On Tuesday 26 May, Japanese Emperor Akihito paraded down the Mall in London at the start of a state visit to the UK. A number of people held captive by the Japanese during the Second World War turned their backs on the Emperor and the Brisish Queen. Brian MacArthur discusses media coverage of this event.

The veteran cricket writer E.W. Swanton, who was a Japanese prisoner in the Second World War and worked on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway, wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday in which he pointed out that the survivors who turned their backs on Emperor Akihito of Japan this week were a minority. The majority kept their thoughts to themselves, he said, and the Lord's Prayer made the Christian's hard duty of forgiveness plain. Swanton cited the example of Eric Lomax, whose award-winning book, The Railway Man, described his suffering under the Japanese but also how he had subsequently been reconciled with his chief torturer. It is a harrowing book that few could read without concluding that there comes a time when we have to bury the past. When I spoke to Lomax this week he shared Swanton's view. The men who turned their backs on the Emperor represented only 2 per cent of the prisoners, he said. What about the silent majority? Yet it is the vociferous minority who have been the focus of almost every news story this week, certainly in most of the tabloids - which raises the question of whether editors should lead or follow public opinion and, indeed, whether their assessments of public opinion or what interests the public are correct. Several newspapers this week have added fuel to flames that surely ought now to be doused. On Monday night, Tony Blair showed proper political leadership when he appealed for a warm welcome for Emperor Akihito during his visit. Now, study the spin put on Blair's appeal. Unsurprisingly nowadays, The Express reported it straight: "Blair backs the Emperor", it said, adding inside: "Blair offers hand of friendship to Japan". The Sun gave Blair a full page to make his argument that Japan is a major investor in Britain, providing more than 65,000 jobs. Elsewhere, the spin played to that vociferous minority. The Daily Mail turned the story round and headlined its report: "Angry PoWs attack Blair". So did The Mirror: "What price our heroes Tony?", it asked as it devoted two pages to stories of Japanese torture. That bitterness continued on Wednesday, when the old soldiers who protested in The Mall were again featured across all the tabloid front pages. "How can we ever forget?" said The Sun. "Silent But unbowed, said the Daily Mail. Given the horrifying suffering of Japan's prisoners, that is a difficult question - and there are other awkward as well as difficult questions, too. One was raised by Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail: why, if Japan's manufacturers appear precisely to grasp our needs as consumers of cars, cannot their politicians have a better understanding of the more profound feelings of the heart? Another was John Keegan in The Daily Telegraph. Since Japan's ruling class had adopted an anti-war culture after 1945, he asked, why was it so difficult now to go the extra mile and fully apologise for the anti-Western culture of the 1930s? Two newspapers stood out from the pack in promoting reconciliation. The words that amounted to the Emperor's apology were published across eight columns at the top of the front page of The Times. Its headline (note the last two words) said: "A day of protest and reconciliation." There was also a picture of a smiling Burma Railway survivor showing his medals to a Japanese mother and child, and a leading article arguing that the Emperor's mission was unmistakably one of conciliation. The Independent, however, was the only newspaper to argue the case for forgiving and forgetting. "Time and crime have moved on," it argued. It also published an article by John Casey, the Cambridge don, who suggested that the British were turning into "rather a small people" by remembering the past so selectively and visiting the sins of the father upon the son's blameless head. At 28, Alison Roberts had the best answer, in the Evening Standard, to the attention given to the vociferous minority. She represented the post-postwar generation, she said, and wondered when an older generation was going to stop going on about the war. Venerable newspaper columnists had crudely insulted a foreign visitor who had nothing to do with atrocities 50 years ago. She made a good point - and aren't newspaper editors supposed to be trying to attract young readers? Most certainly forgot about them this week.