For three and a half years, Arthur Titherington was beaten, starved, worked like a slave and lived in the shadow of death as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, writes George Frew.

For the past 54 years, as the most high-profile member of the Japanese Labour Camp Survivors Association, this former mayor of Witney has refused to go away and to accept the weasel words of psuedo-apology offered by successive Japanese governments for their brutal conduct towards the PoWs persecuted by them during the Second World War.

Private Arthur Titherington was 20 years old when he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and sent to the Kinkaseki slave-labour mine in Taiwan. He was fit and healthy. When they liberated him three and a half years later, he weighed five and a half stone and was one of just 90 prisoners out of 522 left alive.

He will be 80 years old in December and despite Tony Blair's broad hint that the Far East PoWs may receive a 10,000 compensation payment from his Government next month, Mr Titherington remains as determined as ever to pursue his quest: a meaningful apology from the Japanese and compensation. "I don't want compensation from the British taxpayer the British taxpayer didn't knock hell out of me for three years," he says. "The Japanese have had the opportunity over 50 years to apologise and yet the best they can express is that they 'regret' what happened. The expression they use means about as much as it would if you bumped into someone in the supermarket with your trolley.

"There is no doubt that some of the guards in the camp enjoyed inflicting cruelty more than others," he says flatly.

"I do not forgive these people the governments of Japan, the former emperor, the bureaucrats. They will not apologise but I'm sure they feel a sense of shame for what they done.

"But the British Government is almost as guilty as the Japanese for failing to support us. They have a duty to care for ex-servicemen."

When you meet Arthur Titherington, two things surprise you. The first is that he laughs easily and is clearly neither a bitter nor a vengeful man. The second is that his home in Witney's Church Green is dotted with what are unmistakably Japanese artefacts and ornaments.

But then he explains how he has no hatred for the Japanese people, only an abiding detrmination to see justice done, in the form of the meaningful apology and Japanese compensation. "You can't visit the sins of the fathers on the children, says Mr Titherington, who has made no fewer than six trips to Japan. "It would be pointless singing hymns of hate against the entire Japanese race, although I must admit that up until 15 years ago, I wouldn't go near Japan.

"But if you went through what we went through, survived it and didn't gain from it, that'd have been a great shame. I've been very fortunate. My health has been quite good."

His determination is just as iron-willed. Ten thousand pounds or not, Arthur Titherington is not about to abandon his quest.

Kinkaseki, One Day At A Time by Arthur Titherington has recently been released in paperback by publishers Covos Day.