Ninja (28 page)

Harimau died a few days later. Fujiwara had him commemorated in Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, set up after the Meiji Restoration in memory of those who died for the emperor. Then—well aware of the ex-bandit's propaganda potential—he convinced the newly established Japanese movie company Daiei that his story had commercial possibilities.
The Tiger of Malaya
appeared the following year.
⁶

One of Japan's greatest strategic problems—indeed, a prime reason for war—was oil. Japan had a few small fields in Niigata Prefecture, but nowhere near enough. Without more, the carriers, battleships, planes, factories, the tanks and trucks in Manchukuo—all would be useless. There was an excellent source within reach—the oil wells of Palembang, in the swampy, jungly interior of Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies (which became Indonesia in 1945). The Dutch had every reason to fear an assault, and were prepared. Not that their small defenses would be a match for the Japanese war machine, but, given the difficulty of a one-hundred-kilometer advance either up a small river or through the jungle, they would have ample time to blow the wells up before they could be taken.

What to do? The Nakano School was given the job of finding an answer.

Assistant commandant Colonel Ueda Masao devised a plan: Paratroopers would swoop down in advance of an upriver assault. But no one knew anything much about oil fields, and anyway, Japanese paratroopers had no experience of jumping into them. Nakano's commandant commissioned a small team who spent a month researching newspapers and journals, visiting the Niigata fields, and persuading Japanese companies that had been operating in the region to hand over information and pictures. After a few practice jumps, the paratroopers—six from Nakano, another half dozen army men, all “barely old enough to shave”—set off in mid-January 1942, hopping from southern Japan via Taiwan, Vietnam, and Cambodia to their jump-off point on the Malay Peninsula.

One Nakano man, Lieutenant Hoshino Tetsuichi, with only a few parachute drops under his belt, left a dramatic account of what happened next, one of the most successful paratroop operations ever, wonderfully retold by Stephen Mercado.

Hoshino and his five companions had assumed they would jump in the first wave. Instead, they were told they were relegated to the second. They were incensed. That evening Hoshino accosted an officer to protest, arguing that his group knew the terrain and the facilities better than anyone, while he himself had studied Malay. Moreover, he lied, he had actually scouted Palembang. It worked, sort of: He was given a place on the first jump, though his five Nakano companions were not. That night he tossed and turned with nerves, wondering if he could possibly hope to win over the locals, round up the technical personnel, and disarm the demolition charges in time. The next day, February 14, he was on his way, complete with currency and propaganda leaflets proclaiming in Malay: “People of Indonesia are our friends. We have come down from the skies. Everyone, please put your minds at ease.” Below was Singapore, smoking under the Japanese assault, one day from surrender. As they approached their drop zone, the leader called him to the door, pointed to the refinery three thousand meters below, and yelled: “You follow me!” So Hoshino, with no experience in action, found himself second in the invasion. He landed safely and ran through a refinery gate with some others. Seeing some Indonesians in an air-raid shelter, he passed out some of his leaflets and questioned them (so his Malay was up to the mark): 350 troops, no tanks or armored vehicles. He raced on to other shelters, found three captive Dutch technicians, and learned there were no demolition charges, which he confirmed by checking key points. By evening, his group had secured most of Palembang. The next day, the second company of paratroopers—including Hoshino's five Nakano companions—arrived, as did the main force advancing up the Musi River. The Dutch retreated to Java, and Japan had the oil it needed to fuel its war.

Hoshino was left to spread more propaganda, prepare the way for occupation by troops and petroleum engineers, and to play a later part in the story of Nakano alumni, which will emerge in due course.

Japan's involvement with Burma might have worked out well, if only the high brass had listened to the leader of its covert operations, Major Suzuki Keiji. Suzuki, whose agency employed many Nakano School graduates, was another sort of Lawrence of Arabia figure—more hands-on than Fujiwara, though equally idealistic, equally romantic—as devoted to the Burmese and their independence from British rule as Lawrence had been to the Arabs. As the historian of his exploits puts it, “he devised unorthodox and audacious schemes which left people in astonishment.”
⁷
And like Lawrence, Suzuki was seen as “wild” and sidelined by a conservative and fearful establishment, dedicated not to Burmese independence but to military rule, with dire consequences for Japanese interests in Burma. This is Suzuki's story.

By 1940, British-ruled Burma had become a problem for the Japanese military, because they wanted to control all China, and Chinese nationalists and Communists were fighting back, Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists in particular being supplied by the British from Burma along the 1,120-kilometer Burma Road, newly built by 160,000 Chinese across the eastern Himalayas, which included an infamous twenty-four-bend zigzag descent into China. The way to close the Burma Road was to support the Burmese struggle for independence, headed by Aung San, famous father of a now famous daughter, the pro-democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. His organization, the Thakin (Master) Party, had of course been banned by the British. In March 1940, Suzuki, a specialist in Anglo-American affairs, then an obscure backwater of intelligence operations, was told to come up with a plan to cut the Burma Road.

Suzuki, with a piercing gaze and “fierce” moustache, seized this chance to make his mark. He entered Burma posing as a journalist under the name Minami Masuyo.
⁸
Hearing that Aung San and a group of companions had escaped Burma to evade arrest, he used private funds to have Aung San sent to Tokyo, where the two men met. Suzuki, eager to show his fighting spirit, boasted to his guest of killing Russian civilians, including women and children, in Vladivostok when in 1918–22 Japanese troops joined Allied forces to oppose the communist revolution; the Burmese, he said, should fight with equal ferocity against the British, with Japanese help.

Suzuki's wildness spurred his superiors into action. In February 1941, they authorized Suzuki to head his own network, a joint army-navy operation known as the Minami Agency after his nom de guerre. His boss was a Nakano instructor, Oseki Masaji, and his team included five Nakano graduates. Working in Bangkok, they were to back Aung San by smuggling arms into Burma and training his group to become guerrillas—thirty of them, known later as the Thirty Comrades, one of whom was Ne Win, Burma's future military dictator.
⁹
The uprising was to be in June, after a few months of training in a secret camp on Hainan off China's south coast.

It didn't happen. The Burmese didn't like the authoritarian training regime, nor did they like being made to bow every morning in the direction of the imperial palace in Tokyo. And the Japanese army changed its mind on independence, because they were now planning the assault into Southeast Asia. June passed, with no action. The Thirty Comrades found themselves taken from Hainan to Taiwan. Only in December, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, did the high command turn to Burma. Aung San and the Thirty Comrades were brought to Bangkok, where Suzuki put together a volunteer force, the Burmese Independence Army (BIA), with some two dozen Nakano “advisers”—all to no avail. The imperial army did not want anything to do with the unpredictable Suzuki and his irregulars. Sidelined into a separate mini-invasion, they entered an area of minority groups hostile to the Burmese and pro-British. Suzuki did his dashing best, riding a white horse, leading assaults on local police, railways, and offices of colonial administration. In a separate BIA operation, Ne Win headed a small group, including two Nakano graduates, into Rangoon. But all hopes of immediate independence vanished when the Japanese army, unwilling to relinquish Burma with British India on the doorstep, set up a military administration, promising independence at some unspecified date in the future. Suzuki, his Minami Agency, Aung San, Ne Win—all, like Lawrence and the Arabs, learned the hard way that “imperial interests trump ideals of liberation” (as Mercado succinctly put it).

Suzuki pestered his army bosses to distraction, until they saw him as a rogue element who had “gone native.” But he still had influence, directing the BIA, now a force of thirty thousand well stocked with captured arms, and with considerable combat experience, against the retreating British. In May 1942, Burma fell. In a chaotic retreat, British, Burmese, and Chinese fled over the northern borders, just before the monsoon struck. On June 11, Japan's army ordered the dissolution of Suzuki's agency and scattered his staff to new appointments (some to the Dutch East Indies, with results detailed in the next section). Aung San, with no political role, was graciously allowed command of the Burma Defense Army, a 10 percent rump of the BIA. He, Ne Win, and the other Thirty Comrades were part of an impotent puppet force, subject to Japanese “advisers” and under surveillance from the dreaded military police, the Kempeitai. Suzuki was transferred to Tokyo, where he spent the rest of the war organizing military transport.

So ended Burma's dreams of independence under the Japanese. Under Suzuki and his ninja-like operation, what had started with such high and liberal hopes foundered on the rocks of Japanese military and political conservatism. Independence of a sort came in 1943, but under a puppet regime. Japan's decision to treat Burma as an occupied nation rather than an ally virtually guaranteed that when events turned against Japan, Burma's nationalists would turn back to the British and lead a behind-the-lines revolt against those who had once seemed their liberators. In early 1945 the BNA's eight thousand men started to fight the Japanese, something that Aung San was keen to do before the British arrived in order to lay the foundations for independence from Britain.

The shadow warriors of Nakano staged one other mission of high drama, because it involved raiding Australia itself just at a time when Japan was on the way to losing the war—high drama, a few comic elements, and absolutely zero significance. So it goes with covert operations. There's no telling what they may lead to.
¹⁰

In February 1943, the army decided to reconnoiter northern Australia from its base in the Dutch East Indies. Not that they lacked information, because they had very detailed reports from naval intelligence. The problem was that the reports were too good to be true. They suggested an on-the-spot source, and there was none. In the main base of Ambon, the Nakano School graduate Yamamoto Masayoshi decided to check for himself, using his own people and also eight from Suzuki's Minami Agency, who had been redeployed from Burma. Setting up his headquarters on Timor, some 640 kilometers off the Australian coast, he contracted two boats from some reluctant Japanese fishermen, who were nervous of being blown out of the water by the Australian navy. That might happen anyway, Yamamoto told them. Better to have a gun aboard and rely on us to rescue you. But there was another problem: Japanese Nakano alumni did not look much like Australians, whether white or native. So Yamamoto decided to use Timor locals to go ashore, providing a sort of life insurance for them by building huts for all the families.

By the time the operation started, Yamamoto had a little society of some three hundred men, women, and children, all on his payroll. It was proving an expensive business. To pay for it, Yamamoto approached a colleague who was running his own agency, none other than Hoshino Tetsuichi, the same Hoshino who had parachuted second in line to seize the Palembang oil wells. Yamamoto had been Hoshino's senior in Nakano, and he tried pulling rank. Surely Hoshino hadn't used up all his funds? Surely he could use some to help pay for Yamamoto's operation? Surely Hoshino, as the junior, was in the position of a son, and owed Yamamoto help out of some sort of filial duty? Surely imperial funds should be used in the most effective way, whoever controlled them? Hoshino saw the force of these arguments, or perhaps lacked the authority to counter them, and did his bit.

The time came for action. There was a rumor of an Allied naval base being built in King Sound, the fifty-kilometer-wide bay on the coast of western Australia. The Japanese navy wanted the rumor checked out. They couldn't risk it themselves, because Australian planes would sink them. One of Yamamoto's fishing boats would be much more suitable. But, Yamamoto complained, a fishing boat would also be much more vulnerable. Never mind, he was told. This was an order.

The boat, the
Sh
o
ei Maru
, was made ready, with an antitank gun fitted to the bow and three heavy machine guns aboard. A light bomber would keep watch above, and for much of the way the crew would be in contact with base by radio. But once they got near the coast, a radio signal would give the game away, so crew and landing party—four Japanese and twenty-five locals—would rely on forty pigeons for land-to-sea communication. At midnight on January 10, 1944, the No. 1 Australian Expeditionary Intelligence Unit set off over rough seas.

Come the dawn, the wind died. The boat approached a speck of an island just over halfway across the Timor Sea. High above, Captain Suzuki Hachiro (nothing to do with “wildman” Suzuki who ran the Minami Agency) in the light bomber spotted a shocking sight—an Australian submarine on the surface, with men preparing an attack. No one on the fishing boat had seen the danger. Suzuki ordered his pilot to open fire, saw the crew race for the conning tower, and as the sub began to dive, aimed a bomb that struck the bows. An oil slick spread across the surface. On the fishing boat, the crew and landing party, finally aware of the threat, waved in relief and delight as the bomber turned for home to refuel.