As I read this, I thought, "My God, this is me!"

Living in Australia, as a teenager, I always felt annoyed when the media interviewed ex-POWs from Changi, the Burma-Thai Railway and other areas and couldn't understand why so many of them still hated the Japanese. I remember, when I was in Year Eleven, I said that I would have loved to host a Japanese exchange student for three weeks, and my mother said, "We couldn't do that, as your grandfather would want to bring up the war." What I can now understand about myself is, my experiences with the Japanese were positive ones, if I had been a POW and been beaten up and lost mates to tropical diseases and the like, I probably wouldn't think the same way. My paternal grandfather was in Darwin for 27 of the 62 bombing raids and he wasn't anti-Japanese. He even said, "Well, Cyclone Tracy did more damage than all the bombing raids put together." Yes, I have met some Japanese I haven't liked, but I have met more Japanese I have liked than not.

I mean, yes, I still say with the ex-POWs, they are entitled to be bitter, not that it does any good, but what they have to remember is, young Japanese exchange students and young tourists are not responsible for what the guards in prison camps did. Hate their captors, okay, but even if the Japanese exchange student you see in the street's grandfather fought against you, their grandfather fought you, they didn't.

I remember, also, in Year Eleven, having to do this piece of assessment where we saw a few seconds of The Paradine Case and we had to write on the lighting in approximately 200 words, and another bit about something else in 300 words and something else where they wanted 400 words, and I felt tempted to write, "You're Joking", "Don't Be Ridiculous!" and "You Cannot Be Serious!" and walk out. I could only comment briefly on what I saw, I couldn't do what the teacher was asking, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I failed. I also struggled terribly with a film review.

I wrote a story here about a man who was very racist, who learnt that his great-grandfather was Chinese after his mother died, and that was based on a true story.

I can remember my teacher saying that I had to really come up with creative stuff and I thought, "But what you're asking me to do is like connecting a 40 foot caravan to the back of a 1990 Toyota Corolla and wondering why the rear bumper of the Corolla hit the ground!"

I can empathise if somebody told me that they had to see a doctor they didn't like or that they were assaulted by a doctor, because that has happened to me.

Thank you for this article.