I AM writing to The Journal with a problem that I thought the people of Leigh, and in particular the elderly ones, could help me with.

I work for a company in the centre of Manchester that provides me with a £35K salary, a BMW car, free health insurance and two free holidays in the Far East every year.

That salary, over the years, has bought me a lovely house in Pennington and an apartment in Portugal.

Since 1992 the company has created 27 jobs in Manchester and hopes to create another 15 by 2000. The problem is the company is Japanese with HQ in Tokyo.

This past week I have had the awful task of trying to explain to the Japanese executive director with special responsibility for Europe as to just exactly why masses of elderly gentlemen have been turning their backs on his Emperor, booing, hissing and indulging in all kinds of anti-social behaviour.

That director of my company lost his father on Saipon to the US Marine Corps, lost his mother in the USAAF Firestorm bombing of Tokyo, and his uncle died of his wounds fighting an Indian division in Burma.

The director was brought up in a Japanese orphanage and worked his way to the top. He regards his Emperor, Akahito, as a god and he does not go around making a nuisance of himself in public.

He would never dream of booing our Queen and if she were to visit Japan she would certainly be welcomed by all the people. Indeed, when Mrs Thatcher visited Japan that director went out of his way to try and meet her with a view to business openings in the UK.

It was bad enough in 1995 with a load of old fools prancing about celebrating the dropping of an atom bomb.

If these people could just take their blinkers off and visit Japan, as I have done six times, you will find that there is no litter, no drug addicts on street corners, no homosexual perverts lurking in every public convenience, nobody gives the police any abuse, and unlike Leigh, there are no drunken louts falling about the centre of town every Saturday night.

To the veterans I simply say this - you will get your compensation and it will be much more than the £14,000 that you ask for. However, it will have to come through a Japanese private company or a Japanese charity. It cannot come through the Japanese Government.

You will never get an apology from the Japanese Emperor and you may as well wait until the cows come home if you think that you will.

Finally, the war finished more than 50 years ago. We are no longer at war with Japan but in an economic partnership that hopefully will grow and grow. For God's sake the time has come to forgive and forget.

The Progressive

(Name and address supplied)

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