Tokyo ? Still stinging with anger and sorrow, Asians on Sunday marked the 60th anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender by honoring their dead, burning Rising Sun flags and demanding compensation amid rekindled tensions over Japanese abuses.

The occasion spurred protesters in Hong Kong to burn Japan’s flag and march on Tokyo’s consulate chanting “Down with Japanese imperialism!”

In the Philippines, elderly women once forced to act as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers renewed demands for compensation and apologies. Former Australian prisoners of war returned to the Thai jungles where they labored under brutal conditions to build the notorious Death Railway.

China exhorted its citizens to remember Tokyo’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, with “a fresh wave of patriotism,” as state-run media whipped up memories of Japanese atrocities.

The outpouring of emotion revealed the unhealed wounds six decades after Japan’s Emperor Hirohito conceded defeat in a radio broadcast, just days after the United States incinerated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.

The anniversary comes as Japan’s relations with its neighbors are their most frayed in decades.

‘Pariah nation’

Regional strains stem partly from anxiety over North Korea’s nuclear arms program and a dispute between Japan and China over resources in a contested area of the East China Sea. But there are also bitter complaints that Japan has not properly atoned for brutally occupying much of the region in the 1930s and ’40s.

A tourist visits the World War II Memorial Sunday in Washington. Today is the 60th anniversary of VJ-Day, when Japan surrendered to the Allies after the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs.

“I can accept the fact that the young generation of Japanese is not to blame. It was their fathers and grandfathers. But until they own up, they’ll always be a pariah nation,” said 84-year-old Baden Jones, an Australian.

He was among former POWs who honored fallen comrades at a ceremony in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, where many of the 12,000 prisoners who died building Japan’s jungle railway were buried.

Bitterness runs especially deep in China. Riots erupted earlier this year over Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni war shrine – which deifies Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals – and over Tokyo’s approval of history textbooks that critics say gloss over wartime atrocities.

Seeking compensation

In the Philippines, Lili-Pilipina, a group of women who say they were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army, demanded again that Tokyo compensate them. While some have accepted payments from the privately run Asian Women’s Fund, the women want official compensation and acknowledgment of their suffering from the Japanese government.

Tokyo has generally refused to pay damages to individuals for the war, saying the issue was settled between governments in postwar treaties. Japanese courts have rejected a number of lawsuits brought by former sex slaves across Asia.

Controversial shrine

Looming over this year’s remembrances was the Yasukuni shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead, including its prime minister during World War II, Hideki Tojo.

Speculation mounted that Koizumi could visit there as early as today to commemorate the end of World War II – an act sure to further enrage Chinese and Koreans.

Taku Yamasaki, former vice president of Koizumi’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said Sunday he did not think Koizumi would visit on the sensitive date.

“More people are realizing the importance of good diplomatic relations with our neighboring countries,” he said.

But Koizumi needs to bolster support among conservative Japanese for next month’s parliamentary elections and he hasn’t visited the shrine since January 2004. He said Friday he would make “the appropriate decision when the time comes.”

North Korea decried the shrine visits as a sign of resurgent Japanese militarism.

“These militarist forces are directly exercising increasing influence on shaping policies,” the communist country’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary Saturday.