Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  What was most disturbing to Fred Berley, John Bookman, and my father, I suspect, was ultimately not the ease with which the Japanese carried out the most heinous of acts, or the scale of them, but the reflection those acts cast on human nature. They subscribed to the Western notion espoused by Aristotle and Aquinas that human beings are, in essence, benevolent. To them, neglecting the sick and killing the wounded was “unnatural.” It defied the very reason they became doctors. It ran counter to the rules of war as they understood them, and contrary to their conception of who and what people are. The war shattered their weltanschauung, or worldview. It turned their moral universe upside down, called into question their very idea of humanity. At the same time they subscribed to the notion, as the former head of statistical analysis for the Twentieth Air Force, Robert S. McNamara, put it, that “in order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.”

  History, Chris Hedges reminds us, is revised, denied, exaggerated, and fabricated for political purposes. The Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which one million died. Croatian strongman Franjo Tudjman asserted that the Germans killed one million Jews in the Holocaust, not six million. Japanese nationalists such as Ishihara Shintarō, a former cabinet minister and coauthor with Watanabe Shōichi of The Japan That Can Say No, maintain that the Rape of Nanking is “a story made up by the Chinese.”

  Historical grievances may be transmitted from one generation to another, argues psychiatrist Vamik Volkan, whether it is Czechs sustaining the memory of the Battle of Bilá in 1620, which marked their absorption into the Habsburg monarchy for 300 years; Scots reliving the Battle of Culloden and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ill-fated attempt to restore a Stuart to the English Crown in 1746; or Chinese soccer fans burning the Japanese flag at a game in Beijing’s Worker Stadium and chanting: “May a big sword chop off the Japanese heads!” Transgenerational trauma, Hedges adds, can also be invented. Palestinian refugees in Gaza camps identify themselves with villages where they never lived and that no longer even exist.

  The writer Eva Hoffman, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, rejects the idea of a “second generation” who consider themselves victims of victims “damaged by calamities that had been visited on somebody else.” The role of succeeding generations is not, as I see it, to incorporate the pain of one’s parents in a vain attempt to relieve it, but to understand the origin of the trauma and its subsequent manifestations.

  My father eats chicken until there is only a nest of bones left on his plate; then he consumes the bones. He would rather do without than drink green tea. He hoards his mail. For years he would not buy Japanese products. When my older brother, out of childish curiosity, once got his hands on the razor my father had used while a POW and accidentally nicked its edge, he “blew his stack,” as my mother called his periodic outbursts.

  When I was twenty-four years old, a friend of mine was diagnosed with a primary tumor of the liver. She died six months later. It was my first encounter with the death of a contemporary.

  “That’s the way the ball bounces,” my father said.

  I asked him if that was all he had to say.

  “I’ve seen football fields of men go down,” he offered by way of explanation.

  It was an interesting choice of words, a sports metaphor: life as a game to be played, war as a test of mettle and manliness, with clear winners and losers. “Play the greater game and join the Football Battalion,” urged one British recruiting poster during World War I. He had been referring to those who perished on the hellships, and at the time the association couldn’t have been more foreign to me. I had never so much as heard of George Ferguson or a hellship, and without understanding the context of the remark, I was unable to read the message struggling for articulation.

  “They seemed to lose emotional regard for their fellow prisoners,” said army doctor Lieutenant Colonel Norman Q. Brill on the basis of neurological and psychiatric examinations of 4,617 RAMPs who had been confined in Japan for thirty-nine months or more. “One man reported waking when light returned in the hold of the prison ship and seeing his friend’s throat cut and his canteen gone. This did not move him at all.”

  My father was moved by the story of my friend’s death; he simply couldn’t express it. What he was trying to say was: I know what it’s like to lose a dear friend.

  In Western culture, the enormity of the Holocaust has overshadowed the experience of Allied POWs of the Far East. There is no literary work comparable to Elie Wiesel’s Night, or to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, no civilian diaries that speak to us with the urgency of Anne Frank or Etty Hillesum, no fiction with the imaginative power of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus or Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.

  In Japan, Tasaki Hanama’s novel Long the Imperial Way, Noma Hiroshi’s Zone of Emptiness, Ooka Shohei’s Fires on the Plain, and Senō Kappa’s A Boy Called H offer powerful portraits of Japanese military culture and of the deprivations experienced on the home front. In his novel The Sea and the Poison, Endō Shsaku, a Catholic, writes chillingly of the lack of conscience displayed by a Japanese doctor who assists in a lethal medical experiment on an American POW. But the two literary master-pieces to emerge from the Pacific theater remain John Hersey’s nonfiction work Hiroshima and Ibuse Masuji’s novel Black Rain, also about Hiroshima. The suffering of Pacific POWs has dimmed in the afterglow of the atomic bomb, as the country paved over its past with the tacit approval of its American occupiers and revised its history from that of aggressor to that of victim in charting and building its future.

  Ask a Japanese veteran, such as Arakawa Tatsuzō of the 3rd Battalion, 20th Regiment, about atrocities committed against prisoners of war on Bataan, and the subject will quickly change to the civilian deaths caused by the American incendiary campaign over Japan and the dropping of the atomic bomb. In 1993 Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro—whose grandfather, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, evaded responsibility as prime minister during the Nanking massacre and the signing of the 1940 Axis Pact by committing suicide in 1945 after being charged as a Class A war criminal—acknowledged that Japan had waged “an aggressive war and a wrong war.” Less than a decade later Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō authorizes new history textbooks that glorify Japan’s imperial past and visits Yasukuni Shrine, an altar of Japanese militarism that houses the remains of Class A war criminals and memorializes the Kempeitai, Japan’s military police. Konishi Yukio, the priest at Juganji Temple outside Ōsaka, where the ashes of 1,086 Allied POWs repose, tells me that during his time no government officials have attended the annual memorial ceremony he holds for Allied servicemen who died on Japanese soil during World War II.

  There has been no public discourse in Japan about its role in the Pacific War comparable to that in Germany over the causes and consequences of Nazism, no recognition of the plight of Allied POWs, no gesture as powerful as former West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s when, after the Berlin Wall was toppled, he got down on his knees in the former Warsaw Ghetto to beg forgiveness for his country’s past. The Rape of Nanking is briefly described in every Japanese history textbook approved by the Ministry of Education and is taught to high school seniors, and the plight of POWs on the notorious Burma-Siam Railway is referred to in some of them. But the ordeal of American and Filipino POWs on the Bataan Death March is mentioned in only a few—Nippon-shi B (History of Japan), Shin Nippon-shi B (New History of Japan), and Waido Nippon no Rekishi (Wide History of Japan)—and the entries run no more than a single sentence. Asian neighbors, China and Korea, have successfully pressed their cases for Japan’s accountability during World War II; the United States has not. The story of Allied POWs under the Japanese is entirely absent from Senshi Sōsho, the official Japanese military history of World War II. Is this the difference, Ian Buruma has asked, between what anthropologist Ruth Benedict called a “shame culture” in Japan and a “guilt culture” in Germany? Or is it the legacy of Hirohito’s absolution, for which the Americans must be held accountab
le? Sixty years after Tōkyō feverishly tried to destroy evidence of war crimes before the first occupation troops landed on the Home Islands, Japan has yet to officially acknowledge the extent of its wartime culpability.

  I bear no ill will toward the Japanese people. Sadness over their role in World War II, yes, but not anger. I am encouraged by independent organizations such as the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s Wartime Responsibility, the POW Research Network, and the Ōsaka International Peace Center, a museum that offers simple but powerful presentations on Japan’s fifteen-year war of aggression, as well as the American firebombing campaign and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet as I walk the streets of Kōbe and Ōsaka, I cannot find a single historical marker indicating the existence of Tsumori, Ichioka,Wakayama, Kōbe House, the Kōbe POW Hospital, Wakinohama, or even Osaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp. Over the site of Maruyama rises a gleaming white condominium complex.

  As Colonel Murata’s eldest daughter, Inoue Kiyoko, demonstrates the art of Japanese tea (cha-do) for me at her 100-year-old house in Kyōto, she tells me that her father never spoke of his work as commandant of the Ōsaka area camps. She never knew the location of Osaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp. He was a good man, she says, who had a hard life. Hadn’t he established the Kōbe POW Hospital? Hadn’t he received a commendation from Archbishop Marella for letting priests minister to prisoners and looking after the safety of POWs during air raids? She speaks in a voice at once plaintive, imploring, and keening, as if she were in mourning. She cannot accept the idea that he was responsible for the maltreatment of Allied POWs, much less for any prisoner’s death.

  When I meet Nakato Masako and her family in Kōbe, they tell me I am the first Westerner to step inside their home. Masako is the head of an unofficial organization known as the Kōbe Bombing Victims group. Tsuji Hideko, one of the group’s members and sixty-nine years of age, tells me the story of the March 15-16 fire raid from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl. When she is finished, she raises a trouser leg to reveal a large discolored scar from where she was burned. Then she lowers her head, parts her hair, and exposes a bald spot, at the center of which is an ugly keloid scar. Red, raised, shaped like a crab from the build-up of keratonin, it is a daily reminder to her of the terror she experienced that fateful night in 1945. Masako adds her own graphic account, even though she was a fetus in her mother’s womb at the time. Her teenage daughter Atuko listens spellbound. She has never heard her mother mention a word about the firebombing of Kōbe, words that really belong to her dead grandmother.

  When I finally meet Ohashi Yoshihisa in Takarazuka, a suburb of Ōsaka, it is like meeting an old friend. By pure coincidence he works in Sunshine City, a huge office complex built on the site of Sugamo Prison, where the grandfather he never knew was imprisoned for suspected war crimes. He hosts a lunch for me with his aunts—Dr. Ōhashi’s daughters—his mother, and his children. Miyazaki Shunya, the sickly teenager whom Lieutenant Commander Page treated for tuberculosis at the Kōbe POW Hospital—now in his late seventies—also attends. We raise a glass to our forebears, avidly exchange information, and thumb through carefully preserved photo albums of the Ōhashi family dating back to Meiji-era Japan. There are wedding pictures and formal family portraits, shots of Dr. Ōhashi in the army and in the operating room. But I find myself providing captions to an image that seems to have been torn from the pages of history. While Yoshi had seen, as a child, the official photograph of the medical staff of the Kōbe Prisoner of War Hospital dated November 1944, his father rarely spoke about his own father’s wartime experiences. Indeed, Yoshi could identify only one man in it, his grandfather Dr. Ōhashi; the POWs themselves were anonymous. Neither he nor his aunts, Yasuko and Kazuko, were aware of the circumstances of that group portrait, one of two extant photographs of my father as a prisoner of the Japanese, without which I would never have been able to locate the Ōhashi family.

  We are sitting on the terrace of the Corregidor Inn, each sipping a bottle of San Miguel beer. From our perch my father and I have a view of the former 92nd Garage Area, now a sandy beach. It is a beautiful day, and the island, densely foliated after sixty years with kupan trees and white luan, bamboo and mangrove, evokes a Pacific paradise. I try to picture the Japanese attack of December 29, 1941. I don’t have to look far because the fire-blackened remains of barracks such as Middleside, vaunted with Ozymandias-like arrogance for its invincibility, stand on Corregidor to this day. Bombed first by the Japanese and then by the Americans during the island’s liberation, they look like ancient ruins, a maze of stairways leading to the sky, window frames gaping into thin air, slabs of concrete dangling from twisted, rusted steel rods, a concrete skeleton blackened by a hatred that transcends race, nationality, culture, and time.

  Wars divide, they damage, they destroy. It is a commonplace that they also foster camaraderie, forge unlikely friendships, and link men to one another as “blood brothers,” as POWs called the ten-men shooting squads at Cabanatuan. The irony is not lost on me that what has brought me closer to my father at the end of his life is the war that took him captive at the beginning of it. Memory yields to historical record as I learn things about him, his friends, and the world in which they lived that he himself never knew. Our roles as father and son, teacher and student, have been inverted. Or if not inverted, as Wordsworth would have it, at least they have achieved a kind of parity. We are each other’s own best audience, hungry for information, eager to share. I detect the young man in the old man he thought he would never become.

  “Those who have not lived through the experience,” Elie Wiesel wrote, referring to the Nazi death camps, “will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely.” Indeed, if war remains the palimpsest behind the narrative of my father’s life, there are inevitably elisions in the manuscript, scenes forgotten, episodes omitted, questions that remain all the more compelling for their having gone unanswered: resonance from irresolution.

  In the telling, his story has become our story, but our story will always be their story, of four American doctors and their fight for life as prisoners of the Japanese, a small chapter in the history of World War II, to be handed down from one generation to the next.

  Epilogue

  ON A COLD, RAINY DAY in November 1945, a letter arrived at the Ōhashis’ new house in Kizuyama that stunned the doctor and his wife. By order of GHQ Memorandum AG 000.5 concerning the “Apprehension and Detention of Certain Individuals,” Ohashi Hyōjirō was to be interrogated for suspected war crimes.

  Yukako had no idea of what her husband had done. Their children couldn’t understand why their father was leaving home. Ōhashi dutifully packed a small bag, put on his uniform, and on November 27 was escorted by a member of the Japanese Liaison Office to Tōkyō’s Sugamo Prison, a complex of squat, featureless buildings containing 700 cells. He was photographed front and profile, fingerprinted, and confined to Cell No. 3. The former POW camp commandant was now a prisoner. He had been charged with no crime.

  Article 10 of the Potsdam Declaration declared that “stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.” Within days of MacArthur’s arrival in Japan, SCAP began rounding up cabinet ministers and military officers, career diplomats and government advisers, POW camp commandants, doctors, orderlies, guards, and interpreters. Thousands of suspects were caught in the American dragnet, from ex-Prime Minister Tōjō, who bungled his own suicide just before he was apprehended, to former Naval Chief of Staff Admiral Nagano Osami, from Foreign Minister Shigemitsu to Colonel Murata Sōtarō, commandant of the Osaka area camps.

  On January 19, 1946, MacArthur announced the formation of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tōkyō, which would prosecute not only conventional war crimes but “crimes against peace.” The court consisted of eleven justices; the charter governing the Tōkyō trials was based on the Nuremberg Charter. Because so mu
ch incriminating evidence had been destroyed by the Japanese immediately following the surrender, affidavits and statements of ex-POWs played a key role in the prosecution of war criminals. Convictions carried sentences that ranged from imprisonment to death.

  The defendants were categorized as Class A for those who conspired to wage war “in violation of international treaties”; Class B for those who violated “the laws and customs of war”; and Class C for those who committed atrocities against prisoners of war or withheld “medical treatment and/or supplies necessary for survival.”

  The emperor’s role, MacArthur argued—over British, Australian, and Soviet objections, as well as a joint resolution passed by the U.S. Congress in late September 1945—was vital for Japan’s transition to a democratic society. “Destroy him,” he cautioned Eisenhower by telegram on January 25, 1946, “and the nation will disintegrate.”

  Hirohito remained immune from prosecution, as did General Ishii Shirō and his cohorts in Unit 731, which was responsible for bacteriological and medical experiments on more than 3,000 Allied prisoners of war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and MacArthur were as eager to obtain the details of Japan’s biological weapons program and its experiments on live human subjects as they were to prevent the data from falling into Communist hands.