Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  On Saturday, August 25, they left on the electric tram from Kawasaki and arrived at the Kōbe rail terminus around 1700. The wind began to blow, and a hard rain fell, but it failed to dampen their spirits. The ticket agent was taken aback by their request to go to Tōkyō. In spite of the B-29 raids, the railway network to Tōkyō was intact. But travel was severely restricted due to disrupted service, the masses of Japanese military men being demobilized, and emissaries carrying out SCAP directives. The city had been zoned, she said; only those with special military permits were allowed to enter it.

  The doctors explained their mission in broken Japanese. “Baseball? Baseball?” inquired Japanese children on seeing the Americans. Then, as if he had stepped out of a short story, a well-dressed gentleman, briefcase in hand, overheard the doctors’ request. He spoke fluent English and switched back into Japanese to persuade the agent that they were indeed authorized to go to Tōkyō. He accompanied them to the designated track, and together they boarded the train for Osaka at 2100, which would take them to Tōkyō via Yokohama. The gentleman removed three peaches from his briefcase, one for each of them. He said he was glad the war was over. Americans and Japanese could now be friends.

  Before the war, Osaka to Tōkyō was a twelve-hour train ride. The doctors wouldn’t arrive in the capital until 1415 Sunday afternoon. The platform at Ōsaka’s Umeda Station was mobbed with Japanese soldiers. Their packs, laden with blankets and raincoats, mess kits and shelter halves, were nearly as big as they were. When the train pulled in, they threw their possessions in first and then swarmed through the doors and windows. They were filthy, their uniforms stank, and their belongings piled up like dirty laundry in the crowded aisles. The air was stale with the smell of distilled sweat.

  Murray and Stan Smith sat together. Fred was behind them, next to a Japanese marine who shared his hardtack with him. The Americans talked freely in English, speaking a language they assumed no one could understand. After several hours a Japanese soldier across the aisle asked, “You are POWs?”

  They were startled by his perfect English, and their response was deliberately disingenuous. They were doctors, they said, noncombatants according to the Geneva Convention, who did not qualify as prisoners of war.

  “Then you have been, let us say, detained by the Japanese military?”

  All of a sudden it seemed warm—hot, in fact—even with the train’s windows open.

  Yes, they replied, they had been “detained,” first in the Philippines and then in Japan.

  “Ah, yes.” The interlocutor paused before continuing his line of inquiry. “Are you not then still to be considered in the control of the military?” he prodded.

  The Japanese military had guaranteed the safety of POWs to MacArthur, the doctors asserted. Colonel Murata Sōtarō himself had granted them their freedom.

  This seemed to satisfy the stranger. “Now there is a typhoon approaching,” he informed them. “The initial landing in Tōkyō Bay has been delayed two days.”

  A typhoon had raged through the Rykys and swept into southern Japan. That meant the first U.S. soldiers wouldn’t be on Japanese soil until August 28. That meant the three American navy doctors would arrive in Tōkyō two days before MacArthur landed at Atsugi air base.

  Fred, Murray, and Stan were utterly alone as they traveled through a country still “impressively beautiful,” as one writer described it, with “mountains and waterfalls and green rice paddies, and peasants in bamboo hats.” But its cities were in ruins, and some 9 million Japanese were left homeless. The only Westerners in a sea of Asian faces, they were a curiosity to those who had never before seen—much less encountered—an American.

  They arrived in Yokohama in the dark, switched trains, and slept until dawn. At stop after stop soldiers returning home debarked until, by the time the navy doctors reached Tōkyō, it felt as if they were the only passengers aboard.

  It was an overcast afternoon. The eastern half of the city, from Ueno and Tōkyō Stations to the Arakawa Drainage Channel, was a wasteland. Seven hundred thousand structures had been destroyed in the B-29 raids. Since the March 9 bombing, homes that had been reduced to ashes and buildings ground to gravel had been neatly swept up. Streets stretched like runways through a plain of desolation, identifiable by occasional standing structures and their relation to the Sumida River. The Low City was ravaged, as it had been by the fires after the 1923 earthquake, but the path of destruction was even wider; some wards were nearly wiped off the map. The great Kannon Temple, the main building of the palace, and the municipal library in Hibiya Park were now a part of history. The parks along the river were cemeteries. Tōkyō’s population had shrunk from 7 million in February 1945 to less than 3 million. One in ten residents, the police estimated, lived in temporary shelters. Thousands roamed the city in search of food, sifting through ruins, inhabiting the subways. And yet the damage in Tōkyō seemed far less to the navy doctors than what they had seen in Kōbe.

  There were no other ex-POWs on Tōkyō’s streets, though 1,200 Allied prisoners remained locked up at Omori Main Camp on an island in Tōkyō Bay that was connected to the mainland by a wooden causeway. Nor was there any U.S. military presence. The first American echelon had yet to touch down at Atsugi, and Admiral Halsey’s landing force was still offshore of Yokosuka.

  On leaving the train station, the navy doctors were met with stares of surprise, indifference, and hatred. They were strangers in a land that was foreign to its own inhabitants, where women stilll dressed in wartime monpe, where the defeated were just beginning to confront the consequences of surrender.

  Japan’s militarist leaders bathed in the blood of remorse and recrimination. “By disemboweling myself,” said Admiral Onishi, architect of the kamikaze units, “I cannot apologize sufficiently.” On the morning of August 15, Army Minister General Anami committed ritual seppuku. Major Hatanaka Kenji shot himself in the forehead with the pistol he had used to murder Lieutenant General Mori Takeshi, commander of the Konoye Division. Lieutenant Colonel Shiizaki Jirō, also from the Military Affairs Section of the Ministry of War, sliced open his belly and then blew his brains out as he knelt facing the Imperial Palace. Major Koga Hidemasa, an associate of Hatanaka and Shiizaki, met the tip of his sword on the parade ground outside the Imperial Guards Division headquarters. There were rumors of a “government of resistance” and plans to occupy the Imperial Palace at midnight on August 20. On August 24 Eastern District Army Commander General Tanaka Shizuichi, the man who had quashed the coup, put a bullet to his head. Inspired by the Atsugi insurrection, more than a dozen rightist youths in Atagoyama linked arms in groups of three and detonated hand grenades “for our sins in disobeying the Imperial Rescript.” By month’s end more than 1,000 officers and members of the imperial armed forces had taken their own lives. But in spite of the millions of imperial troops bearing weapons, the resistance came to naught. Hirohito’s emissaries succeeded in persuading the Japanese military to disarm. As ultranationalist and underground boss Kodama Yoshio put it: “Defeat and unconditional surrender . . . also signified national death.”

  No one knew what to expect from the occupation. Families hid their possessions; women and children were secreted in the countryside. On August 19 the Home Ministry instructed municipal governments to set up “comfort facilities” or “Recreation and Amusement Associations” using national treasury monies, in order “to hold back the mad frenzy [of the occupying troops] and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future.” Interim prime minister Prince Higashikuni appointed Kodama Yoshio as a cabinet councilor to oversee the burgeoning sex trade. Ohashi Hyōjirō made sure his daughters shaved their heads for fear that they would be raped by American soldiers.

  In the twilight hours between surrender and occupation, the three American doctors were certain of their mission but less confident of its success.

  The killing of Allied POWs did not end with Japan’s capitulation. In Manchuria, 600 Chinese and Manchurian laborers wh
o were used as experimental subjects in Unit 731 laboratories at Pinffan near Harbin were gassed to death or poisoned with potassium cyanide. At Fukuoka, guards marched sixteen American POWs to a glade, where they were stripped and then hacked to death to the amusement of the guards’ girlfriends. In North Borneo, more than 2,700 British and Australian POWs who were constructing an airfield were herded into the jungle; all but six were either killed or died. In Ōsaka, hours after the entire Osaka Kempeitai had gathered to hear the emperor’s speech, five American airmen were executed at the Sanadayama Military Cemetery (two of them were unsuccessfully beheaded). As Fujioka Hideo, chief of the department of Special Police Business, later explained, “We still had the spirit as officers to carry on and not let the war end in defeat.”

  They walked and walked until they flagged down a lone Japanese Army truck with two soldiers in it. The Americans asked if they would take them to the Imperial Hotel in the Hibiya District, where the Imperial Palace, the Diet, the central government offices, and the diplomatic embassies were located. Redesigned by Frank Lloyd Wright as a grand hotel that could compete with the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Ritz in Paris, and the Carlton in London, the Imperial had been completed in 1923. Fred and Stan had stayed there before hostilities began when it was the epitome of elegance in the East, drawing politicians, foreign dignitaries, celebrities, and movie stars, from Babe Ruth to Charlie Chaplin and Helen Keller.

  The hotel had survived the great Kantō earthquake of 1923 and the March 1945 firebombing, but the war had taken its toll. Radiators were stripped from guest rooms. Fans, fixtures, carpet runner rods, and even cooking utensils had been handed over to the government in accordance with the 1943 law ordering the collection of metals. An aerial attack against Tōkyō on May 25-26, 1945, gutted the south wing and damaged the banquet rooms, the famous Peacock Room, and the annex. The interior needed painting; the lobby was darkened by walls made from brown tile and green Oya tuff; and the furniture was as shabby as the staff’s uniforms. The windows looked out on a city in ruins, and at night the hallways were alive with vermin. But to Fred, Murray, and Stan, the Imperial was a palace.

  They walked downstairs and into the men’s lavatory to wash up. Then they went to the front desk and asked for rooms. The clerk couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Rooms? He sucked in his breath through clenched teeth.

  The hotel was preparing to accommodate the new Foreign Office, which was going to meet with the occupying powers, he explained. Okazaki Katsuo, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official who had served with the Tōkyō delegation in Manila, had instructed the manager, Inumaru Tetsuzō, of the advance echelon’s needs. They were closely involved with plans at Atsugi air base that were being coordinated by Lieutenant General Arimatsu, chairman of the reception committee. But it was August 26. The first American forces weren’t due until the twenty-eighth. Who were these men?

  “We’re doctors from the Kōbe POW Hospital,” Fred replied.

  And they wanted rooms? the clerk asked.

  “Yes,” Fred affirmed.

  That would be difficult, the clerk said, but he would see what could be done. In the meantime, perhaps the Americans would like to wait in the mezzanine.

  Stan thought they were being brushed off until either the Foreign Office or the Kempeitai could be notified of their presence. Sure enough, Major Fujisaki of the Foreign Office arrived and began interrogating them in English.

  Fred explained that they had come from Maruyama outside Kōbe, where 120 ex-POWs were in need of food and medicine. They had made the trip to Tōkyō so they could inform MacArthur of their patients’ plight and also see the Pacific Fleet.

  Fujisaki found Fred’s story hard to believe. First of all, American POWs were still technically under the control of the Japanese. Second, it would have been extraordinarily risky for any Americans to travel all the way from Kōbe to Tōkyō given the unstable situation in Japan. Why would they go to all that trouble just for their patients? The story didn’t add up. There must be another motive.

  “Didn’t people throw stones at you, stare at you, attempt to molest you?” he asked. “We are daily confining hundreds of avowed fanatics who would gladly have taken your lives in one last gesture of revenge.”

  That might be true, Fred replied, but here they were, in Tōkyō. Now could they please get a room and something to eat?

  Finally their request was granted. Fred and Murray shared one room; Stan stayed in another. Soon they were served their first complete meal in three and a half years: breaded veal cutlets, rice, a fresh vegetable salad, bread and butter, rice cakes and tea for dessert. They ate on real plates, used knives, forks, and spoons, drank from glass goblets, and dabbed their mouths with cloth napkins. They bathed with soap and dried off with cotton towels. They tested the mattresses on their beds and the plushness of chair cushions as if they were discovering such amenities for the first time. Boy, this was the life! Or it would have been, had they not been placed under guard.

  Sakagami Jin’ichirō, a young English-speaking Japanese who had been a college student at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, sat by the window of Fred and Murray’s room guarding the hotel’s unexpected guests. Sakagami casually provided them with a wealth of information about Japanese plans to annihilate the American invasion force. Thousands of kamikaze had been waiting for the call to arms, he said. Ten thousand volunteers were prepared to act as live mines to destroy incoming landing craft, he asserted. He was pleased the war was over. He was eager to visit the United States.

  Effectively under house arrest, the ex-POWs had limited freedom of movement in the hotel. Murray noticed that the room next to theirs had its door slightly ajar. That was odd, he thought. He ventured inside and found himself staring at a bank of electronic surveillance equipment. They were being bugged as well. The Japanese clearly thought their “mission of mercy” story was a ruse. The doctors were in Tōkyō not to enlist aid but to report war crimes. If they contacted MacArthur before the signing of the surrender treaty, the terms of the surrender might be even harsher for the Japanese people.

  For several days the Japanese Foreign Office tried to persuade the doctors to return to Kōbe. If the Americans agreed to leave, Fujisaki promised, the Foreign Office would deliver their message. The navy doctors didn’t buy it. They insisted on handing over the roster of Maruyama’s patients directly to MacArthur’s staff. The Japanese tried another tactic. They called in the Kempeitai.

  The Kempeitai were the military police of the Imperial Japanese Army. They were feared as much by Japanese citizens and subjects of the Co-Prosperity Sphere as by officers and enlisted men who breached military discipline. Like their German counterpart, the Gestapo, the Kempeitai were trained in counterintelligence and the art of coercion. Their policy was one of intimidation, and their tactics were officially sanctioned by the Japanese Army training manual, Notes on the Interrogation of Prisoners of War, which described various forms of physical and psychological torture. There were more than 10,000 Kempeitai in Japan alone. They stood guard in war plants. They tapped telephones. They harassed so-called enemies of the state. They trafficked in narcotics, counterfeited, supplied women for military brothels, and participated in the notorious activities of Unit 731. They swaggered through the streets of Kōbe and Osaka on horseback, searching for aliens, neutrals, spies, quislings, or simply violators of wartime regulations. Caucasians were immediately suspect. As Max Pestalozzi, an ICRC delegate in Yokohama, put it: “We never knew whether we were privileged with diplomatic prerogatives or whether we would land in jail.” Above and beyond the law, the Kempeitai were loathed for their arrogance, intolerance, and excessive use of force. They had power over local POW camp commandants, and the army allowed them to apprehend, prosecute, and sentence captured American fliers on its behalf. The Kempeitai, in short, were both judge and jury. The Tōkyō headquarters building was just across from the Imperial Palace, and it was there that eight of Doolittle’s raiders were imprisoned for some forty-fiv
e days and tortured before three of them were condemned to death.

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, August 28, Captain Nakamura of the Tōkyō Kempeitai strode into the Imperial Hotel. Solidly built, he was brusque, belligerent, and he spared the ex-POWs any pleasantries.

  “Who knows you’re here?” Nakamura barked through an interpreter, Nakao Kiyoaki, a Japanese schoolteacher who had been schooled at Catholic University in Dayton, Ohio.

  It was a curious question, but his meaning was clear: Who would know if you disappeared? Who would know if we killed you? Who would ever find your remains? Who would care?

  Nakao took a softer approach in the translation. He explained to the doctors that their request to contact American authorities had been denied by the Foreign Office.

  But Murray knew enough Japanese to get the message. He stepped forward to reply, looked Nakamura in the eye, and said, poker-faced, “The entire camp knows we’re here.”

  It was a bluff. Only John knew of their whereabouts. They hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye to Page.

  “Why did you come to Tōkyō? What is the real purpose of your trip?” the captain demanded.

  They were threats, not questions, uttered with the same contempt that the camp guards had shown when they shrieked commands at POWs, as if nobody had told the Kempeitai that the war had ended, as if their behavior were guided by an uncontrollable urge to abuse the power the Imperial Japanese Army had conferred upon them when the army itself was in the process of disbanding.

  But the doctors weren’t prisoners anymore. From the balcony of their hotel room that morning, they watched fighter planes usher in the vanguard of the Allied staff to Atsugi air base. C-54s followed in the afternoon, with the advance echelon of the 11th Airborne Division. As Murray listened to Nakamura, he could see carrier planes from Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet skim Tōkyō’s treetops. The sky belonged to the Americans, and the sight of it was emboldening. No more would the ex-POWs have to submit to Little Speedo or Big Speedo, Air Raid or Donald Duck, Mad Butcher or Dumb Shit. No more would they have to bow at the waist or fear being slapped or beaten as a Japanese officer strode by in leather boots, vitamin stick in hand. No more would they have to wonder where their next meal would come from, or what indignity tomorrow would bring.