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PEOPLE
Volume 2 Number 8
Message to Emperor
01 August 1989
The nine million readers of the Japanese paper, Yomiuri, read in June of how another Welsh war veteran was building bridges with Japan.
The nine million readers of the Japanese paper, Yomiuri, read in June of how another Welsh war veteran was building bridges with Japan. Gwilym Jenkins, a former trade union branch secretary at Llanwern steelworks, South Wales, had sent a taped message to Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko describing how he had lost his hatred for the Japanese.
`I had a fierce burning hatred against all Japanese people, arising from my days fighting the Japanese in Burma,' he told the Emperor. `I fed and nurtured this hatred like a rare orchid.' These feelings were fanned by the threat to British jobs from the Japanese steel and car industries.
When Jenkins was invited to attend a Moral Re-Armament conference in 1980 where a Japanese delegation was expected, he nearly refused. But at that conference he found the courage to confront his hatred and to apologize to the Japanese present. As a result, he was invited to a conference in Odawara in 1981.
While in Odawara Jenkins went for a walk and came across a man pruning his roses. As a rose enthusiast, Jenkins stopped and the two men got talking.
They discovered that they had both fought in World War II. The Japanese veteran, Masahiko Hatano, invited Jenkins in for a cup of coffee. `I took off my shoes and entered his home and was introduced to his wife,' said Jenkins. `For a moment my heart stopped beating. My Japanese friend asked why I was so quiet. I told him that 40 years ago in Burma if someone had told me that one day I would be drinking coffee and eating cakes with a former Japanese naval officer, I would have certified him as insane.
`Some would think of me as a traitor. But I realized I was part of the healing process between the British people and Japan.'
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Earlier this year, when controversy broke out in the British press over Prince Philip's decision to attend Emperor Hirohito's funeral, Jenkins was one of many British ex-servicemen interviewed. He put his experiences on tape for the new Emperor.
On his return to Japan this May, Jenkins tried to track down Hatano - only to find that the terrace where he lived had largely been demolished. He enlisted the help of a passerby and, 'unbelievably', Hatano turned up at the conference Jenkins was attending, having heard that an Englishman was looking for him. It was on his suggestion that Jenkins was interviewed by Yomiuri.
`God worked a miracle in my life and the repercussions are still continuing,' says Jenkins.
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