Ninja (30 page)

On the home front, students and staff traveled by train, truck, and even ox cart to a new headquarters in Tomioka, near the emperor's underground shelter in Matsushiro. They would lead the population in mass, nationwide resistance, demolishing facilities, infiltrating, and mounting assaults. Across the nation, Nakano School shadow warriors began drilling everyone—reservists, civilians, men, women, and children—for the coming invasion. For most, there were no weapons except bamboo spears with which to attack American foot patrols. Members of the so-called Izumi (“Spring”) Unit, one of the Nakano School's most secret programs, had undergone intensive training beginning in June, focusing on the use of explosives, hiding out in mountains and valleys, where they would be linked by runners rather than radio. When the time came they would throw off their civilian roles and bring assassination and terror to bear against Allied forces and collaborators. Resistance in the Tokyo area would be handled by the Yashima Unit, after an old name for Japan, whose commander, Arai Fujitsugu, had stocked hill caves with radios, weapons, clothing, and food, much of it taken from downed B-29 bombers. Ten Nakano graduates commanded one hundred men, who would organize civilians to mount attacks behind enemy lines. But in early August, Arai was told to shift his operation to the coast, which would mean certain death when the invasion came. Arai was appalled, and complained to his army headquarters.

Why throw away his men in vain? “What's the point of having them die a dog's death before fighting?” he asked.

“Is life so precious to you?” came the blinkered reply. “The kind of tactics you're talking about aren't written in the Military Academy textbooks.”

Of course, Arai and his men did not have to fight and die after all. Ten days later, Japan surrendered.

In the far north, too, in Hokkaid
o
and beyond, Nakano men prepared for battles that never came. Here they had to consider another possible enemy. Russia and Japan were (and are) old rivals in both the island chains that almost link Japan to Russia—principally the long thin island of Karafuto (the Japanese name) or Sakhalin, and the Chishima (or Kuril) group. In December 1944, an old Nakano acquaintance of ours resurfaced—Suzuki Keiji, mastermind of the Minami Agency and minder of Burma's Thirty Comrades, of whom Aung Sang Suu Kyi's father had been the leading light. Suzuki had been sidelined after objecting too vociferously to Japan's refusal to back Burmese independence. Now here he was on one of the Chishima islands, Etorofu (Iturup in Russian). The island, a two-hundred-kilometer spine of volcanoes looming above fir forests, had one good feature, a bay that provided fine anchorage. There was a brief operation to train twenty-five officers, fourteen of them from Nakano, to attack enemy ships and their shore-based headquarters, but it lasted only a couple of months, and the focus shifted to Hokkaid
o
, just in time for the surrender.

Not that their presence would have amounted to anything. When, three days after the atom bombs were dropped, the Soviet Union invaded Manchukuo, Japan's puppet nation on the mainland, Stalin already had Allied agreement that he could, as a reward, have the Chishima Islands. Today, as southern Sakhalin, they are still in Russian hands.

Nakano men were meant to be different, more creative, more flexible than their regular army counterparts. In building their new empire, all were supposedly “liberating” their Asian brothers and sisters. The training made some shadow warriors less arrogant, less xenophobic, willing and occasionally eager to put the interests of other peoples and cultures before their own. But there was nothing in their training that taught respect for the enemy. Of course, almost all governments and almost all high commands like to see their troops hating their opponents, lumping them together as the embodiment of evil. You can't have your men fraternizing with the enemy, because they might then not kill them with quite such abandon. But most wars have been against neighbors, and in most wars ordinary fighting men know that the enemy are also ordinary fighting men doing a job they dislike for some greater cause. In World War I, British and German troops referred to each other as Tommy and Jerry, with a certain affection. In World War II, some commanders won grudging admiration from the other side. But in the war with Japan, not even shadow warriors were touched by such humanity. They believed the Americans would kill and rape and maim indiscriminately, and did their best to make civilians believe it, too.

(Their attitude had its mirror image. Ordinary American fighting men who watched kamikaze pilots diving to their deaths concluded they were up against some new and perverted form of the human species. It was remarkable, given the horror and inhumanity of the conflict, that in victory American troops often surprised Japanese civilians with their lack of vindictiveness.)

There were, of course, atrocities on both sides. Nakano graduates were on occasion as barbarous in their behavior as any. One particular incident stands out. This occurred outside Fukuoka, which guards Hakata Bay on the southern island of Ky
u
sh
u
. Fukuoka, Sixteenth Area Army headquarters, had been pounded to rubble by American bombers. Four days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki vanished under mushroom clouds, the headquarters learned from foreign radio stations that surrender was imminent. Some shadow warriors decided to take out their rage and frustration on American prisoners. These men were airmen, and were considered criminals for their indiscriminate, indeed deliberate bombing of civilian areas (let alone the atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo of March 9, 1945, that killed or injured 120,000 and destroyed 250,000 homes).

On the evening of August 10, Captain Itezono Tatsuo summoned more than twenty shadow warriors, Nakano graduates who had not yet seen combat, and told them that they were to participate in the execution of eight American POW airmen. Permission had been given to practice guerrilla and martial arts training on them, this being a form of execution that had been widespread since 1937. They could use hands, bows and arrows, and swords. It would, Itezono said, boost the morale of his men.

If this was sadism, it was also sanctioned by the culture. Until late in the nineteenth century, samurai swordsmen had honed their skills by beheading the corpses of prisoners. It was, after all, something they might be called upon to do if they had to participate in
seppuku
, when a man who commits suicide by cutting his belly would be finished off by a coup de grâce from an aide.

The next morning, the prisoners were taken to Aburayama, a forested hill just south of Fukuoka. The prisoners were stripped. One was made to kneel. Itezono asked for volunteers. While others warmed up, practicing karate strokes, a lieutenant took a sword and, when given the go-ahead by a colonel, Tomomori Kiyoharu, beheaded the prisoner with one stroke. Four others were also beheaded. Then came the martial arts exercises. One of the men struck the fifth prisoner several vicious karate blows, and another volunteer beheaded him. Two others died in the same way. The eighth prisoner was forced to sit, while a Futamata probationary officer shot at him with a bow and arrow. The third shot pierced the man's head above his left eye. He was then beheaded.

Colonel Tomomori said that for his men the experience would be valuable for the decisive battle to come.
¹¹

That battle never came, of course. Japan surrendered instead, nine days after the A-bombs fell. Already the Nakano School, in its new buildings in Tomioka, was dead, condemned by orders to close it from its new commandment, Major General Yamamoto Hayashi. Across the empire, its hundreds of operatives obeyed orders to cease fighting. Though some, meeting in Tokyo, were for rebelling against the decision to surrender, they backed down after a major, Hata Masanori, an expert on Germany, pointed out that Hitler's determination to fight to the bitter end was disastrous for his people. Better to obey the emperor, he said, and focus on reconstruction. Even those who planned to continue the war underground as members of the secret Izumi Unit never put their plans into effect. As one American liaison officer and an expert in Japan commented, “When the Japanese were told by the emperor to stop, boy, they stopped.”
¹²
It was an attitude that, once conveyed to General MacArthur, helped ensure there would be no direct military rule by the United States, but indirect, relatively benign rule through a Japanese government.

On August 13, burning documents, weapons, and communications gear sent clouds of smoke billowing over the school's buildings. Two days later, at an assembly in the school's courtyard called by Yamamoto, the staff heard the emperor's voice on the radio calling upon his subjects to “bear the unbearable.” Then, wracked with emotion, Yamamoto set fire to the Nanko Shrine, the one dedicated to Kusunoki Masashige, which had been brought from the school's original buildings to Tomioka. A few remained to bury weapons in case of a future uprising. That was the school's formal end. Futamata, its specialist commando branch, closed ten days later.

Other than the small memorials that mark the sites, the Nakano School shadow warriors shared a considerable legacy. As Louis Allen, historian of the war in Asia, puts it: “In the long perspective, difficult and even bitter as it may be for Europeans to recognize this, the liberation of millions of people in Asia from their colonial past is Japan's lasting achievement.”
¹³

Fujiwara would have been gratified by Allen's words. His story makes a telling postscript to that of the Nakano School and adds a personal footnote to Allen's conclusion. At the end of the war, he was in Fukuoka, recovering from malaria contracted during the Burma campaign. A few months later he was back in India, subpoenaed to help defend the first three of almost twenty thousand Indian National Army officers being tried for treason by the British. The upcoming trial inspired protests, then riots. The British backed down, the men were released, British prestige plummeted, independence became a certainty. But Fujiwara was kept in India, to face accusations that he, like countless other Japanese, was a war criminal. He spent three months in Changi Prison, in grim conditions. Handcuffed, half-starved, shoved about by guards, Fujiwara was appalled that his agency could be confused with the imperial army. He defended himself vociferously. Transferred to a prison in Kuala Lumpur and reinterrogated, he was cleared of all charges. At the end of his incarceration, he was given a final interview, in a totally different atmosphere. The tall, balding colonel was puzzled. How was it that Fujiwara and his colleagues, who were really no more than naïve amateurs, had proved so successful? His answer is worth quoting, because it captures the essence of the ideals of a tiny minority, which were the complete reverse of the ethos that dominated the Japanese military.

I was at my wits' end when I was given this difficult assignment shortly before the war, when we started out with nothing and with an extremely poorly trained staff. Then I became aware of one thing. The British and the Dutch had made remarkable achievements in the development of industry and in the construction of roads, schools, hospitals and houses, in their respective colonies. They were, however, developed and built for their own benefit, not for the welfare of the indigenous people. . . . The [colonial powers] made no pretence to understand native national aspirations for freedom and independence, but suppressed and emasculated them, [and] had no love for the local people. . . . I made a pledge with my men that there was no other way but to put into practice our love and sincerity. The indigenous people who were hungry for love reached out for the mother's milk that we offered. I believe this is the reason for our success.

This was the attitude that infused Japan's wartime shadow warriors. Yes, it's naïve, even childlike in its simplicity. It never had a chance to grow up, because the F. Kikan and the other covert agencies were quickly opposed by the Japanese leadership. On the other hand, Fujiwara would perhaps always have remained a Peter Pan idealist, because he saw his role as making independence possible, not engaging in the complex, difficult, compromising business of creating new governments. Love and sincerity can remain pure and simple, if not tested by reality.

15

TO JAPAN, WITH LOVE

If you always assume you are facing the enemy, you will never drop your guard in any way.

Ninja instructional poem

ON
DECEMBER
6, 2011,
THE
GUARDIAN
PUBLISHED
A
REPORT
on the violence that broke out in London and other cities in the U.K. in August. The article, “Reading the Riots,” was based on 270 interviews with participants. It revealed that the rioters were young and poor and felt so alienated from society that they felt no shame at trashing stores and stealing the contents. In many areas, as word spread of coming violence, few saw any connection between their actions and the individuals on the receiving end. Almost all shops were fair game, especially big stores and those selling clothes and electronic goods. A major factor in the spread of the riots was the slow response by the police. The explosion of violence, the absence of immediate police action, the rage, the heady sense of freedom, the feeling of power and of entitlement—all combined into a toxic mix.

One nineteen-year-old from Battersea described how he plundered shops at least twelve times, stashing the stolen goods in a hiding place: “I felt like I was a ninja, on a mission . . . like I was jumping in all the shops, using front rolls, yeah, run in there, get a bag out there quick . . . tie it up, put it back on my back, roll out, run to my little road that I know no one else knows.”

“I felt like I was a ninja.”
Here is a young man untroubled by morality, whose sole purpose at that moment was theft, which had to be done surreptitiously, and this, he imagines, was what ninjas did.