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Hirohito, the war criminal who got away

Not prosecuting Hirohito was a mistake

22 August 2020

9:00 AM

22 August 2020

9:00 AM

This month the global media marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities’ destructions were momentous indeed, but the coverage has squeezed out other memories of the Pacific War. Who remembers Japan’s genocidal campaign in China that killed more than 20 million people — thousands of them by poison gas and canisters containing plague and typhus? Or the murder of 35 per cent of the 200,000 soldiers and civilians held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps that meted out unspeakable cruelties? Certainly not the BBC, which failed to put Hiroshima and Nagasaki into any...

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Francis Pike is the author of Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War 1941-1945.

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