When a Chinese and a Japanese visit Tokyo’s Yasukuni war shrine

What does freedom mean to you? That’s the question the BBC World Service has been asking of us through its season of programmes Freedom 2014. The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (whose daily blog from space went viral) gave us a vivid and unusual image of what freedom, or rather the lack of freedom, looks like to him. While circling the earth in the international space station, he noticed that each time he went past the lights of Berlin were two different colours. After a while he realised this was ‘a poignant reminder’ of the city’s history; of its former lack of freedom; of how it had been divided by a wall for decades. The wall has been taken down, but the lights tell a different story.

This weekend, and next, two young journalists from China and Japan have been taking us on a journey through their own understanding of what freedom means.