‘I spent my childhood in a Japanese prison. Then God sent me back as a missionary’

Basil Scott endured three “horrible” years inside a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the second world war. He explains how God later called him back to Asia, and why reconciliation is at the heart of the gospel 

Basil Scott was only eleven years old on 15 August 1945, but it’s a day he still has strong memories of. “I remember it so vividly,” he tells me. “It was our liberation.”

Scott is recalling the jubilation of witnessing 40kg drums of food being dropped from US aircraft into the Japanese prison camp he’d lived in for the past three years. Tins of apricots and pears were a welcome sight after years of starvation. Fruit had never tasted so sweet, and neither had the hope that was finally realised on VJ day.