As New Year approached, Terasawa bought a stack of greeting-cards and, after stamping each of them with the company seal, got Teruko to address them, which she did in immaculate, precise handwriting.
Takuya toyed with the idea of sending a New Year’s card to his parents. He could write Terasawa’s company address, he thought, but of course he would have to use a false name, something new, neither Kiyohara Takuya nor Higa Seiichi. At first glance his family would think it strange to be receiving greetings from a stranger, but they’d soon recognise his handwriting and realise that he was safe and well, living in Himeji.
After thinking it through this far, Takuya suddenly changed his mind. Maybe he was slowly starting to cave, he thought. When he left his parents’ home, Takuya had told himself that there would be no return, and that he would never see his family again. He had known that evading the authorities hinged on cutting the bonds with his home, and that was as true now as it had been two years earlier.
But, as time passed, Takuya’s resolve started to waver. Sending New Year’s greeting-cards was so ritualised that receiving one from someone with whom you normally had very little contact was nothing out of the ordinary. Surely the police wouldn’t notice his one card among the dozens of others? He pondered a little longer, convincing himself that there was no risk involved. Letting his family know that he was still alive was something he just had to do.
After getting one of the company-stamped cards from Terasawa, Takuya thought hard about what to write. Something as bland as possible would be best, and addressing it to his younger brother rather than his father would make it safer still. He wrote ‘New Year’s Greetings’ at the top, followed by ‘Wishing you and your family all the best for the year to come.’ They were very nondescript words, but he was sure that his family would read between the lines and recognise his message.
That night, Takuya went to the mailbox in front of the makeshift ration distribution centre. There was a chance that a member of his family might try to visit him at the address on the card, but surely they would realise that this could be fatal for him.
He headed back home with an extra spring in his step at the thought that even a tenuous connection was about to be made with his family.
At dinnertime on New Year’s Day, 1948, Terasawa brought in five bottles of beer and a large bottle of sake for them to drink with their meal of rice cakes and vegetables boiled in soup. He had even obtained some dried fish to supplement the meal. By all accounts match production in the area was increasing by leaps and bounds, and Terasawa’s production of boxes, and therefore profits, was also rising. By this stage he had increased the number of staff to almost twenty workers.
Terasawa often spoke of hearing rumours that the match market was about to be deregulated later that year, with the old wartime rationing and control regulations possibly being abolished. He told them that, while the overall quality of the matches was still inferior, production levels were basically meeting demand, so the regulations were becoming pointless. Terasawa said public discontent was running high over matches which frequently snapped or failed to light properly, and that government offices in Tokyo and Osaka were starting to handle appeals from citizens’ groups for something to be done about the situation.
‘There’s certainly something farcical about making matchboxes when more than half of what goes in them is going to break anyway,’ Terasawa lamented.
The front page of the morning newspaper on New Year’s Day contained a long message to the Japanese people from General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied Powers, in which he laid out a plan for Japan’s future as a nation. Takuya scoured it for mention of war criminals, but found nothing.
After the New Year’s holiday came to a close, however, the newspapers featured lengthy articles almost daily, recounting the proceedings in the Tokyo trials of Class A war criminals. Takuya read every one of them, but since that article the previous September about the imprisonment in Sugamo of the high-ranking officers, there had been no further mention of the POWs held by Western Regional Command, something which worried him intensely.
Although he had long since recovered from the physical damage caused by the encounter with the American soldiers, emotionally he was far from healed. The pitiful feeling of helplessness he had experienced as the helmet smashed down on his head was still rooted in his mind. It was a feeling less of humiliation than of having been absolutely crushed in defeat. Everything they did seemed lighthearted, he thought. If they caught him they would probably make a comedy out of leading him to the gallows and placing the noose round his neck. He remembered that the Americans had adorned the B-29s with caricatures of naked women and pictures of flames painted on the fuselages to show how many raids they had taken part in.
On his job carrying timber around the workshop Takuya kept a lookout for anyone approaching from outside. Houses were being built in the vicinity of the railway station, and the boundaries of this new residential area were gradually pushing farther out.
With the price of materials increasing at a frightening pace, Terasawa decided that the best thing would be to stock up on timber and striking-paper and, as the existing warehouse was already full to capacity, to build another one next to it.
It appeared more and more likely that the sale of matches would be deregulated soon, and an article in the newspaper on the twentieth of January reported that a special ration of matches was to be given to each household. Families with three members could buy two small boxes, those with six people four boxes, ten people eight boxes, and ten boxes could be purchased by households comprising ten or more people. The price was set at one yen twenty-three sen, and normal ration coupons for household goods would suffice. This was proof that production levels were at last starting to meet demand.
Maybe the news that matches were going to be removed from the list of regulated goods was encouraging more operators to start manufacturing, for the number of stranges coming in to buy large quantities of matchboxes had increased considerably. Thick wads of notes were handed over in exchange for cartloads of matchboxes. The buyers, dressed in all sorts of clothes, were obviously black marketeers, and none of them knew much at all about the product they were looking to buy. Every time these strangers approached, Takuya worried that they might be plainclothes policemen.
With the drop in temperature came occasional light flurries of snow. The icy winds that blew across Himeji stole the feeling from Takuya’s hands, and that winter he again developed painful chilblains on his ears, fingers and toes.
The new houses built near the station hid the lower part of Himeji castle from view, but the white towers and donjons stood out in stark relief against the clear blue of the winter sky.
Towards the end of January the newspapers were dominated by articles about the poisoning of twelve workers at the Shiina-machi branch of the Imperial Bank, but in early February Takuya found one that mentioned Western Regional Command. On the second of February the legal department of the US Eighth Army had announced the names of twenty-eight people, comprising sixteen military personnel, including the commander-in-chief of Western Regional Command, and twelve staff of the Faculty of Medicine at Kyushu Imperial University, who had been charged and would be tried together publicly by the Yokohama military tribunal. The charges were divided into the three broad categories of vivisection, cannibalism, and the unlawful execution of B-29 crew members, with a note at the end of the article to the effect that Professor Iwase of Kyushu Imperial University had already taken his own life.
Takuya had secretly hoped that the trial of the seven officers from Western Regional Command, including the commander-in-chief, who had been held in Sugamo prison since September 1945, had already ended. Now he knew that in fact it was just about to start, and that the number of people charged had increased to sixteen. The article he had read almost a year and a half ago had mentioned seven suspects incarcerated in Sugamo prison, six of them high-ranking officers, and the other, Lieutenant Howa Ko
taro, the only one who had actually taken part in the executions. That the number of suspects had increased to sixteen meant that another nine of the soldiers who had participated in the executions must have been arrested and charged.
Takuya had taken part in only one of the three executions, so he didn’t know for certain how many people had been involved altogether, but he surmised that it must have been around fourteen or fifteen, meaning that including himself there were still four or five men at large. Shirasaka had mentioned giving Lieutenant Hirosaki demobilisation papers and telling him to run, and Takuya had done the same for his friend Himuro in Osaka. If those two men were still at large, another two or three more must be on the run.
SCAP would have wanted to start the trials, and would have instructed the Japanese government to arrest the remaining suspects. The government in turn would have entrusted the police with the task, which they were no doubt doing their utmost to carry out. Again Takuya felt as though the net was somehow closing in around him.
He started to feel uneasy about having sent the New Year’s card to his family in Shikoku. Using a false name was one thing, but maybe he shouldn’t have used a card with his real address in Himeji printed on it. But then again, if the police had been suspicious about the card they surely would have sent someone to Terasawa’s workshop by now. He assumed that the fact they hadn’t was proof that the card had slipped past the censors unnoticed.
Takuya tried to imagine the lives his comrades were leading as fugitives. Like him, they would have assumed false names and tried to change their appearance, and would probably be leading secret lives somewhere as labourers. They would no doubt pay just as much attention as he did to the newspapers, and would have seen this article. How wonderful it would be, thought Takuya, if they could all evade capture.
The Class A war criminals’ trials entered their closing stages, and towards the end of February there was further mention in the newspaper of those in Western Regional Command. The article first covered the charges against those involved in the experiments on eight captured airmen in the Faculty of Medicine at Kyushu Imperial University, then went on to describe how, after the experiments, the livers of the dead airmen had evidently been extracted, marinated in soy sauce, and served at the officers’ club of Western Regional Command. Takuya hadn’t heard anything about livers being eaten, and thought that it must be a mistake.
Accompanying the indictment was an explanation of the background to the charges, which further increased Takuya’s anxiety. The names of those charged were preceded by the statement that although Western Regional Command had tried to conceal the truth by stating that the eight airmen who died on the operating tables in Fukuoka had been killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, ‘the full story had finally been revealed after hundreds of interrogations had been carried out all over the country’. Takuya thought this testified to the rigour of the investigations undertaken by the occupation authorities.
After reading this article Takuya decided it was almost a miracle that he hadn’t been caught.
The police had probably already traced his movements as far as his uncle’s house in Osaka, then on to Corporal Nemoto’s on Shoodo-shima, and from there to his friend Fujisaki in Kobe. They would have been unrelenting in their questioning, and while each of his friends would no doubt have admitted to giving him shelter for a short time, the fact that he was still a free man was obviously due to the fact that Fujisaki and his family had not let on that they introduced him to the Terasawas.
The temperature started to rise as spring approached.
‘Do you want to try your hand at keeping the accounts? You seem to write pretty well, and I think my wife and niece are right when they say that lugging wood around the workshop doesn’t really suit you. They’re always on at me about it,’ said Terasawa to Takuya as he sat taking a break on a pile of wood.
Takuya didn’t know what to say.
‘I remember you saying that you finished high school in Okinawa. The warehouse is in full operation and stock is streaming in, so we need to keep a proper inventory of things. Want to give it a try?’ said Terasawa, offering Takuya a cigarette.
Takuya could sense the goodwill behind the offer.
His boss might only have finished primary school, but he treated his workers with an innate generosity which formal education could not teach. He had led a hard life and was extremely demanding when it came to work, but his kindness ensured that a proper balance was maintained. He implied that the idea behind the offer wasn’t his, but Takuya had no doubt that Terasawa had thought it all up himself.
The thought of changing jobs made Takuya uneasy. Moving wood around the workshop allowed him to stay in an isolated environment, while if he were to look after the company accounts he would be obliged to go out into the public eye to arrange deliveries and collect payment from clients. He wanted to turn down the offer, but could think of no good excuse.
The prospect of not having to toil away in the workshop was certainly appealing. Although he had been a sportsman during his university days, labouring required a different sort of physical and mental hardness which was starting to take its toll. Deciding that it might seem peculiar if he turned down Terasawa’s kind offer, Takuya consented to change jobs.
Beginning the next day he sat behind a desk in the large concrete-floored space in the front part of the house. Obviously there could be no more wrapping a hand towel round his face while he worked, nor could he wear his mountaineering hat all the time. He felt exposed and unnerved without what he now realised had been, at least in his mind, crucial elements of disguise.
Terasawa came in and handed over some money, telling Takuya to go and buy a new pair of glasses to replace the ones he had repaired with a piece of string.
Glasses were the only means he had left to make his face less recognisable in a crowd, so he willingly took the money from Terasawa and went to an optician in an area of town which had largely survived the fire raids. There wasn’t much to choose from, but he picked out some with dark-brown horn rims and asked the shopkeeper to fit them with quite strong lenses. He tried them on and looked in the mirror on the counter. The rims of the glasses Fujisaki had given him had been relatively thin, so they hadn’t made much difference to the way he looked, but these new ones altered his appearance considerably. On the way back to the workshop he tossed his old glasses on to a pile of rubbish by the side of the road.
The two women made quite a show of their surprise upon seeing Takuya, and Terasawa commented jokingly that he looked like a completely different person, which of course eased his fears somewhat.
Takuya set himself conscientiously to his new job. The accounts book Terasawa gave him was nothing more than a large exercise book with the word ‘Accounts’ written on the cover. While he thought he should hide the fact that he had a degree in economics by keeping the books as simple as possible, he knew that he would have to use some basic bookkeeping practices in order to maintain the accounts properly. He ruled some blue and red lines on the pages and organised them into workable columns.
Terasawa was impressed when he saw what Takuya had prepared.
‘When I say high school, it was a business school, actually,’ said Takuya, looking a little embarrassed at the praise.
Terasawa’s niece brought cups of green tea to Takuya’s desk mid-morning and mid-afternoon. She also told him that amid the desolation a charred plum tree had actually started blooming. Two little clumps of blossom had appeared on one branch sticking out from the blackened trunk, and quite a few people had come to see this. She added that she had noticed couples standing under the tree looking up at the pink flowers.
Teruko often whispered to him that she would be glad to mend his clothes, or do other little jobs for him.
On the eleventh of March, Takuya read in the newspaper that the trial of those involved in the experiments at Kyushu Imperial University had begun at the Yokohama military court. The article described how three hundred people, includin
g foreigners, the families of the accused, and reporters from Japan and overseas, had packed into the public gallery, and how the accused, the public prosecutors and other lawyers had filed into the court, followed by members of the military tribunal. After one of the public prosecutors read out the charges, each of the accused, including the commander-in-chief of Western Region, had pleaded not guilty, and the day’s proceedings were closed after the chief prosecutor made his opening address to the court.
Six days later Takuya came across an article which, in its own way, indicated the probable fate of the accused from Western Regional Command. It reported on the sentencing of naval garrison personnel on Ishigaki island who had been involved in the execution by decapitation, and subsequent bayoneting of the corpses, of three American fighter crewmen. The chief of the military tribunal had sentenced two of the forty-five accused to imprisonment with hard labour, and found another two not guilty, but had sentenced the remaining forty-one men to death by hanging.
Logically speaking, no more than three garrison soldiers had actually beheaded the American airmen, so the others must be the officers who had ordered the execution and those who had bayoneted the corpses. That the list included many soldiers of the rank of corporal or below served to confirm this, the officers undoubtedly having ordered the bayoneting to prepare the soldiers for the battles to come. Such practices were almost routine in front-line units, and there was no place for the will of the individual soldier to intervene in the process. Nevertheless, it was SCAP’s position that several dozen soldiers should receive the death penalty regardless of whether they had been acting on orders from their commanding officer to mutilate the dead bodies. By this reasoning, Takuya and those of his comrades who had actually beheaded B-29 crew members could expect nothing less than the gallows.
One Man's Justice Page 19