Vanished (18 page)

If you made it, you were on your way—streaking across the interminable ocean to a fortress of caves, cannons, phosphorus bombs, and twenty-five thousand Japanese troops.

SECRET POLICE

S
adae Inoue had come to Palau for a heroic defense of the Japanese perimeter, but by August 1944, his mission was looking more heroic than defensible.

A lot had changed in four months. The Japanese defeat on Saipan had shaken Prime Minister Tojo from power, removing the man who sent Inoue to the islands. With Tojo gone, the rest of the military was pulling back to defend the Philippines. That left the garrison at Palau more exposed than ever, and as the front line withdrew, so did their supplies. For the soldiers on Koror and Babeldaob, food and fuel were scarce. As the historian Mark Peattie described the situation in
Nan’yo
, “During the summer of 1944, the Japanese high command decided to pull back to the Philippines,
making the Palaus expendable
. This [decision] fatally imperiled the Fourteenth Division. On the one hand, the Tokyo high
command concluded it could not spare more ships, planes, or troops to reinforce the Palaus, since these were now needed to defend the Philippines. On the other, it could not risk losing elements of the division trying to evacuate it by sea, even if shipping were available to transport it. After July 1944, the Palau Sector Group was essentially on its own.”

As if all that weren’t enough, now that the islands were isolated, the Allied assault was coming. With naval aviators buzzing the islands on photographic recon missions, it didn’t take a close reading of Sun Tzu to imagine that an attack was imminent.

Already, the Palauan islanders were evacuating the city. There was little reason to stay. Though the colonial Japanese had been relatively benign in the 1920s, building roads and schools and transforming Koror into a modern city, the relationship between Palau and Japan had been degenerating ever since. Islanders would not soon forget the segregation policies of the 1930s, when their children were taught to reject island customs, mimic Japanese manners, worship photos of the emperor, and celebrate jingoistic holidays like the “Day for Appreciation of the Imperial Flavor.” And as the war escalated, indignity gave way to oppression. “
All residents of the Palau islands
,” the historian Wakako Higuchi wrote in
Remembering the Pacific War
, “including both Palauan and Japanese women and children in elementary schools, were made to work on the construction of military facilities.”

Faced with such dismal prospects in town, many islanders returned quite literally to their roots. Building camps in the Babeldaob jungle, they learned to subsist on the tubers of the taro plant as their ancestors had. When the war dragged on and the taro ran low, they turned to wild nuts called
keyna
, and when the
keyna
ran out, they scraped by on the poisonous fruit
belloi
, soaking its bumpy brown flesh to remove toxins, then boiling it and choking it down. Life in the jungle camps was hot, wet, dangerous, and dispiriting, but at least it didn’t require them to build barracks for the occupying army.

But the Palauan refuge on Babeldaob was not to last. As US planes
began to canvass the islands in late July, an increasing number of Japanese soldiers began to settle on the big island. There had been a small detachment of the kempei-tai on Police Hill since the beginning of the year, but according to a journal kept by the commander of the kempei, Colonel Aritsune Miyazaki, the rest of the unit began to arrive on Babeldaob soon after. In fact, on the same day in July that George Bush sank his first enemy ship in the northern atoll, a flight of thirty-one additional American planes laid waste to the kempei facility on the island of Koror. The next day, while Roosevelt, Nimitz, and MacArthur were gathering in Hawaii, another strike demolished several of the Fourteenth Division’s buildings downtown. Then, the following day, yet another bombardment left the division headquarters on Koror in shambles. “
Bombers attacked. Barracks were burned
. Forty soldiers and sixteen natives were killed,” Miyazaki scrawled into his journal. Within days, both the kempei and division troops were relocating to Police Hill.

For Palauans, the sight of Japanese officers streaming onto Babeldaob was as ominous as it was unexpected. Peering through a curtain of foliage at the massive construction on Police Hill, they began to whisper that the Japanese had come for them. Soon there were a number of theories and rumors circulating through the Palauan camps, and today the wartime legends of Palau offer a vivid glimpse of the island experience.

One of the most widespread stories that summer involved a bunker that Japanese soldiers were building in the district of Ngatpang. The bunker, islanders believed, was too large to be an air raid shelter. Instead, they guessed that it was part of a secret plan to exterminate them. The Japanese, they whispered, were still angry with the Palauans for abandoning the city, and one day soon, they would come into the jungle to round everyone up. They would lock them all inside the new bunker and detonate a bomb. There was no evidence of such a plan, and none would emerge after the war, but in an atmosphere already rife with resentment, the story quickly gained the currency of fact. Six decades later, many Palauans still spoke of the “extermination plan” as though it were settled history.

At the same time, a countervailing legend formed in the jungle, this one with an American hero. His name was Captain Morikawa and he was ethnically Japanese, but was said to be a spy for the United States who had penetrated Inoue’s command. By day, Palauans said, Morikawa walked through the jungle in all-white clothes. When he encountered the islanders, he would offer them food, water, and advice on how to tend their land. A skilled farmer, he helped many families improve their gardens. Then he would return to Inoue’s headquarters at night to spread misinformation about the Palauans—tricking the Japanese commander into thinking the islanders were far away. Eventually, the Palauans wrote a song to honor Morikawa, with the lines “They were preparing an air raid shelter at Ngatpang, in an attempt to exterminate us all. Were it not for our rescue by
Morikawa, Roosevelt’s spy
, we would have all perished.”

Years later, the historian Wakako Higuchi investigated the Morikawa legend. She found a retired officer named Yoshiyasu Morikawa living in Japan, who had spent two years working for Inoue during the war. Trained as a surveyor, Morikawa confirmed that he often walked through the hills and jungle alone. His assignment, he explained, was to traverse Babeldaob in search of possible US landing sites, but Inoue had asked him to be especially friendly toward the Palauans he met. The Japanese, Morikawa insisted, were nearly as frightened of the islanders as the islanders were of them. “According to Morikawa, one great anxiety the Japanese military had during the war was the civilian unrest that prevailed throughout Babeldaob,” Higuchi wrote. “In order to alleviate the food shortages [Morikawa] taught the Palauans how to enlarge their farms, and especially
how to cultivate tapioca
and sweet potatoes.” It was a measure of how deeply Palauans mistrusted the Japanese that they interpreted Morikawa’s kindness as proof that he wasn’t really Japanese.

“The Pacific War was the turning point in relations between Japanese and Micronesians,” Mark Peattie wrote. “It began with the generally passive and sometimes even willing acquiescence of the islanders toward
Japan and its war effort; it ended with the
near total abandonment of the Japanese
cause by these same people.”

But if the war drove a wedge between Japan and Palau, it also brought up divisions within the Japanese army itself.

—

O
FFICIALLY, THE KEMPEI
were Japan’s military police, but in practice they filled a role more like secret police—tracking down political enemies, real and imagined. Like the Nazi Gestapo, they were widely feared, functionally autonomous, and influential in ways that did not come through on an organizational chart. Often, the leader of a kempei unit answered only to a regional general, and only in an oblique way. In a place like Palau, that meant the kempei commander experienced
little oversight from Sadae Inoue
, who spent far more time worrying about the gun emplacements on Peleliu, Angaur, and Battery Hill than about the comings and goings of a few kempei men.

That suited Aritsune Miyazaki just fine. As leader of the South Seas Kempei-tai, Miyazaki was in some respects Inoue’s opposite. Where Inoue was a battle-hardened general, with such a martial bearing that his own wife described him as “strict,” Miyazaki was long-winded and excitable, given to regaling his subordinates with stories of his own valor. As his personal assistant, Keishiro Imaizumi, put it, “
The unit commander liked to talk
about himself, and when he grew tired of that, he would talk about old times—for example, stories about the time when he was in officer’s school, stories about women, stories about the time when he was Kobe detachment commander . . .”

The kempei under Miyazaki were divided into sections, including the Intendance Section, for administrative affairs; the Special Higher Section, to dispense military discipline; and the Criminal Section, to manage the unit’s prisoners. Among them, the Criminal Section was by far the most feared among Palauans. It had been the first kempei
detachment on Police Hill, and it was the one that might arrest a Palauan and hold him indefinitely for a minor offense.

The commander of the Criminal Section was Kazuo Nakamura, who relished his independence from Miyazaki almost as much as Miyazaki sought distance from Inoue.
Born on a farm just west of Hiroshima
, Nakamura was skittish, careful, and mistrusting; he found Miyazaki’s braggadocious manner offensive. As a child, Nakamura was routinely beaten by an alcoholic father, and he dropped out of school after third grade to work on the family farm. In his teens, he began to follow long days in the field with even longer nights on the town, and by the time he was twenty, he’d contracted a debilitating strain of syphilis, which left his legs permanently unstable, his ears ringing, his vision blurry, his reflexes slow, and his penile urethra glutted with ulcers. After that diagnosis, Nakamura met and married a young girl, Fujiko, who lived near his family—and soon she was ill, too. A year after the wedding, their first child was born with severe intellectual disabilities, and a year later, a second child arrived with gross nervous system malfunction. By the time Nakamura was drafted into the army at age twenty-seven, his assignment to the elite kempei-tai seemed like a rare stroke of luck. Yet he quickly discovered that, in Miyazaki, he would answer to a commander with little sympathy for his health, and whose violent tantrums mirrored his father’s.

“If we opposed his intentions,” Nakamura said of Miyazaki, “he would scold us and berate us angrily in a thunderous voice, or strike us, or
chase us subordinates with his sword
, shouting that he would kill us.”

In his first months on Police Hill, Nakamura had enjoyed the distance from Miyazaki, but the dank tropical air of Babeldaob worsened his health. His migraines were constant and racking; he felt a strange burning sensation on the skin of his head; and the syphilis began to creep into a large vein by his heart, shunting the flow of oxygen to his brain. At the end of the war, doctors would diagnose him with “paresis of the insane.”

Somehow, despite his condition, Nakamura managed to supervise a
dozen men in the Criminal Section, many of them with health complications to rival his own. Yoshimori Nagatome was
a sergeant from the southern tip of Japan
, whose wife, aging parents, five siblings, and nine children all lived together on a three-acre farm, where half of them suffered from a debilitating autoimmune disease. Nagatome had been spared the illness, but contracted yellow fever within weeks of his arrival in Palau, and by summer he was grappling with a persistent case of bronchitis as well.

Sergeant Major Chihiro Kokubo was beset with a case of dengue fever that seemed to recur or flare up every few days, and he had been fighting dysentery since the day he landed on the islands. Kokubo had grown up in extreme isolation. Born to a large family, he’d been sent to live with childless relatives at the age of eight, taking their surname so that he and his parents could inherit their fortune. As part of the arrangement, Kokubo was rarely allowed to see his mother and father. “
I always experienced loneliness
when I saw my brothers and my own parents,” he said later. Drafted at the age of twenty-one, he’d served two years on the home islands, then a year as a civilian, before being drafted back into the kempei and sent to Palau.

As crude as the conditions were on Police Hill, they continually grew worse. While the Long Rangers relocated from Los Negros to Wakde Island in late August, the kempei were in the middle of a move themselves, building a new hideaway in the jungle below Police Hill. In a dark patch of forest, they carved a network of caves and tunnels into the banks above a small stream, and by the time the Long Rangers began their missions to Palau, most of the kempei had taken up residence in the sodden jungle camp. Trudging through the mud between caves, it was easy to wonder how they had sunk so low—from the exalted status of secret police to
the crude and primitive conditions
of the natives they had come to occupy.