Yasukuni. The great shrine that symbolizes Japan's war guilt
Ben Hills
STILL, as though it were yesterday, Kang Duk Kyong remembers the day they came for her. She had just turned 16 and was attending junior high school near the town of Chinju, in the rice-bowl of southern Korea.
"The teacher came to our house and asked for volunteers to work in Japan for the Women's Labor Corps," she says. "My mother wept after the teacher left, but I felt I had to go - in those days, the teacher was God."
Ben Hills reports
THE charred figures in the photo montage are piled in the street, barely recognisable as human beings. All around, for mile after mile, smoke rises from the fields of ash that were once one of the world's most populous and prosperous cities.
On the soundtrack, the engines of the B-29 Superfortresses, then the mightiest instrument of warfare ever built, bellow their curse of destruction over the almost-undefended Japanese capital, whose population huddles for shelter in dugouts, in temples and in the icy rivers.
The legacy of Hiroshima - was the bombing necessary? Interviews with survivors on both sides.
Ben Hills
The nightmarish wax figures stand petrified among the ruins, faces burnt black, flesh dripping from their bones, the ghastly red glare of the burning city illuminating the apocalyptic landscape.
Nearby is a whitewashed concrete wall streaked indelibly with black radioactive rain; the shadow of a child's foot burnt on to a wooden clog; hideously deformed body parts preserved in alcohol; a greyish nest that on closer examination turns out to be a head of human hair.
The Himeyuri girls. How Hirohito killed his children and why his son feared to visit Okinawa
Ben Hills
THAT was the rock we used for the operating table." The torch cuts a pale path through the dank darkness of the cave, illuminating the ghostly limestone stalactites.
"We ran out of drugs; there was no anaesthetic left; the doctors just had to saw off arms and legs with nothing to stop the pain. The men were screaming, 'Kill me, please, kill me.' " The woman's voice echoes around the underground vault, getting louder and shriller, verging on hysteria, as the memories come flooding back. Her name is Yoshiko Shimabukuro, and she was one of the Himeyuri girls, Hirohito's child soldiers.
Nagasaki - the forgotten nuke.
Ben Hills
THE priest in his white tunic poses in the blazing sunshine in front of his church, beside the charred, decapitated statue of a saint - a stark reminder of what happened here 50 years ago.
"It was a devilish weapon," says Father Takeshi Kawazoe, the head priest at the Urakami Cathedral. "But we must never forget that it was Japan's militarism and aggression that brought the bomb upon itself."
Myth may have saved millions.
Ben Hills, Herald Correspondent
When I fly the skies,What a fine burial place
Would be the top of a cloud
Farewell poem written in blood on his headband by a kamikaze pilot, quoted by Domei newspaper. Fifty years later, Tadashi Nakajima no longer remembers the names or faces of the brave, scared, reckless young men he sent to certain death in the steel-filled skies over the Philippines.