One Man's Justice

by Akira Yoshimura

  Fine weather continued and the temperature steadily rose. The number of power lines in the area around the workshop increased, and they could often hear cicadas clinging to the pole beside the gate to the company grounds.

  At the end of July match manufacturers had managed to obtain a small quantity of white willow from Hokkaido, so good-quality matches were being produced again. As more goods circulated in the market, the skyrocketing prices that had continued since the end of the war started to ease, and the freeze on access to savings was removed. On top of this, reports appeared in the newspapers that the price of vegetables and seafood was starting to fall below the prices regulated by the government. The meals at Terasawa’s gradually improved, and the dining-table was occasionally graced by large bowls of rice mixed with real barley.

  Takuya noticed that articles about the war crimes trials had all but disappeared from the newspapers. Once in a while there was mention of the trial of a Class A war criminal, but it was never more than the briefest of coverage. Terasawa had obviously kept his word about not telling his wife or niece about Takuya’s past, for there was no noticeable change in their attitude to him.

  The summer that year was unusually hot.

  On the twenty-eighth of August, Takuya found an article in the newspaper reporting that a verdict had been delivered in the case against the men involved in the experiments carried out at Kyushu Imperial University. Three medical staff from the university, the commander of Western Region, and a total of five staff officers from the tactical operations centre had been condemned to death by hanging, while two other university staff and two headquarters staff had been sentenced to life imprisonment. The article closed by stating that the trials of those involved in the execution of B-29 crewmen would commence very soon.

  Takuya sensed that the Allied administration was moving into the final stages of dealing with Japan’s part in the war. The military tribunal’s adjudications would close with the trials in Tokyo of the Class A war criminals and those staff of Western Regional Command involved in the execution of POWs. Takuya mused that, after these trials were finished, the danger of capture might abate as his pursuers became less zealous.

  Early the next morning, Takuya was overseeing the shipment of a consignment of boxes. A very large order for various sizes had come in from a match manufacturer in Kobe, and Takuya had to organise its transport by horse-drawn cart to the freight station, and then its loading on to the train.

  He stood on the platform at the Sanyo line freight station, checking that everything was in order as the cargo was loaded into the freight car. The workers were stripped to the waist, their back muscles glistening in the sun and their arms and chests speckled with pieces of straw packing stuck to the sweat from their toil.

  The man in the guardroom stuck his head out of the window and called to Takuya that there was a telephone call for him from Terasawa. He told the men to stop loading until he got back, walked over to the office and put his hand in through the window to take the receiver.

  Terasawa’s hollow-sounding voice came over the telephone line, telling Takuya to drop everything and run for it. ‘Go to Okayama. I’ve got a friend who makes matchboxes there who will help,’ he said. He blurted out the address of the place before telling Takuya that two detectives from a city near his home had turned up at the workshop together with one from Himeji Central Police Station, and had left hurriedly when Kameya said that Takuya was at the freight station. ‘Run for it! They must almost be there! Go to Okayama!’ said Terasawa, now almost shouting into the telephone.

  ‘OK,’ Takuya replied, and he leant in through the window to replace the receiver. He turned and looked down the road leading to the workshop. All he could see was a horse-drawn cart moving slowly along the parched dirt track, and an old woman dressed in dishevelled clothes with a baby on her back.

  Terasawa’s words imploring him to run rang in his ears, the name and address of the man in Okayama echoing in his head. If I go now everything will be all right, he told himself, amazed at how calm and collected he was. As he stood beside the guardroom, it occurred to him that he wanted to check with his own eyes that someone had actually come to arrest him. For a moment he couldn’t believe that he could be so deliberate at a time like this, but he told himself that there was still time to wait and see them before making his escape.

  A man wearing an open-necked shirt appeared a short distance down the road. Two other men soon followed, one of whom crossed to the other side, picking up his pace as he neared the platform. The second man had close-cropped grey hair, suggesting that he was much older than the other two.

  Takuya couldn’t understand why he hadn’t turned and run already. It was almost as though his joints had locked and his feet were set in concrete. He knew that all he had to do to escape was to jump down on to the tracks and thread his way to safety through the lines of freight cars. Nevertheless, he stood glued to the spot, watching the three detectives hastening toward their goal. The tallest of the three looked quite young, not much more than twenty or twenty-one years old.

  Takuya was at a loss. A feeling of inertia seemed to have come over him, as though the mental strain of two years on the run had disappeared, leaving nothing but lassitude. Even if he evaded capture, he would doubtless end up being caught somewhere else, he thought. Maybe he wasn’t as good at being a fugitive as he had thought. He had done all he could to stay at large, and he had no strength left to push himself any further.

  Enough, he told himself. The three men walked into the station, casting studied glances at everyone, until almost at the same moment all three recognised Takuya.

  One of the younger men clambered up on to the platform. The other made to seal off the path to escape by walking farther down the footpath and stopping in front of the freight car. The grey-haired man walked over towards the guardroom and up the stone path to the platform to stand in front of Takuya.

  ‘Takuya Kiyohara?’ he said. Takuya nodded, watching dolefully as the detective pulled out a set of handcuffs. He told himself over and over again that this was all right, this was the way it was always going to end.

  His father was there waiting at Himeji police station. As soon as he saw Takuya walk into the room he hung his head and started sobbing uncontrollably. He was still weeping as he began to explain himself in beseeching tones. He told his son that the police investigations had been relentless from the day after Takuya had made his escape, with all his family, relatives, friends, and even his teachers from primary and high school, being interrogated one by one. Within weeks of Takuya’s disappearance, the atmosphere at the municipal office had soured so much that he had quit his job. A month ago he had been taken into custody for another round of interrogation, the police insisting that he must know where Takuya was hiding. He described how the police had told him that the three other men from headquarters had been arrested after their parents had confessed their whereabouts, and that they were all trying to put the blame for everything on Takuya. His interrogator had kept telling him that, because of this, Takuya must receive the heaviest sentence, and the only way to prevent it was to bring him before the court as quickly as possible.

  As they had decided that Takuya’s father was not going to try to escape, they had let him sit outside and sun himself in a spot where they could see him. Not wanting to be a public burden, he spent much of his time outside, weeding the police grounds as payment for the meals they provided. His father had realised that the false name on the New Year’s card had really been Takuya, but, fearing that writing a reply would lead to disaster, he had gone no further than to copy the address in Himeji on to the reverse side of the paper attached to the straw festoon adorning the family’s Shinto altar in the living-room, burning the greeting-card after he had done so. After being held for about a month, and increasingly worried about what his interrogator had said about Takuya’s remaining at large leading to a heavier sentence, he had told the police about the address written on the festoon.

/>   ‘What have I done? I wish I were dead,’ Takuya’s father sobbed, burying his face in his hands.

  Early that evening, some sushi rolls were delivered to the holding-cells by one of Terasawa’s workers. Two other men were being held in the same cell as Takuya, so he shared the food with them.

  Later that same night, he was handcuffed and taken to Himeji station by two detectives. When he walked in he saw his father and Terasawa standing beside the ticket window. Terasawa handed the detectives some cigarettes and matches before fixing his forlorn gaze on Takuya.

  The police must have contacted the station beforehand, because there were seats reserved for them on the train. Takuya sat between the two detectives and looked out of the window as the train slowly moved away from the platform. The moon was out and the sky was clear, so he could make out the silhouette of Himeji’s White Egret Castle, but before long it faded into the distance and disappeared.

  The next day, just after eleven o’clock in the morning, the train pulled into Tokyo station, and from there Takuya was taken directly to the Tokyo metropolitan police station. After a brief round of questioning he was put into a cell. When asked how he had acquired the pistol and ammunition, he said nothing about Shirasaka, instead saying that he had brought them home to Shikoku after the war ended and had buried them in the forest behind his parents’ house.

  After breakfast the next morning he was taken on foot to SCAP headquarters. His interrogator, a twenty-seven-or twenty-eight-year-old American officer who spoke good Japanese, asked him about his rank and posting during his years in the army. He pulled out the wanted poster they had used in their search, smiling as he said, ‘You’re just a little boy here.’ It was a photograph of Takuya’s face, enlarged from the class photograph taken when he graduated from high school. They must have got the original from one of his classmates, he thought.

  Later that day Takuya was driven through the main gate at Sugamo prison in a US Army truck. A burly military policeman escorted him into a room off the courtyard, where he was made to strip to his underwear before being photographed and fingerprinted.

  From there he was led down a long corridor into a cell. The American military prison guard pushed the steel door shut with his foot and locked it. The prison clothes Takuya had been given had the letter ‘P’ stencilled in black on the back of the shirt, both arms, the back of the trousers and the front of each trouser leg.

  On the second of September, with a second-generation Japanese-American army sergeant acting as interpreter, the questioning by the public prosecutors and lawyers began. It didn’t take Takuya long to understand that what Shirasaka had said about the commander of Western Region and other high-ranking officers trying to evade responsibility was obviously true. They were all insisting that the executions had been carried out arbitrarily by junior officers and their men, rather than because of any orders from above. This, of course, flew in the face of what Takuya knew to be true. The deputy chief of staff, the colonel in charge of the tactical operations centre, the headquarters legal officer and a number of headquarters medical officers had all been present at the executions, which should surely remove any doubt as to whether consent had been granted by those at the very top echelons of command.

  Apart from one small window at the back, Takuya’s cell was defined by concrete walls and a heavy steel door. He spent most of his time sitting there quietly by himself, but at bath time, twice a week, he had a chance to see the other prisoners, among them some of those who had served in Western Regional Command.

  When Takuya bowed to higher-ranking officers, they did little more than casually acknowledge his presence before looking away. He wasn’t sure whether this was because they were indignant at what they viewed as his cowardice in fleeing in the face of arrest, or because they felt pangs of conscience at the thought that their statements about ordering the executions had compromised Takuya and the other more junior men. Their long confinement seemed to have weakened them physically, for their faces looked gaunt and pale.

  Lieutenant Hirosaki, who had been given blank identification papers by Shirosaka, and Lieutenant Himuro, whom Takuya had advised to escape from Osaka, were there, too. Both men described in hushed tones how they had let their parents know where they were hiding and how this had ultimately led to their arrest. As with Takuya’s arrest, the parents of these two men had broken under the pressure of interrogation, divulging their sons’ whereabouts on the assumption that they were thereby helping to avert the worst of punishments. Apparently, this had been a calculated scheme to round up the last fugitives.

  Himuro told Takuya that a former colonel from the tactical operations centre of High Command had insisted in court that the indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities and towns by the US Army Air Force was a violation of international law, and that the people responsible for such attacks were the ones who should be brought to justice. Takuya was impressed by the man’s courage, but at the same time, knowing that criticism of the American military in front of a military tribunal could only lead to the heaviest possible penalty, he realised that he could never bring himself to say anything so provocative when his turn came to speak in court.

  About a month after Takuya entered Sugamo prison, he happened to pass the former commander-in-chief of Western Regional Command in the corridor as the old man carried his meal on a tray back to his cell. Maybe it was because he had lost so much weight, but in his baggy prison clothes the commander looked frail and ordinary, a completely different person from the one Takuya remembered. The intimidating presence he had had in his lieutenant-general’s uniform was gone, leaving behind only a haggard old man.

  On the eleventh of October, in the military court in Yokohama, the first public hearing was held in the trial of those from Western Regional Command. Takuya was one of thirty-five accused, including the commander-in-chief. They all pleaded not-guilty to the charges against them.

  The public hearings were a long process. Takuya and his fellow accused travelled each day by bus through the black-market area in front of Shinjuku station, down Shibuya Doogenzaka, through Oosaki and Shinagawa to the military court of the American Eighth Army in Yokohama. Upon arriving at the courtroom they ate a simple midday meal from a mess tin while sitting on the floor in the makeshift holding-room, made their appearance in the courtroom and then returned by bus to Sugamo prison. As a precaution against suicide, before they were returned to their cells when they got back to the prison, they were made to strip naked to allow an MP to check their ears, noses, mouths and anuses to make sure they were not bringing back any poisons.

  Every time Takuya attended the court sessions he was astounded that every one of the high-ranking officers from headquarters persisted in completely denying giving orders to carry out the executions of the American airmen. In the face of determined questioning by the public prosecutor, even the deputy chief of staff and the colonel in charge of the tactical operations centre, both of whom had actually witnessed executions, were adamant that no orders had been issued from above to dispose of the POWs. The only thing that now concerned these shadows of men in prison clothes was saving their own lives. That this would mean compromising the lives of others meant nothing to them. They were different people now. The poise and assurance they had demonstrated when they were in uniform was gone.

  From all appearances, they seemed terrified by the prospect of death. Their faces were ashen and their replies to questions were halting, as though they were afraid that choosing the wrong word might be fatal. There were some among them whose voices trembled with fear as they spoke. The expression ‘strung up’ was being used in Sugamo to mean death by hanging, and it was clear that these men were choosing their words very carefully in a desperate attempt to avoid being ‘strung up’ themselves. Takuya couldn’t help but notice that when one of the American military prosecutors directed his gaze at one of these men, he literally stiffened with fear, his every word of reply filled with apprehension.

  From time to time tho
ughts of regret entered Takuya’s mind for not having escaped at the freight station, but he always returned to the conclusion that doing so would only have served to postpone the inevitable. The more contact Takuya had with the prison MPs, the American military prison guards, and the judges, prosecutors and lawyers sitting in court, the more he came to the realisation that America’s omnipresent military had total control of the country. Even if he had managed to evade his pursuers at the freight station, the Americans’ control of society was so comprehensive that his capture would have been only a matter of time.

  From other inmates, he learnt that about a month earlier the commander of the Tokyo kempeitai, Oishi Kojiro, had been incarcerated in Sugamo prison. He had managed to stay one step ahead of the authorities until they discovered that he was working in a coal mine and moved swiftly to arrest him. Many of Takuya’s fellow inmates said that Oishi’s staying at large so long was proof that his kempeitai background had equipped him well for stealth and deception, but the fact that even someone as careful as that could be captured brought home the inevitability of his own arrest.

  Takuya, struggling against the fear of death as he spoke, testified in court that his own subordinates, the two sergeant-majors, had taken part in the executions only because of his orders. Shortly after this, a major posted to Fukuoka from Imperial Headquarters gave evidence to the effect that Takuya’s participation in the executions was in compliance with orders he himself had given, and that these orders had of course originated at the very top of the chain of command in the Western Region, a statement which directly contradicted the testimony given by the highest-ranking officers. It seemed as if any suggestion that the US Army Air Force’s indiscriminate incendiary raids on Japanese cities might have been a violation of international law had been ruled out from the start, for the defence lawyers made no mention of this in any of their statements.