On 1 December our survey unit travelled from Phnom Penh on the Cambodian line, our object being to utilize an efficient transport capability for which we had to verify the viability of the railtrack. To safeguard our secret undercover movements, we were disguised as ships’ passengers and tourists. By chance a Frenchman who was travelling on our train saw us and my chief, Matsudaira, told me to keep him under observation. I invited him to the dining-car, having recourse to my sole stock of French, bonjour and merci, gave him several cups of coffee, trying to make him feel at ease and not get wind of our survey. This was an unexpected tough job added to a difficult survey job.
The following day we arrived at the station on the frontier. From the station the frontier was two to three hundred metres to the North, and a bridge was being built over a small river.
The station-master treated us in a friendly manner but we didn’t understand a word. We talked to yesterday’s Frenchman and he ended up by being interpreter in buying some lovely silks. We asked the station-master to be our guide as we thought we would like to go and see the bridge at the frontier. He led us to the river-bank and we all got into a boat pointing downstream, but when we got close to the bridge we saw on both banks machine-gun emplacements sited menacingly. At the moment when he led us to the boat on the river-bank a couple of Japanese soldiers had come and asked to go with us. They were without badges of rank and weren’t carrying swords. The boat was handled by the stationmaster, going downstream in mid-river, because that was thought to be the frontier-line. He was worried he might be shot at if he went over it. Apart from being in the narrow confines of a boat it was a small boat and he was crossing the bridge-route. It’s odd, but our bridge survey was accompanied by bursts of laughter!
That evening at the shelter we were stopping at, these two infantry officers greeted us and courteously offered their help at the frontier station. It was surprising that they were travelling at the frontier as ordinary soldiers without side-arms. They were people from an advance party and it looked as if the moment to occupy Thailand had come as they were reconnoitring the frontier. From such circumstances one supposed it was inevitable that hostilities would break out, and I was not sure whether I felt belligerent or not – on arrival at Saigon my own bridge unit was also an advance party.
On 4 December a warning order came from 2 Railway HQ that, ‘4 Special Railway Unit must wait for their advance into Malaya until X and Y hours.’ Chief Official Nishijima, who happened to be present, was looking for a pretext for advancing into Malaya, a British possession, but an essential pre-condition was lacking – he had been told that X, Y and Z days had to seem likely to happen. To me it was a quite intractable problem but indicators were appearing moment by moment that we were being dragged bodily into war.
Chapter 3
OPENING OF HOSTILITIES
On 8 December 1941 I was at the HQ’s lines-of-communication hotel in a corner of Rue Catenar, Saigon. At the hotel entrance an Imperial Guard Division sentry stood on guard. In the garden red canna flowers basked in the morning sun, blooming in a blaze of colour. I went into the hotel lobby and listened to a radio broadcast in Japanese. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The broadcast was serious.
The source was an IJA GHQ communiqué. What we heard was that the Imperial Japanese Empire was involved at midnight in a state of war following the joint American-English proclamation of war on Japan, and in an instant our feelings became taut and tense. The successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was reported. As I stood there in the lobby, I heard the news repeated, that the American-British declaration marked the start of the war for Japan. When the negotiations with America were broken off, this had meant war. This news came as a shock. Since our departure from the homeland the unit had been reorganized and up to embarcation was under strict orders to keep secret that it was an undercover transport unit and so we made a showy departure for the front and each individual was furnished with a copy of a meaningful label: but we really knew it meant war. On the Cambodia frontier the circumstances made everyone tense. One began to unravel that mysterious order of a few days ago. One renews his decision to give selfless patriotic service and even if one became a victim there’s nothing he can do about it but resign himself to the thought that in the end he returns as a hero to the Yasukuni Shrine. We had tended so far to lose our bearings, got needlessly worried. The unit commander addressed us and boosted our morale.
We soon became front-line troops at Phnom Penh. At the crossing-point on the Mekong river our trucks had to await their turn on the ferry. At Phnom Penh was the royal palace and the streets of this Cambodian capital were newly completed. At city centre there was a star-shaped market where they sold big spiny-lobsters and big crabs, an impressive sight, but we had no time for sightseeing. News came that in the offing at Kuantan on the Malayan Peninsula the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse of the British Far East Squadron had been attacked and sunk by Japanese naval aircraft.95 There came also a report that the Japanese Army was making a lightning conquest of Malaya. That Japan at the start of hostilities should win such victories delighted me, it was a heartening thing, but thereafter one did not expect anything quite so dramatic.
On 12 December I went from the unit to the Bangkok HQ in advance, having been given responsibility for liaison and for fixing up billets. More and more joining in warlike activities unilaterally, I became unexpectedly cool in what really was audacious activity. Because my duty lay in the rear echelon, where there was no fighting, I did not give a thought to the risk of being killed. For some days before leaving for the front I had been excessively busy. I had even begun to get acclimatized to the heat of the southern regions and, sleeping at night, I recalled winters at home. I waited for seventeen days and then left Phnom Penh HQ, riding in Lt-Colonel Mayama’s car. We went North along the River Mekong, passed over the frontier and broke into Thailand. On the highway into Bangkok the traffic was congested with Japanese Army lorries. The rule of the road varied in Indo-China, Cambodia and Thailand and across the frontier traffic accidents occurred, even a head-on collision. But the highway on both sides was broad, with no ups-and-downs, and essentially ran straight ahead. Apart from low scrub and coconut palms, it was an unpopulated stretch. That evening we passed a hamlet called Don Muang,96 a resort in the northern suburbs, and in the distance could see pagodas in the sunset sky. This was Bangkok. I felt deep emotion as my war ensued from that point. I recall the triumphal entry into the streets of Bangkok, at the crossroads with the Anung Sawari Pagoda bathed in the setting sunlight. In Bangkok there were then several hundred Japanese expatriates – and what can such an event, the outbreak of war on 8 December, have meant for them! Originally in business in the commercial district and later with 9 Railway Regiment’s Sakamoto Battalion, there was, I recall, Mr Chikawa Saburo – who was an experienced interpreter: he wrote:
We broke in and through the Japanese embassy opened negotiations with the Thai Government following what might be called a peaceful occupation. In other parts of Thailand occupation forces bided their time, fully prepared for a show of force if that became necessary. The planned outbreak of war on 8 December being imminent, Prime Minister Phibun of Thailand initially concealed his view that a weakness showed up in the Japanese Government’s high-handed demands. Our ambassador tried to probe Phibun’s real views. In fact, to the Japanese embassy the decisive issue came when a signal had been put out in the embassy garden for the reconnaissance aircraft sent over quite soon from Main Southern Army HQ. On 7 December the embassy had got ready, against a show of force, a vessel standing by at a Bangkok wharf into which our women and children were put on board. Civilians in the prime of life were concentrated in the embassy to resist their adversaries, the Thai Army, when the Japanese Army moved in. On the vessel light machine-guns and other weapons were put on board in secret, and at the embassy itself the entrance had barbed-wire entanglements set up as a barricade. All this was completed by midnight. So on 8 December our occupation force began their assault, the landing campaign was put into execution, there was spasmodic resistance from the Thai Army at its bases on the southern waterfront of Bangkok, at Chumphon in the South and elsewhere. Phibun called a conference, consented to a peaceful occupation, called off the