Uniquely among civilized nations Japan declined to ratify the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners-of-war. Since the early 1930s militaristic propaganda, in the dark valley of that decade, insidiously boosted the medieval concept bushidō, ‘the way of the warrior’. Forgotten was the chivalry of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 when a beleaguered Japanese general surrendered with all his men and returned to Japan with honour after the war. Now, in the 1940s, an enlisted soldier pledged to commit suicide rather than surrender in battle, and if hit by disease to lie at attention in his quarters. No dressings were issued to them or to their prisoners apart from quinine and creosote pills: hideous tropical ulcers resulted in seventy amputations, done by Australian, British and Dutch surgeons with what limited equipment they had managed to carry in their packs on the march.
Such, in practice, was how the Japanese Army interpreted the way of the warrior. These prisoners were sub-humans who had surrendered in battle. The Japanese could not ratify the Geneva Convention because it was impossible, they said, for Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen to surrender. Given that they were not engaged in a situation of forlorn hope, this theory held water in the Malayan campaign. At the surrender parley at Bukit Timah General Yamashita asked General Percival how many Japanese prisoners the British were holding. ‘Not one’, was the subdued reply. And in their campaign across the Pacific islands the magnificent bravery of the American marines was matched, some might say obscured, by the wholesale suicides of the Japanese defenders, military and civilian alike. On the island battlefields there, a Japanese soldier would feign dead, holding a concealed hand-grenade, to take one marine with him into oblivion. In their ‘octopus pots’, the Japanese equivalent of the marines’ foxholes, they would wait for their enemy to get close and then destroy him with a grenade.
But, if when all seemed lost, they were faced en bloc with defeat, they tended to be lost, typically looked for a higher order, and sat on the fence. When the atomic bombs dropped, I was ordered on 17 August 1945 to Bangkok from the remote foothills near Nakhon Nayok where the Japanese were preparing their obligatory ‘last stand for a decisive battle’. My job was to act as Staff Captain ‘Q’ on Ex-PW HQ we set up to get ourselves out. The twenty thousand fully armed soldiers in Bangkok under a one-time head of the kempeitai had not surrendered because the C-in-C of the Southern Army in Saigon, Field Marshal Count Terauchi Hisaichi, was a hard-liner who would not accept a merely broadcast message from his Emperor. I had commandeered a Japanese soldier with a jeep and told him to drive me to the Japanese HQ. A priority was to find staging camps in which we could house ex-prisoners from the worst cholera belts on the railway, and by good luck my driver had found me the empty Law University, across the padang by the Royal Palace. Like my nineteenth-century college, Keble, it was built on the corridor system but unlike Keble it had only one latrine. So I asked the General for a working party of soldiers to dig latrines. It sounds foolhardy but after three years we knew our Jap. The General hesitated, passed the buck, and told me to take my request to the colonel commanding prison camps in Thailand. My driver took me a hundred yards down the same road, and I presented Colonel Nakamura Shijō with his general’s superior order, a meirei. In ten minutes I had my squad and they worked like blacks on the job. This small episode illustrates a facet of the Japanese character not always appreciated in the West.
The Count’s final surrender filtered through to us in Bangkok on 8 September. The Emperor’s brother, Prince Kanin, had been flown out from Japan in late August to give him a personal order face to face.
Futamatsu is guilty on occasion of chop-logic, that form of disputacious argument endemic in Japanese philosophical passages. Examples occur, for example, when he tries to gloss over the reason why the Japanese Army could not allow his Government to ratify the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-war, and in another passage when he attempts to leave it as an open question whether the Army committed violations of the Convention or not. Again, he disputes unconvincingly the post-war stigma of ‘Death Railway’. However, he does rehearse articles in the Convention which were violated, but tends to argue that the terrible conditions in which the railway construction took place constitute for it a special case. And he tends also to regard as ‘retaliatory action’ any attempt to bring offenders to book in the War Crimes Trials.
He was born in 1912. He graduated in engineering at Kyōto University in 1936, going down in that year into Japan National Railways’ head office as a civil engineer in their construction bureau. He was called up in 1941 into a specialist bridging company of gunzoku (civilian auxiliaries of Japanese nationality) and served with a railway regiment on the West coast line of Malayan Railways on bridge repair, notably across the Krian River, during the campaign to capture Singapore. In June 1942, he was seconded, in the rank of Captain, to the HQ of 9 Railway Regiment with responsibility for survey of the projected Thai-Burma Railway and for design of bridges up to the frontier at the Three Pagodas Pass. He became professional railway engineering adviser to the regimental commander, Colonel Imai Itaru, and on the railway’s completion in October 1943 he commanded a battalion, in the rank of Major, on line-conservation on the Thai side, patching up rail track and repairing bridges which increasingly had come under RAF and USAAF attack. In August 1945, he was sent to Saigon to expedite transport to Thailand of replacement locomotives exported from Japan.
After the Japanese surrender he was ordered back to Thailand, and was interned in military prisoner-of-war camps at Nonhoi near Bangkok and later near Nakhon Nayok, which is 40 km from Prachinburi station on the north-east line of Thai Railways. In April 1946, he was moved to a camp half-way between Nong Pladuk and Banpong, and was repatriated in July 1946.
He re-entered Japan National Railways, from whom he retired in April 1960 at the age of forty-eight in order to become chief engineer on subway works on the Kōbe high-speed railway. Subsequently, he worked with a consultant engineering company in Tokyo and Ōsaka.73
In the Japanese Army a railway engineer is a specialized sort of engineer. The commander of a railway regiment is normally a graduate in engineering of a reputable university and the officers, warrant officers and NCOs are specialized technically. During the Pacific War army ranks were as follows, in downward order of rank: shōgun (army commander), taishō (general), chūjō (lieutenant-general), shōshō (major-general), taisa (colonel), chūsa (lieutenant-colonel), shōsa (major), taii (captain), chūi (lieutenant), shōi (second-lieutenant), minaraishikan (cadet officer), juní (warrant officer), sōchō (CSM, staff-serjeant), gunsō (serjeant), gochō (corporal), heichō (lance-corporal), jōtōhei (superior private), ittōhei (first-class private), nittōhei (second-class private). An RSM was a juní, a brigadier was ryodanchō, not of general officer rank but an appointment for a senior colonel. Collective nouns were shōkō, commissioned officers, heitai, soldiers, heisotsu, private soldiers. Strictly speaking, each of the above ranks was prefixed by rikugun, Land Army, to distinguish it from kaigun Sea Army, i.e. Navy. During the Pacific War there was no separate Air Force. The Army had its own aircraft, the Navy its own separately, and rivalry between the two arms was carried to ridiculous extremes.
The railway had its starting point at Nong Pladuk (80 km from Bangkok on the southern section of Thai National Railways), its terminus Thanbyusayat (about 50 km from Moulmein on the India National Line to Ye on the Burma coast), with main construction bases at Nong Pladuk on the Thai side and at Thanbyusayat on the Burma side.
The line ran from Nong Pladuk 50 km to Kanchanaburi (always abbreviated by Japanese railway engineers and by prisoners-of-war to Kamburi,) crossed the river Mae Khlaung at Thā Makham, and continued thence alongside the river Kwae Noi upstream as far as the Three Pagodas Pass, descended thence along the upper valley of the river Zami and crossed the Taungnyo mountain range to Thanbyusayat, at which point it converged with the India National Railways line to Ye on the Andaman Sea coast. In the event it ran for 415 km through mountainous jungle, rose to about 275 meters above