Their Past Your Future
David Gimson describes a school trip with a difference: from Oxford to Japan to see how another country deals with its own contested and painful past, and to develop contacts for the future.
In January, twenty-four Lower Sixth A Level History students and four teachers from Cheney School, Oxford, were lucky to be selected to take part in a sixtieth anniversary commemorative ‘Their Past Your Future’ visit (organized by the Imperial War Museum and funded by the Big Lottery) to sites associated with the Second World War in Thailand and Japan. The trip took place in early August which meant that we were there at the traumatic moment of the sixtieth anniversary of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Emperor’s subsequent surrender on USS Missouri. In preparation, the students wrote essays and reviewed relevant books, exchanged their work with teachers and students in Japan, took a course in basic Japanese, and met with two former prisoners-of-war, Arthur Titherington and William Rose.
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