Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (23 page)

There is a final irony to the kamikaze story — one which reminds us not to believe that all Japanese at the time chose death rather than shame.
Warrant Officer Shoichi Ota, the man responsible for the catastrophic ‘human missile’, was thought to have flown off into the Pacific, never to return, at the end of the war.
But naval design technician Tadanao Miki remembers his fate differently: ‘I heard the rumour that Ota had flown his own suicide mission.
But I also heard that some years after the war one of my subordinates had bumped into him.
It was raining and he lent Ota an umbrella which Ota never returned.
Obviously that meant Ota was still alive.
But afterwards I don’t know what happened to him.
Nobody knows what happened to him — it’s a mystery.’

But it was a mystery that was solved by the
Timewatch
team during the making of their BBC film on the kamikazes.
They discovered that after the war Shoichi Ota had changed his name to Michio Yokoyama and begun a new life.
Only in 1994, as he lay seriously ill, did he tell his family about his past.
‘We were told he had three months to live,’ says his son.
‘And it was then that my father revealed things to us which he hadn’t told us about before.
I had never seen him cry until he said it was his fault that so many young people had died before reaching their twentieth birthday.
I couldn’t think of anything to say — only that many terrible things happen in war and that no one can be blamed for them.’
The tale of Shoichi Ota and his incompetent suicide missile is an important reminder that, even in a culture where the vast majority feel compelled to conform, there were still individuals who preferred to risk shame and ostracism to save themselves.

On Okinawa in the spring of 194S the US marines engaged in a bitter fight with the determined soldiers of the Imperial Army formed a more simplistic view of their Japanese opponents: ‘They were an inhuman race,’ says former marine sergeant James Eagleton.
‘We had no concern about killing the Japanese.
[If] we’d have gone to Japan we’d have probably killed a thousand to one [i.e., 1000 Japanese for every American], but we would have killed ‘em without regret.’The ‘inhuman race’ who were defending the island, under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, had adopted a strikingly original tactic.
On Okinawa, unlike at Iwo Jima and Saipan, the Imperial Army did not oppose the landing of American troops on the beaches.
Instead, the 77,000 Japanese and 20,000 Okinawan support troops had retreated inland to well-prepared defensive structures, often concrete pill-boxes dug into the mountainside.
By using this tactic the Japanese sought to demonstrate to the Americans that they could only capture Okinawa at prohibitive cost.
Soldiers of the Imperial Army, like Hajime Kondo, simply sat secure in their defences and waited.
‘I saw Americans for the first time in my life,’ says Kondo.
‘Their tanks came first and then the infantry companies followed.
The soldiers were carrying guns and they were chewing gum.
They looked as though they came for a picnic’ But once the Americans advanced towards the northern mountainous part of the island, the Japanese confronted them.
‘We realized that we were losing a lot of people,’ says James Eagleton.
‘They were very excellent trained troops and killed any number of our company people.
You’d get up there and you’d get under machine gun fire and you’d lose people.’

The jungle around the mountains of central Okinawa made it virtually impossible to dislodge the Japanese defenders except by brutal, near hand-to-hand, personal combat.
As a result there was a high rate of battle fatigue amongst the marines and, as Eagleton admits, they were ‘mentally breaking up’ under the strain.
One of the most hazardous of duties was to be selected as a night picket.
Seven or eight marines would be ordered to set up a defensive line 200 yards or so from where the main unit was resting.
The idea was simple — if the Japanese attacked under cover of darkness they would encounter this small force first and the alarm would be raised.
The soldiers on picket duty knew all too well that they were unlikely to survive such an attack themselves.
And sometimes even when the Japanese did not mount a night action the marines broke down.
‘Once they sent out eight marines to set up one of these defences,’ says Eagleton.
‘That night there wasn’t any firing.
When they came back, seven of them had battle fatigue.
They were crying and were unable to function as marines for a day or two.
The one that didn’t have battle fatigue, he was a dairy man from New York and I always thought he was too dumb to know what they were out there for.’

Many marines, even though technically not victims of battle fatigue still found that in these conditions, as Eagleton puts it, their ‘mental faculties’ became abnormal.
‘You would see things that didn’t exist,’ he says.
‘One time I saw Japanese attacking our position and all night we fought.
Next morning there weren’t any Japanese.
Mentally I saw the Japanese.
I never had that experience before or since.’

The Japanese fought stubbornly on, through April and May.
And as Hajime Kondo watched the Americans in their death throes, he made a surprising discovery: ‘The Japanese soldier’s last word was usually “Mother” — I saw several people die in the war, but nobody called out “Banzai!”
for the Emperor.
Americans also muttered “Mother” when they died.
When we shot them, we heard them calling “Mom” or “Mother”.
We talked about it amongst ourselves — that when they were dying they said the same thing as us.’

Similar emotions of fellow feeling were distinctly lacking amongst James Eagleton and his comrades.
He frankly confessed to us that ‘we did not ever take a Japanese prisoner.
In the two years that I was overseas I saw no prisoner ever taken.
Once thirty or forty of them came out with their hands up.
They were killed on the spot because we didn’t take prisoners.’
Eagleton seeks to justify his actions by saying that ‘on Guadalcanal a number of Japanese would come up purporting to surrender, and fall down with grenades under their arms and blow people up.
Any number of tricks the Japanese had.
We’d call them “Tricky Nipper”.
We had a Lieutenant James and he was always talking about “Tricky Nipper” and “Don’t let that little rascal get close to you.”’

‘When you yourself were shooting these prisoners who were trying to surrender,’ we asked him, ‘what was in your mind?’

‘We were just defending ourselves.’

‘But they had their hands up....’

‘That’s right.’

James Eagleton admitted that he and his comrades were never given a specific order by his superiors not to take prisoners, but maintains that it was tacitly understood that this was what was required of them.
He cites one example that typifies the culture of the time: ‘Two fellows running a telephone line across country came across a Japanese who surrendered to them.
They took him to the company headquarters and the captain just blew his top.
“You’ve ruined our record!”
he said.
“Sergeant, take this prisoner to battalion headquarters and I will see you at eleven-fifteen.”
Well, it was eleven o’clock and the headquarters was 5 miles away.
They took him out and killed him.’

The significance of this story is considerable.
What it demonstrates, of course, is the inadequacy of Eagleton’s explanation as to why he and his comrades shot Japanese troops who tried to surrender to them.
The soldier who was shot after his capture had been announced to the company commander and presented no danger.
He was killed out of principle, not pragmatism.
Neither does it appear to have been essential as a matter of course to shoot Japanese prisoners who attempted to surrender.
Archive film exists that shows how many American units dealt with any potential danger from surrendering Japanese.
The soldiers were simply ordered, still at some distance from the Americans, to take off their clothes.
The Japanese complied, showing that they possessed no concealed weapons and were therefore no threat.
Therefore it is hard to escape the conclusion that James Eagleton and his comrades needed little other justification to kill surrendering Japanese soldiers than their hatred of the enemy, and the self-confessed belief that they were fighting ‘an inhuman race’.

Of course, any Japanese soldiers who surrendered were themselves breaking their word to their supreme commander, Emperor Hirohito, who had called for them to fight to the death.
But on Okinawa thousands did decide to give up, and their surrender was accepted by the Americans.
After years of brutal fighting there were signs that significant numbers of Japanese had simply had enough and decided they wanted to survive the war.
But Hajime Kondo was not one of them — even after enduring weeks of fighting, suffering a bullet wound to his back and made distraught with lack of sleep and food.
‘There was never any thought of surrender,’ he says.
‘To become a POW is to defame the family.’
So after almost all his comrades had been killed — many, he says, ‘dying like dogs’ in the caves of Okinawa as the Americans burnt them out with flame throwers — he decided in June 194S that the moment had come for him to meet his own end.
‘I thought, it’s time to join my colleagues.
That’s why we decided to attempt a banzai attack.
It was suicidal behaviour, but I believed that death would be a kind of relief for us at the time.’
He ran towards the Americans with one of his comrades alongside him, but suddenly his friend was shot and, as Kondo reached down to help him, he stumbled and fell himself.
‘I was surrounded by American soldiers.
They were pointing guns at me.’
He expected them to kill him, but instead, as he gestured that he was thirsty, they offered him water from a canteen.
‘Then,’ he says, ‘I realized that American soldiers are kind.’

Despite the large numbers of Japanese soldiers who did surrender, the majority still decided to fight to the death; and as the Americans pushed the Imperial Army to the south of Okinawa there were many civilian suicides, including several thousand at Cape Kiyan.
Once again, the Japanese army played a crucial role in encouraging civilians to kill themselves.
Significantly, on nearby islands where there were no Japanese soldiers, there were no mass suicides.

By 22 June 1945 all of Okinawa was finally in American hands.
Eight thousand American troops had died on the island, a figure dwarfed by the 60,000 Japanese soldiers and 150,000 Okinawan civilians who had lost their lives in the struggle.
And the way some of the American troops behaved towards the civilians who remained on the island will come as a surprise to those in the West who believe that this was a war in which atrocities against civilians were only committed by one side.
Teru Yasumura was a young mother of twenty-five when the Americans landed on Okinawa.
She was told — in the familiar propaganda way of the Japanese — that the Americans were a ‘mad’ army and that if they caught Okinawan women they would ‘cut their throats’.
She confesses that, if her village had been surrounded by the Americans and there had been fighting to capture it, she too would probably have committed suicide.
As it was, the Americans simply arrived the day after the Japanese had retreated.
But in their wake came further rumours that the occupying forces would do ‘all sorts of things’ to any women they caught.
As a result, Teru and her friends used to try to make themselves ‘look unattractive’ by rubbing dirt into their faces and tearing their kimonos.

One day, Teru and several other young women from her village were out tending their vegetable plots in a remote area near the mountains of central Okinawa when some American soldiers appeared.
The women ran, but one of them was caught by the Americans.
Several hours later she reappeared in the village looking dishevelled.
Nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy.
‘We felt revolted,’ says Teru, ‘that the Americans could do that to a young girl.’
Significantly, little was ever said openly in the village about what happened — even after the young girl who had been raped had given birth.
To be raped was a cause for ‘shame’, and as a result the crime was never reported.
The young victim had to endure the silent censure of the other villagers for the rest of her life, and not surprisingly she never married.
Because few of the Okinawan women who were raped wish to speak of their experience, it is almost impossible to discover just how common was the crime.
But local historians working on Okinawa believe that there were many similar cases in the wake of the American victory.

When interviewed, James Eagleton admitted that in his time in Pacific he ‘heard of one man in my group that raped an old woman and was reported to me.
I was sergeant of the platoon at the time and I had the problem about what to do about it.
Was I to report him to the lieutenant or the company commander?
I needed to report him to somebody.
But the Japanese took care of it.
They killed him with a 91-millimetre mortar shell — landed right on top of him.’

As the Americans celebrated their victory on Okinawa it was obvious to Hirohito and the Japanese leadership that the war was effectively lost — but there was still no agreement on how Japan could end the conflict that was destroying the country.
‘The reason why Japan continued the war,’ says Masatake Okumiya, then a senior officer in the Imperial Navy, ‘is that for the previous half-century, through the first Sino — Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, up to World War I, the Japanese had never lost a war.
Japan had always won.
Thus, both the government and the military people didn’t know how to deal with losing a war.
They didn’t have any experience of defeat and they didn’t know how to end it.
In that situation, it was easier to continue the war rather than to make the courageous decision to lose it.’

The new prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, had made attempts in May 1945 to open a line of communication with the Soviet Union in the hope that the Russians could intercede on Japan’s behalf with the other Allies.
But the negotiated peace envisioned by the Japanese at this stage was a long way from the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allies.
The Japanese military were insisting not just on the Allies agreeing to keep the emperor system intact, but also on their accepting other surrender conditions — such as not occupying the home islands of Japan and giving the Japanese the right to try their own war criminals.
This was a package of demands that the Allies would never have accepted.