VJ Day: why don't we talk about WW2 in Asia?

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. This month marks the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, when fighting between Japanese and Allied forces in the Second World War came to an end. Yet as broadcasts Dr. Kavita Puri argues in her new BBC sound series, the history podcast The Second Map, this was a messy, complicated conflict that remains largely forgotten.

Matt Elton caught up with Kavita to find out more. Your new series, The Second Map, explores what you describe as the other story of the Second World War, which is the war against Japan on the Asian front. Before we go any further, why is the series called The Second Map? And why is that a helpful way into some of the things it covers? It's called the second map because I met a man who is now 98, Peter Knight, and he told me that after Pearl Harbor happened, he put up a map.

Now, if I could just set the scene, he was a young boy, he was fourteen, in early December 1941. He was living in Bromley, in Kent, which is a kind of suburb of of London. He lived in a terraced house and he had been following the war in Europe on a map on one side of his dresser in his living room. But when

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