What does freedom mean to you? That’s the question the BBC World Service has been asking of us through its season of programmes Freedom 2014. The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (whose daily blog from space went viral) gave us a vivid and unusual image of what freedom, or rather the lack of freedom, looks like to him. While circling the earth in the international space station, he noticed that each time he went past the lights of Berlin were two different colours. After a while he realised this was ‘a poignant reminder’ of the city’s history; of its former lack of freedom; of how it had been divided by a wall for decades. The wall has been taken down, but the lights tell a different story.
This weekend, and next, two young journalists from China and Japan have been taking us on a journey through their own understanding of what freedom means. For them, it’s about history, and making sure that the past is not forgotten; that its contours, both dark and light, are kept in mind. We in the democratic West take history so much for granted, believing that it’s possible to be open, honest, free in our interpretations of what took place in the past. In both their countries, though, history is fraught with unacknowledged questions, and information that is denied, hidden, locked away.
In Missing Histories, Mariko Oi took her Chinese counterpart, Haining Liu, to visit the Yasukuni Shrine on the outskirts of Tokyo, where it is believed the spirits of Japan’s war dead are enshrined. Mariko has been bullied online and threatened by many nationalist groups for daring to write articles that attack Japan’s education system because it effectively denies what happened in the war.
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