"I can forgive, but I won't forget," says Jack Simmonds, an 82-year-old Australian, who was detained as a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II.
Along with fellow Australian ex-POWs Neil MacPherson, 82, and Jack Boon, 87, Simmonds was visiting Japan for the first time since the end of the war. "I wanted to see Japan, where I spent my war-time, with my eyes again," he said.
His thoughts are echoed by his fellow travelers.
"I don't have any ill feeling toward Japanese people," says Boon, who worked on the Japanese railway project in Thailand, immortalized by the movie "Bridge on the River Kwai," before being brought to Japan.