When the atomic bombs dropped prisoners had varying degrees of unease about the reaction of the Japanese Army to the Emperor’s broadcast, many believing that bushidō extremists would try to kill them. This was particularly the case in a country under the influence of Count Terauchi but if orders to kill prisoners existed, in Thailand at any rate it appeared that the kempeitai had filleted them from the offices of the various HQs. It was left to the British Division of the International Prosecution at the International Military Tribunal Far East, B & C Offences, to reveal what may be the only unfilleted document.90 It was found by ex-prisoner Jack Edwards at the Kinkaseki Mine in North Taiwan. The document emanated from the Taihoku prisoner-of-war camp and was addressed to the commanding general of the Taiwan kempeitai. The document is listed by the British Division as Document No. 2071 (certified as Exhibit ‘0’ in Document No. 2687). It describes the reply to Taihoku’s query about ‘the extreme measures for prisoners-of-war’ and runs as follows:
The time and method of this disposition are as follows:
(1)The Time.
Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual disposition may be made in the following circumstances:
(a)When an uprising of large numbers cannot be suppressed without the use of firearms,
(b)When escapees from the camp may turn into a hostile fighting force.
(2)The Methods.
(a)Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.
(b)In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.91
The timing of this document (1 August 1944) has added point to those who know that in the summer of 1944 senior officer-prisoners secretly ordered named officers to act as key personnel in a putative mobile infantry brigade. I myself was nominated as Staff-Captain ‘Q’ to serve, as I discovered later when I arrived, under Major R.A.N. Davidson 4PWO, Gurkha Rifles, as DAQMG and Lt-col C.E. Morrison, 1 Leicesters, as DDST.
Detailed documented accounts exist of the militaristic take-over as a criminal course since 1931. One could say, with Ienaga Saburō in his book, The Pacific War, that a Great East Asian War lasted from 1931 to 1945. He argues that the use of prisoners-of-war on forced labour was only one aspect of the Army’s general violation of International Law. The effect of the take-over led to inevitable side-effects such as training to breed vicious fighters with a penchant for brutality against enemy prisoners. The tendency of Japanese to react to constant pressure with an explosion of irrational destructive behaviour was only too well-known to prisoners in Burma and Thailand. The conduct of the Japanese Army in the Pacific War was far inferior to their disciplined behaviour in the Russo-Japanese War.
Eight captured USAAF men were vivisected in May and June 1945 at Kyūshū Imperial University in experiments to test human limits of resistance to pain. For example, a prisoner had saline injected into his bloodstream to find the quantitative limits before death occurred. Air was injected into another prisoner’s veins to ascertain the volume at which death occurred. In the case of another prisoner his lung was excised to find the limits to which the bronchial tubes may be cut before death occurs.
The brilliant novelist, Endō Shūsaku, in his book The Sea and Poison (1958), confronted the problem of individual responsibility in wartime in a study of a doctor who had been ancillary to the test team and on return to civilian practice in peace-time was dogged by his. sense of guilt. Endō’s translator, Michael Gallagher, comments that his thesis is that the West is informed by the faith (he is a Catholic) even when formally rejected: the East is informed by a kind of pantheism so that the East knows no tension of opposites like good versus evil, flesh versus spirit, God versus devil. The East, he argues is a ‘concave’ world which has no God, the West is a ‘convex’ world which has acknowledged the existence of God.
In Tokyo many kempei deserted their units, panicking at the Emperor’s broadcast but not omitting to fillet HQ records of prison camps like Ōmuta in Kyūshū or the interrogation centre at Yokosuka near Yokohama. This overall display of docility is in marked contrast to the spirited dynamic resistance movements in Thailand and Burma during the Japanese occupation. But harsh treatment of Japanese by the Russians in Manchuria had its counterpart in Japan during the predominantly American occupation with GIs frequently accosting women in the street, or actually assaulting them, assaults resulting in women committing suicide or becoming street prostitutes. Victims of robbery by GIs were rarely able to recover their property or receive compensation.
B and C Class War Criminals included men who had no real chance of defending themselves and were executed. An example of mistaken identity (taking the charitable view) when the wrong man was to be put to death was Captain Wakamatsu Shiguō, commandant of Kilo 100 camp in Burma and later of the hospital camp at Nakhon Pathom in Thailand. According to testimony by prisoners at both those camps he was a humane man of principle, kind to prisoners and exerting his jurisdiction by protecting as far as he could the men under him. At Singapore in September 1945 Major Robbie Robertson, RAE, confirmed these views in his defence, and related how the Moji maru transport in which he himself was a prisoner was bombed in the Andaman Sea. In her stern she was carrying explosives, a fire broke out, and a Japanese officer left his cabin and with no regard for his own safety threw the explosives overboard. This was Captain Wakamatsu, under whom Major Robinson later served in Kilo 100 camp. The court commuted Wakamatsu’s death sentence to life imprisonment on 13 August 1946, yet despite this he was hanged by the Australians on 30 April 1947 at Singapore, an act of retaliatory judgement without retrial. His story, first told to me by Robbie Robinson, was set out in the Asahi newspaper on 4 October 1982.
The militaristic take-over of 1931 re-asserted the right, written into the Constitution of 1898, of giving the war ministers in the Cabinet direct access to the Throne. In 1913, the Constitution had been changed to allow retired officers to serve, but in 1936 the regulation was changed again making the Army and Navy ministers men on active service only. Thus the Army could topple the Cabinet by refusing to nominate a serving officer to serve as minister.
In 1940, Army Minister Lt-General Tōjō Hideki transferred Lt-general Nakamura Aketo, commander of Yamashita’s 5 Division, ‘for violating orders to avoid a clash in advance of the Japanese takeover of French Indo-China’. Nakamura emerged as commander of the kempeitai and by 1945 commanded all 50,000 forces in Thailand, the General with whom my encounter has been described.
Japan’s last war? It is possible that the economic development of the Pacific Basin, with its transfer of world dominance from the Atlantic to the Pacific, would leave Japan powerful enough to influence a consolidation of Australasia, China, and ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, The Philippines), and realistic enough to remember that in war the winner does not take all.
After the war Futamatsu published An Account of the Construction of the Thai-Burma Railway in 1955, and my correspondence with him since 1979 culminated in his illustrated pamphlet, Recollections of the Thai-Burna Railway in 1980. The tale had come full circle from marines in the Pacific to his recreations of the railway. As a Buddhist, he might stress how we all are recreated in an unending series of afterlives leading (we hope) to a predestined nirvana. For Christians, life after death goes on ‘out there’ in a heaven each individual imagines for himself. For the Agnostic, Flanagan and Allen sang of the dawn which comes again after dreams underneath the Arches:
We are men drenched in soaking rain,