders and some young children died of illness, and their graves are also in Cowra War Cemetery.

JON FAINE: When you say 240 or so died in the breakout, can we be specific? How did they die?

KEIKO TAMURA: Most of them were shot.

JON FAINE: By Australian guards

KEIKO TAMURA: By Australian guards. The camp is like a hexagon shape, and there were watchtowers. When the Australian guards realised that there was a breakout, they started to shoot. And the Japanese did not have any weapon. I mean, like guns, what they carried was dinner knives, I think, not to fight against Australian guards, but just to hold something. And lots of them die, kill themselves, tragically.

JON FAINE: Why did they break out? I know that sounds like a really stupid question, but it's actually critical. Days and days away from the coast, let alone any viable means of escaping from the continent. What were they trying to do?

KEIKO TAMURA: Yeah, well, that's still kind of lots of discussions. Why did they do that? In general, for some time, people say that, well, well, it's just either fanatic Japanese soldiers’ belief or they didn't want to be prisoners of war because being captured was regarded as a very shameful existence, so they wanted to kill themselves. But after doing research from various angles about the breakout and also Japanese prisoners of war, I think it's a rather simplistic conclusion. I think lots of them wanted to leave, but at the same time, they realised that once the war ends, eventually, they didn't know where to go, because they thought once they go back to Japan, they might feel embarrassed being a prisoner of war, and not just themselves, but their families might be disgraced. So once the POWs were captured, they were all interrogated, and one of the questions was that 'What do you want to do when the war ends?' Answers were, in general, most of them said, 'I don't want to go back to Japan. We want to stay in Australia, or we just want to move to a remote island by ourselves, with other POWs and live among ourselves'. So going back to Japan was not the option for them, they thought. So, they were more like in limbo. They didn't know what to do. So, when this trigger of the breakout came out, they felt that's the only thing they could do.

JON FAINE: And just finally, and then I'll come back to Anoma and Atha, is the Cowra story widely known in Japan?

KEIKO TAMURA: Yes and no. For example, those like 80th anniversary, 70th anniversary, those events been reported in Japan. And also, some dramatization on TV is being broadcast. So, during that time, people will hear about it, and then think, 'Ah, I didn't know anything about it'. But then other things come. So, it's not the main story of the Japanese war. But yeah, many school students, university students, who visit Australia, they also want to visit Cowra.

JON FAINE: A pilgrimage?

KEIKO TAMURA: Yeah

JON FAINE: So, Anoma, these are complex ideas and emotions. How does architecture grapple with such complexity?

ANOMA PIERIS: So, I think the importance about architecture is that things happen in places. And often when you read social histories where you're focusing on people and their narratives, the places kind of become a backdrop, but these places influence how we interpret history. And I guess an architectural historian's life's ambition is to make people see the world through the built environment, to understand that it is a contingent part of our experience of life and of trauma.

JON FAINE: So, is there anything distinctive, Atha, about an Australian war memorial? If you were blindfolded and dropped in front of something that's a war memorial, could you tell which country's memorial it is from its architecture and its structure and its design?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: I think there are some aspects to it that can trigger these memories. In the case of Yokohama, if you're standing in front of a eucalyptus tree or two and see the leaves on the ground next to the graves, you get that sense. Another factor is to look at the names, and often we forget that these are the names of families that you know have been part of Australia for so many generations. We can also travel to a lot of the war cemeteries within Australia itself and see an Australian aspect to it through the kind of materials that they would use and the kind of landscape they would engage. But overseas, it becomes a little more challenging. And one of the ways in which the Imperial War Graves Commission had tried to create a semblance of it being of that group that's buried there was to plant a tree, a national tree within it. And I think that's about as much as you can do on sites like that, unless you're going to create an Australian identity in the architecture itself.

JON FAINE: Keiko said that there's a pilgrimage of Japanese visitors to Australia going to Cowra. Is there a pilgrimage of Australians going to Yokohama? To Hodogaya?

KEIKO TAMURA: Yes, yes. Actually, I was in Japan last September with the 20 high school students from New South Wales, and one of the main places of the visit was Hodogaya. And students organised their own commemoration service to honour those Australian dead. And then two students chose to speak about their particular POWs who lost their lives in Japan. So, in that sense, there's a pilgrimage. But Hodogaya is rather kind of a difficult place to get to. There's no public transport, so for ordinary Australian tourists, even though 1 million Australians are now visiting Japan, I heard, (not) many, I have to say, Australian tourists have chance to visit Hodogaya. But by you know, once they know somewhere like that is there, I'm sure they will like to go and visit.

JON FAINE: So, is part of this exhibition's ambition to put Hodogaya on the map?

ANOMA PIERIS: Very much so, and also to bring the history of the creation of the cemetery to the Japanese as well in Yokohama, so that they begin to understand the background story to the creation of the cemetery, who was involved, but more importantly, that there were Japanese collaborators and Japanese contractors. Because I think having some claim to that creation will make it meaningful for them. Otherwise, they might just see it as a recreational space.

JON FAINE: What do you mean by collaborators?

ANOMA PIERIS: So, the fact that there were architects, Japanese architects, were collaborating in designing the space.

JON FAINE: It's always got a sinister connotation, collaboration, so you're meaning there were, there were Japanese civilian contractors who worked on this?

ANOMA PIERIS: Yes.

JON FAINE: What's the difference then, any of you, between a Japanese war memorial and Hodogaya?

KEIKO TAMURA: Well, it's a complex issue, as you might...

JON FAINE: We're not afraid of complexity.

KEIKO TAMURA: Well, 80th anniversary of the end of war, it was just marked a few days ago, and Japan is still struggling with their kind of concluding or making sense or come to terms with what that war was. And so, it was a war aggression, but at the same time, 3 million people, Japanese people died. So, this kind of two side of being aggressor and being victim is conflicting, kind of each other, and people are still struggling to kind of come to one conclusion. Comparing with that Japanese struggle, I think Australia is much, how to say, clean in the sense of honouring the war dead. I think, for example, ceremonies which are held by the national or state level, where almost all Australian citizens or residents are expected to participate or honour that's very much, from my point of view, is the Australian way of understanding the war and war dead.

JON FAINE: And just finally, and we'll come to questions next. So, start to give me a wave, and I'll start to come to you in just after this one last question, we often contrast the way the German reconciliation and historical reckoning has characterised post war Germany with how Japan dealt with post war reckoning. There are still sensitivities in Japan, and I'm no expert, but I learned about tatemae and honne when I went to Japan on a fellowship many years ago and was taught that appearance is not always reality.

KEIKO TAMURA: Yeah, tatamae is a principle and honne is a real thing, right? And those two can be quite different, yeah, but I have to say that, of course, in the kind of rise of populism worldwide, but it's also happening in Japan, the very right wing nationalistic view on the nation and the war has been publicised quite widely in the recent days, and that's quite concerning, but Japan has been, in the Constitution for the last almost eight years, declare that Japan would not engage in war. It is getting more and more difficult, but that constitution still stands, and many people, many Japanese citizens, who hold on to that as more like a last stand, I think. And I think it's not easy, but I think it's a very important principle for Japanese to keep.

JON FAINE: And it didn't escape anyone's attention that it was almost on the 80th anniversary of the end of hostilities in World War Two, that Australia signed an agreement with Japan for new warships. How things change. Let's get to some questions. Go ahead, please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello everybody. Thank you very much for coming today. It's been a privilege to listen to you. I'm a little confused. I've had a couple of birthdays past my 21st so I've heard lots of stories from grandparents about the war, and you've told me things today I didn't know. So, thank you for that. I'm a bit intrigued, the British said, leave them where they lie. The Americans say, repatriate and take them home. A little bit intrigued as to why the Japanese would not have gone along with the Americans who were in occupation by then, and say, take your people home. Why did they give up your land to even have an Australian Memorial?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: I think there was a very strong sentiment that if we followed the Imperial War Grave Commission's ideas about how you commemorate the dead by keeping them where they fell, in terms of citing the cemeteries of places of battles or significant casualties, it becomes a reminder that a war did take place there. And in fact, these war cemeteries are fast becoming the last known physical reminders that there was a conflict, given the way other sites have been covered over, and it was a principle that was set up from the First World War, and it didn't really change in the Second World War, and I don't think any effort was made to change it in the Second World War. And we were, I guess, as Imperial subjects, to some extent, forced to go along with it, knowing full well that the Americans were actually able to take theirs back. And I think that caused a lot of consternation, especially in the Australian government at the time, and having to make that decision. And I think one of the dilemmas would have been, well, if we remove the Australians from Japan, but are forced to keep them in Burma or Thailand, which were then under the control of the British, to build the cemeteries, how do we get away with that? So, it was always going to be a difficult choice. And when you do bring them home, where do you send them home? Do they get buried in their states, in their local communities, where a lot of people will not be able to go and commemorate them? A lot of this also has to do with the way in which Australia was starting to think of nation building. And how do you create these sites that can have a different story or a more national story later on?

JON FAINE: Just to follow that, up to what extent and how do you balance collective grieving with individual, personal grieving? How much weight do you give to what a family wants compared to what a government wants?

ANOMA PIERIS: So as an example, I spoke to a family of an indigenous servicemen who is buried in Hodogaya, and he's actually, his picture, George Henry Beale is on the entrance storyboard. And I spoke to his niece, Jenny, and asked her permission to, you know, if I was asked a question to be able to talk about it, because it's important to be able to speak about it. And she said that when her father Frederick Beale, so Frederick and George were both captured and held at Naoetsu at the prisoner of war camp, and George died there, horrific death, and Frederick took his ashes and was about to board the repatriation ship when they were taken away from him, and throughout his life, he felt very deeply the fact that he couldn't take his brother's ashes back home to country. And this is something that I have come across when talking to indigenous servicemen, that now they have soul return ceremonies because they are unable to take the ashes back.

JON FAINE: To get closure.

ANOMA PIERIS: To get closure.

JON FAINE: It's an interesting one, isn't it? No simple answer, gentleman in the middle there, yes please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks very much for a fantastic presentation to all of you. Very short question. One for Keiko, with the Cowra breakup, was that a spontaneous situation, or was it quite sort of methodically planned by the POWs to do this? And just the other thing is, with the POWs, the idea of bringing Japanese POWs to Australia. I mean, the logistics of doing that, when you captured them from sending them here, time consuming, a lot of resources. What was thought to be gained by doing that, by bringing POWs to your own country? Was it actually used it as a negotiating tool, say with the Japanese Government? So, yeah, two questions there. Thank you.

KEIKO TAMURA: So, the first question was about spontaneous, whether it was. Yes, it was actually a very spontaneous decision. The trigger was that they, since the number of POWs in that camp was getting very large, they wanted to divide the non-commissioned officer, and then other soldiers separate, and non-commissioned officer to be sent to, I think, Hay. And that was not what the POWs wanted. They wanted to stay together, and that triggered the breakout. So, a few days before, everything was normal, amazingly, they were kind of looking after the veggie garden day to day things. Sorry, what's the second question?

JON FAINE: Were they to be used as a negotiating tool? What was the purpose of having so many people detained in Australia?

KEIKO TAMURA: Well, it wasn't done ... in a sense negotiating too in terms of Geneva Convention, international law, where the treatment of prisoners of war should be in a certain kind of way. And allies, Australians knew there were thousands of Australian POWs under Japan, and the Australian government was very, very concerned. So instead of using it a negotiating tool, what the Australian government wanted to do was to treat the Japanese POWs properly, according to the Geneva Convention. So that condition the Japanese were under was very favourable. They were fed very well, no forced labour, and they have plenty of leisure time. So, there's photos of baseball, small wrestling tournament among the Japanese. So, breakout was a total surprise for the Australian Government.

JON FAINE: Australia was thought to be such an informal and casual form of detention. There's a famous story told, I think, by one of the Dunera boys, or maybe it's one of the Italian enemy aliens, who was detained that they were force marched from the city to the camp, and it took days. And on day two, one of the guards said to one of the prisoners "Here, can you hold my gun while I take a piss", and at that point, the prisoner thought "I'm in paradise". You don't get it better than that. So, there we go. I don't know if it's true story, but it's a good one anyway. Neil?

NEIL SHARKEY: There's an even more famous story about Italian prisoners of war being let out into the fields to help the local farmers with labouring, and then coming back to Cowra because Cowra one half of it was for Japanese and the other half was for Italians, knocking on the gates to be let back in every night. So, I just wanted to, I know we're not supposed to do this, make statements rather than ask questions.

JON FAINE: You have an exemption.

NEIL SHARKEY: Just to the point about decisions around the repatriation of bodies. I thought there were two points that were important to make. One, the last major time when Australians were buried in the country where they fell was in Korea at Pusan. And I think that's significant, because that's really the last time that Australians fight on mass as part of a Commonwealth force, so as part of the Commonwealth division. So that would feed into the idea of these presets that have been set by the Imperial War Graves Commission, which are a part of maintaining an equality across the empire in a way that, like that there aren't exceptions made for people from particular countries. You know that everyone is part of this what was then an Imperial or a Commonwealth project, and that's where they go. And the first time that Australians are repatriated is during the Vietnam War, so in a way, we're following American practice. I mean, that could be read as a different way, as in the sense that we're now following another lead, and that the British weren't involved in Vietnam. So that's an important point to make. And the other point being, we were talking about the relocation of bodies from China to Japan. I think if the Imperial War Graves Commission was confident that those bodies where they lay in China would be respected, they would have buried them there in the same way that they buried the bodies in Ambon. But they couldn't, because China was in flux at that time, as part of a, you know, a civil war. And had the Chinese Communist taking control of Hainan in the way that, well, they did take control of Hainan, it, who knows what would have become of those bodies. So that informed the decision as to why the bodies were sent from Hainan to Japan.

JON FAINE: Makes heaps of sense. We've got a few more minutes but go ahead. Thank you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, thank you. I'll have to ask Atha about the issue of maintenance. And you know, as time goes by, these wars in the generations to come, fade a bit into the past, and how much support will there be for continuing the maintenance that's needed? There must be quite a lot of war graves. I've seen them in France and also in Japan, and the costs has to be provided for. How is that looked after? Thank you.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: We actually were having this discussion earlier. The Australian government as a co funder of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission allocates or provides a percentage of the budget, can measure it with the number of Australian dead as a total of the Commonwealth, and that is for the basic maintenance and running of the commission and maintaining the war cemeteries throughout the world, because there are a lot of Australians who are buried in many other war cemeteries, and not necessarily predominantly Australian.

JON FAINE: So, this is like part of the budget every year. It's part of Veterans Affairs, and there's a figure allocated there.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Yes, yes, it is. It's a cheque that has to go out every year, which is separate to the amount of money that the Australian Government would allocate for sites of commemoration that they choose, to be specific in the way in which the I think it was the Bicentennial, where we spent a lot of money on upgrading a lot of Gallipoli for our travellers, the extraordinary amount of money we gave to build a visitor centre in Villers-Bretonneux.

JON FAINE: How much again?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: I use that as a point in my studios, John and the students get a bit of a shock at the cost, but well over 100 million.

JON FAINE: I think it's true to say that the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, Australia spent more than all the Allies together on its celebration of the 100 Years of the end of the war. It was an Australian obsession and regarded by many of our allies as a folly, but they didn't think it was worth anything like as much as we did, more than Canada, India, England, France combined, we spent.

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: Yes, it was, it was extreme, and it's something that I believe will happen again and again as the national story needs to be told by politicians.

JON FAINE: For their purposes

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: For their purposes.

JON FAINE: Sorry, we're getting into ... that's another seminar for another day. Yes, go ahead, ma'am,

Thank you. Just a simple question. Australians and New Zealanders are traditional siblings in life and death. And we were surprised, when we went to Hodogaya that the New Zealanders are actually together with Canadians, wondered if you could explain why that might be?

ATHANASIOS TSAKONAS: I honestly don't know, but I think, given that they were Australian designers, their preference was for Australians to be separated.

ANOMA PIERIS: I wonder, though, whether it's because of the numbers, the numbers being fewer. I mean, Bourail is the cemetery where New Zealander kind of have a predominance.

JON FAINE: Which is in?

ANOMA PIERIS: Which is in New Caledonia,

JON FAINE: New Caledonia, and where my, where my uncle's name is on a plaque, apparently, not that I've been there, but I should,

ANOMA PIERIS: And if I can also squeeze in another point which hasn't been raised. So, 2.5 million Indians fought in the Second World War, and very little is known of them, and very large numbers of them are not commemorated across these sites, because some of them just the bodies were not collected. Sometimes they were just names, and the remains were left in place. There was a lot of unevenness in the recognition of these soldiers. And so now the current push of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is to begin to recognise the African and Indian soldiers. Just like Australia is beginning to recognise Indigenous service.

JON FAINE: I think I'm right that more Indian soldiers died at Gallipoli than Anzacs. Is that correct?

ANOMA PIERIS: I don't know.

JON FAINE: Is that correct? I think I learned that when I was at Gallipoli, and it was astonishing, that there were more Indian casualties than Anzac casualties. And if people, I'm sure there are people who've been to Gallipoli here, who, as you walk around the Turkish graves, what strikes you is that many of them have only one name on them, and a lot of them are not Turkish. They were from the Ottoman Empire. They were from anywhere except Turkey, and they were not even identified properly. It's incredibly moving. I never thought I would be as moved as I was but really was. Look, it's been fantastic. Neil's going to do the thank yous, but I have to thank you each. These are deep emotions, and it's a respectful conversation that we're having today in a time when apparently some people are incapable of having respectful conversations about difficult topics, which is a great personal regret on my part, but it's been a wonderful chance to do exactly what we should do in this building, which is to respectfully remember and hopefully also to learn.