War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  Once installed in the villa of a sympathiser at Hua Lim, near Ipoh, Lim began organising his nationalist network under the nose of Ishibe. But on the eve of new year 1944, Davis, Broome and Lim went to a communist guerrilla camp at Blantan in the Perak jungles to meet Lai Tek, who was using the cover name Chang Hong, and his military deputy Chin Peng, to discuss coordination of the two organisations and conditional British military supplies to the communist force.

  Lai Tek must have worked out the identity of Lim Bo Seng, who was also using a cover name, and realised he was a potential figure of influence and leadership among the Chinese of Malaya. In March 1944, he tipped off Onishi about the Kuomintang network and the identity of its leader. Onishi hastened to Ipoh and took personal charge of a crackdown. Kempeitai units raced into action in Pangkor Island and Lumut township, arresting the local Chinese they had been keeping under watch. Naval patrol boats and an Imperial navy submarine cruised the nearby waters, to intercept a planned submarine rendezvous and supply drop, of which Lai Tek had knowledge.

  A second house sequestered by Onishi’s Kempeitai at Gopeng Road in Ipoh became a torture centre. Eventually some of the arrested men cracked, and began giving details of the network. By the end of March, all the Kuomintang operatives including Lim Bo Seng were locked up in one or other of the Kempeitai houses and their identities learnt by alternate sessions of torture and sympathetic interview.

  Eddie recognised Tan Chong Tee, who’d been a well-known badminton champion in Singapore, but kept quiet about it. The Kempeitai eventually matched him to a photograph in a newspaper clipping anyway. After a week, Onishi sent his prisoners to the Ipoh police station. From there, on 24 April, they were sent to the grim old three-storey prison at Batu Gajah, a town close to Ipoh.

  Onishi was later to claim he’d kept them as special Kempeitai prisoners to save their lives, as otherwise they would have simply been executed as spies once handed over to the military command. But he also felt there was more to learn from them, especially from Lim Bo Seng who’d refused to divulge anything about his background despite prolonged torture. Ishibe told Eddie he was convinced Lim could have been eventually broken and made to talk. But the diet and insanitary conditions inside Batu Gajah jail amounted to a slow execution. On 29 June, Lim died of dysentery after being refused medical help.

  Eddie was sick of it all, and longed to escape from work with the Kempeitai. Leonie was pregnant. Like everyone else in Singapore, she and the family were short of food, with mild symptoms of beri-beri, a vitamin deficiency that left them weak.

  His escape led him into a new ordeal, though without the moral challenge of the Kempeitai role. Having already turned 20, the Japanese age of adulthood, Eddie was called up for the Imperial Japanese Army in October 1944.

  The three months infantry training made Eddie feel like one of Onishi’s prisoners. The days were a blur of drill, senseless orders and beatings. Sergeants beat the recruits on the slightest provocation. They beat them with belts, hands and rubber sandals until their faces were swollen.

  After three months, Eddie was transferred to the 224th Transport Company, occupying the Monk’s Hill high school grounds, and began three months training as a driver. At least he managed to get leave passes to see Leonie, and be at the family home when she delivered their first child, a daughter they named Philomena.

  But Eddie had barely better access to food supplies than the half-starved civilians of Singapore. His Japanese army uniform was now a stigma. From late in 1944, Allied bombers had come within range of Singapore, and were frequently attacking the naval dockyard at Seletar and other installations around the island. The military currency lost its value day by day, and the nominal value of rice and other items shot up.

  After the British regained control of Burma, parachute landings in Malaya intensified to prepare for an invasion of the peninsula. The Japanese began drilling their civilians, including women, for a last-ditch fight. In early August 1945, extra ammunition and arms were distributed to the drivers and mechanics in Eddie’s transport company, with orders to prepare to fight to the last man.

  Then the soldiers listened to the emperor’s broadcast on 15 August. But no word came from the army commander in Malaya, General Itagaki. It was three days before he convened his officers and ordered them to surrender. There were shots in barracks as some officers killed themselves. Some of Eddie’s fellow soldiers decided to run for the jungles, or hide in the offshore islands.

  Clashes broke out across the city between Japanese soldiers and residents who put up the Chinese flag. The communist guerrillas emerged from their jungle camps and seized smaller towns vacated by Japanese forces who were now regrouping in the larger centres. They hunted down collaborators and ‘running dogs’, sometimes parading them in pig basket-cages, before hauling them in front of ‘people’s tribunals’ where crowds invariably shouted for the death sentence. Kempeitai informers, police detectives, interpreters and the concubines of Japanese soldiers were promptly bayoneted. Inevitably, the wave of retribution took on a racial character, with the Chinese guerrillas picking out Malay and Indian police or petty officials for revenge, and Malays forming armed vigilante groups to defend their kampongs.

  In Singapore, the communist fighters took over the Japanese Club building as their base. Bodies turned up on streets or hanging from trees. A whispered allegation could result in seizure, parade and execution. It was to be more than two weeks before the first British troops, mostly Gurkhas and other Indian army units, landed on Collyer Quay.

  Wisely, Eddie decided to stay in his barracks with the Japanese army and follow its orders. He and his fellow soldiers used their grenades along the seashore to stun fish to add to their dwindling rations. Eddie’s war came to a listless end. Then Eddie’s transport company was put to work by its British captors to transfer the Japanese garrison to newly built prisoner-of-war camps in Jurong and Jahor.

  Chapter 18

  THE JAPANESE EMBRACE

  Over the warriors summer grasses wave:

  The aftermath of dreams, however brave.

  — ‘The Ruins of Takadachi Fort’, by Bashō

  Singapore–Kyoto 1948–77

  Charles, Naka and John moved in with Leonie’s elder sister and her husband, the first-aid dresser, who still had a government flat above a clinic. It took several weeks to find a room to rent in Yio Chu Kang Road.

  Eddie’s investigation turned into a formal charge over the beating and torture of the three Chinese victims during Sergeant Ishibe’s interrogation at Teluk Anson. Charles went to see Commander Proud, by then reinstalled back in the Cathay Building in the information department attached to Admiral Mountbatten’s headquarters.

  ‘Not much we can do,’ Proud told him a few days later. ‘The local people are keen for revenge. We can’t be seen letting people off, even the small-fry. Get him a lawyer.’

  In January 1946, Eddie was transferred to Changi Prison and the Straits Times carried a notice about ‘Edward Bavier alias Tanishiro Taro’, who worked for the Kempeitai between 21 February 1942 and 20 October 1944. ‘Do you know him? Notify the War Crimes Investigator.’

  The trials began 10 days later in the Supreme Court buildings. Panels of military officers, headed by lieutenant-colonels drawn from all kinds of units, many of them new to the Far East, began hearing the grim accounts of torture, beatings, executions and neglect.

  Eddie was among the earliest cases. He came before Lieutenant-Colonel Culley’s panel in mid-February. One of the Japanese lawyers engaged as defence counsel, Kurose Shozaburo, appeared for him at Charles’ expense. Kurose put him through his account of how he was recruited, the likely consequences of disobeying Ishibe’s order to join the beating, and his attempts to alleviate the blows by striking the floor. The victims all said they felt no difference.

  In March, the tribunal sentenced Eddie to 21 months’ imprisonment, and he was taken back to Changi. Edd
ie took his sentence in good spirit, passing his time by painting little pictures of Japanese and Malayan scenes – Mount Fuji, a waterwheel, a palm-lined beach – talking to the young British soldiers in the rotating guard at the prison, and writing the addresses of the Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese fellow prisoners in his scrapbook.

  The trials went on. Two of the Onishi Butai, Lieutenant Yamaguchi and Sergeant Shimomura, were among the first to get the death sentence for their role in Lim Bo Seng’s death, even though they had been brought out of Changi earlier to help the Field Security track the Malayan communists, and had presumably told them about Lai Tek’s double game.

  Eddie saw them in the exercise yard at Changi, and found them fatalistic about their sentences. They wrote the usual kind of poems, about climbing the 13 last steps to the scaffold. Early one morning in June 1946, Eddie heard their shout ‘Banzai Tenno Heika’ in a last salute to the emperor, then the thud of the trapdoor.

  There were dozens more executions. The trials went on. Charles worked as court monitor to help make sure the accused understood the proceedings, and tried to give the judges some idea of the Japanese military codes. It became a litany of small-scale brutality, earning a wide variation of jail sentences.

  The culmination was the trial of seven officers, including Onishi, for the great ‘clean sweep’ massacre of February 1942. Kurose, as defence counsel, did his best to portray the precariousness of the Japanese hold on Singapore at the time, with their soldiers holding three times their number of Allied prisoners and a largely hostile Chinese population. ‘The necessity of war overrules the manners of warfare,’ he argued.

  He suggested the Japanese were not uniquely cruel, citing the example of the British massacre of civilians at Amritsar in 1919, or the rampage through the Arab village of Surafend in Palestine by the Australian and New Zealand light horsemen in 1918. He cited the Imperial rescripts that governed the thinking of the soldiers, making disobedience unthinkable. Only those who issued criminal orders should be held guilty.

  But who issued the orders? It was impossible to trace them back. The officer who probably instigated the whole thing, Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, had vanished rather than join the surrender. He’d been sighted in Thailand, once pretending to be a businessman, another time with shaven head and wearing a monk’s saffron robes.

  The end result of the Sook Ching operation was more convincing to the court: the account of the lone survivor of a Changi beach mass execution, who’d feigned death; the bodies washed up at the yacht club or floating around Blakan Mati Island where they’d been pushed off launches and machine-gunned in the water.

  A general, Kawamura, took responsibility. Together with the overall commander of Eddie’s Kempeitai detachment, Lieutenant-Colonel Oishi Masayuki, he was hanged at Changi prison in June 1947. Eddie’s direct commander, Onishi, got off with a life sentence, after bringing evidence of his efforts to query the screening process and the execution orders. Kurose quoted Robert Burns in his defence: There is so much good in the worst of us.

  It became a process that satisfied no one. The Japanese took it as victor’s justice. The Chinese were enraged that only two men were hanged for a massacre that took 6000 lives, by the lowest (Japanese) account. The British could barely divert attention from their unwillingness to hold an inquiry into who was accountable for the loss of Singapore and the failure to defend its population.

  Singapore had turned to a place of ashes for Charles. Naka developed severe jaundice and her health declined. Charles bought a rattan easy chair for her in the furniture market along Victoria Street. Not allowed to board the bus with it, he carried it on foot the eight kilometres home. Naka died in February 1947. Eddie was refused leave from Changi to attend the simple funeral, conducted by a Malay pastor whom John had engaged. It was a forlorn affair. They had not yet made contact with her older boys, and were not even sure if they had survived the war. Naka had been increasingly withdrawn from Charles as he took her further away from Japan. He didn’t blame her.

  Eddie was released only a month later, in March 1947, with five months off his sentence for good behaviour. He was immediately transferred to the Jurong internment camp pending repatriation. Leonie and little Philomena joined him there in one of the married quarters.

  In October that year, Eddie was assigned to a ship taking some of the last prisoners of war back to Japan. A British major tried to talk Leonie out of going with him. When she refused, he gave them some army ration boxes. The rusty little cargo ship, the Kizan, set out with 2500 soldiers and family members crammed into tiers of bunks welded into the holds. Eddie’s family shared a slightly better space with an admiral and his wife.

  The Kizan chugged northwards. Just past Keelung in Taiwan it ran into a typhoon, and was driven southwards. Leonie, pregnant again, was wretchedly seasick. Passing Keelung for the second time, the captain put in to replenish the drinking water tanks, bartering the ship’s lifeboats to the local officials in payment.

  When the ship finally arrived at Sasebo, five weeks after setting off, it was snowing. The Japanese immigration officials refused to let Leonie and Philomena land. Eddie insisted on staying with them. The admiral interceded and promised to pull whatever strings he could. A week later, the officials relented. Eddie and his family found places on a crowded train heading towards Yokohama, where they made their way to the outlying village of Denenchofu where an ex-Kempeitai comrade, Koba, had promised accommodation.

  Eddie spent his days riding the trains into Tokyo and Yokohama. He walked the Ginza looking for work, leaving his name at many offices, trying to talk his way in to see the managers. After many hungry days eking out the little supply of dollars Charles had provided, Eddie found a job as an interpreter in the US military’s welfare section, dealing with the accommodation needs of American personnel, extricating soldiers from disputes with the Japanese police and civilians, sorting out the love lives of young Americans who had fixed affections upon an ‘onriwan’ (only one) among the hordes of pan-pan girls and so on.

  In Yokohama, he put out the word about Naka’s family. He located his half-brother Sadaichi (Sam), living with Naka’s older brother near his small factory in Tsurumi, on the railway line up to Tokyo. Together they scrounged timber and built a two-room shack in the yard of the factory. This became the home of Eddie, Leonie, Philomena, the new baby girl Naomi, and Sam.

  Among the few possessions Eddie had brought from Singapore was a crate containing bottles of an artificial sweetener, looted from a Fraser & Neave factory. He sold them to a local soft-drink peddler in Yokohama, gaining the working capital for a move into the black market. Eddie’s contact with American soldiers gave him access to the food, cosmetics and apparel in the PX stores on the bases, which sold at a multiple price outside. Soon he was joined in the business by another old army friend from Malaya, Teramoto Hiroshi, who moved in to the shack too and became known to the children as Uncle Victor.

  It was a time when nothing was discarded. Eddie and Victor came back once with an empty oil drum, which they proudly set up as a bathtub, heated by a fire underneath. The first bath was for the babies. They came out of the water covered in a black tarry substance.

  *

  Charles’ own return to Singapore had had its own small moment of glory. Along with his tasks at the war crimes tribunals, he was assigned to liaison work in the sprawling internment camp out at Jurong, where initially tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers and 6000 civilians were held.

  After many months, the initial acceptance of the surrender order had frayed. The soldiers were now disillusioned and angry. Their food rations were as bad as the few grams of rice and flour allowed the civilian population outside, but they had less access to the black market, and felt especially punished. The death rate from infections and illness rose steadily.

  One day, discontent at a muster turned into a refusal to go out on work parties, then a riot of angry shouting and fist-
thumping on buildings. The young British guard battalion was called out, helmets on and bayonets fixed. Charles could see another Cowra incident in the making, and offered to try to talk the situation down. The commandant handed him a megaphone, and he went out onto the verandah of the guardhouse.

  ‘Soldiers of Japan!’ he began, in language that came back from his days drilling the school cadets in Yokohama. ‘You have amazed the world with the speed of your conquests through Asia. You captured this island, the fortress that the British said could never be taken! You have done as much and more than Japan and the emperor could ever have expected …’

  He played on their pride, telling them they were still recognised as Japanese soldiers. He told them it was not their fault the war had been lost. He reminded them it was time to think beyond the present hardship, which the emperor himself had asked them to endure, and look to returning home to their families, hometowns and old jobs.

  They fell quiet. Some were sobbing. Charles stopped talking, then shouted: ‘Lecture finished! Dismissed!’

  There was a moment while Charles held his breath. Then the prisoners turned in different directions and they dispersed in small, disconsolate groups from the parade ground. As a boy and younger man Charles had dreamt of being a great general, exhorting his massed troops into battle. This was as close as he would ever get.

  Later, he suggested a camp newspaper might give the internees some direction to their lives and raise morale. He found among them a war correspondent from the Kyoto Shimbun, Kato, ready to work as editor. Charles acted as censor initially, but as Kato and he grew familiar, Charles was invited to contribute editorials and commentaries about the postwar outlook for Japan.

  Charles often talked with Kato about returning to live in Japan. After Kato was repatriated and had rejoined his old newspaper in Kyoto, he wrote to say his editor was interested in hiring Charles as a regular commentator if he came back.