A visit by six former American prisoners of war to Japan has opened a door to reconciliation that should be opened wider, according to Lester Tenney, a survivor of the infamous 1942 Bataan Death March in the Philippines.
In an interview in Tokyo earlier this month, Tenney, a 90-year-old professor emeritus at Arizona State University who now lives in California, suggested that much progress needs to be made on issues involving Japanese companies that used POWs as slave labor during the war.
The six former captives of the Imperial Japanese Army and their families received an apology Sept. 13 in Tokyo from then Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. They were in Japan at the government's invitation on the first trip of its kind for American POWs.