Canberra, Australia. -- On Wednesday, the 53rd anniversary of the fall of Singapore to invading Japanese, the Australian government honored the 31,088 Australian men and women taken as prisoners of war during World War II. As the survivors gathered at the war memorial overlooking the city, police blocked buses carrying Japanese tourists.
They were afraid of what might happen if the old "diggers" saw the children and grandchildren of their Japanese guards.
Australian memory is enshrined in these numbers: 8,712 Aussies were captured by Germans during the war and 8,448 of them came home; 22,376 were captured by the Japanese and 8,031 of them died in captivity -- the greatest number of them from starvation and exhaustion building the jungle railroad in Burma and Thailand that Americans remember leading to the bridge over the River Kwai.
More than a third of Australians, according to polls, believe Japan is still a military threat to their freedom. More than 40 percent believeJapan has secret stores of nuclear weapons. War and remembrance.
But there are different kinds of statistics now. Japan is Australia's principal trading partner -- one-quarter of its exports go to Tokyo -- and Australian companies have a $4.2 billion trade surplus ($3.1 billion U.S.) with their Japanese customers. The principal exports are coal, aluminum and grain.
So there is an uncomfortable clash between the business of 1995 and the brutality of 1942. As in the United States, Australia does its commercial best to sanitize the events of 50 years ago. Wednesday's ceremonies were the first official tribute to the World War II POWs, and the Canberra Times lead story that day referred only to "the enemy," avoiding mention of Japan.
But the old men remembered; mainly they remembered their "mates," the Aussies who died in Japanese camps. The ceremony went on despite quiet Japanese protests and the complaints of the Japanese ambassador that he was not invited.
(A few years ago in Paris at the premiere of "The Last Emperor," a very anti-Japanese film, I found myself seated next to the Japanese ambassador to France. We chatted, but he made no concession that the events depicted on the screen, the invasion of Manchuria, had anything to do with him or his country. They don't acknowledge, they don't apologize -- which is why so many Australians still hate them, trade or no trade.)
Wednesday's ceremonies on a crystal late summer day (in the Southern Hemisphere) were among the most impressive I have ever seen. The Aussies, I guess, learned from the British. To begin with, Prime Minister Paul Keating, not particularly popular these days, was presented as "speaking now on behalf of the Australian people" -- an affectation American presidents might benefit from using.
Mr. Keating was uncommonly eloquent, leaving men in tears, not all of them Australian, saying:
"Perhaps we should bring two messages to this commemoration. One is the message of faith and courage -- the love of freedom and fairness, pragmatism, resourcefulness and perseverance and, above all, the love of this place. The love of Australia . . . those indefinable bonds between them we call 'mateship.' "
"No man on the Burma line was allowed to die alone," said one of the survivors, Arthur Wright. "Always he had a mate by his side -- you never let a bloke just die."
And Mr. Keating ended with his second message: "We should never forget the evil that was done in these prison camps. The outrage we feel about what was done on the Burma-Thailand railway . . . should never fade. Our children must know these things. . . . But, too, we must also heal. We owe it to our children that they are not obliged to live in a world poisoned by old hatreds."
It was another example to me of the power of experienced and shared history. Will their children remember? I don't know, and obviously the Australians do not either. The day after the ceremony, the Ministry of Veterans Affairs offered $20,000 to any playwright who could "help Generation Xers understand what it was like in the Depression and war."
Richard Reeves is a syndicated columnist.