veins to ascertain the volume at which death occurred. In the case of another prisoner his lung was excised to find the limits to which the bronchial tubes may be cut before death occurs.
The brilliant novelist, Endō Shūsaku, in his book The Sea and Poison (1958), confronted the problem of individual responsibility in wartime in a study of a doctor who had been ancillary to the test team and on return to civilian practice in peace-time was dogged by his. sense of guilt. Endō’s translator, Michael Gallagher, comments that his thesis is that the West is informed by the faith (he is a Catholic) even when formally rejected: the East is informed by a kind of pantheism so that the East knows no tension of opposites like good versus evil, flesh versus spirit, God versus devil. The East, he argues is a ‘concave’ world which has no God, the West is a ‘convex’ world which has acknowledged the existence of God.
In Tokyo many kempei deserted their units, panicking at the Emperor’s broadcast but not omitting to fillet HQ records of prison camps like Ōmuta in Kyūshū or the interrogation centre at Yokosuka near Yokohama. This overall display of docility is in marked contrast to the spirited dynamic resistance movements in Thailand and Burma during the Japanese occupation. But harsh treatment of Japanese by the Russians in Manchuria had its counterpart in Japan during the predominantly American occupation with GIs frequently accosting women in the street, or actually assaulting them, assaults resulting in women committing suicide or becoming street prostitutes. Victims of robbery by GIs were rarely able to recover their property or receive compensation.
B and C Class War Criminals included men who had no real chance of defending themselves and were executed. An example of mistaken identity (taking the charitable view) when the wrong man was to be put to death was Captain Wakamatsu Shiguō, commandant of Kilo 100 camp in Burma and later of the hospital camp at Nakhon Pathom in Thailand. According to testimony by prisoners at both those camps he was a humane man of principle, kind to prisoners and exerting his jurisdiction by protecting as far as he could the men under him. At Singapore in September 1945 Major Robbie Robertson, RAE, confirmed these views in his defence, and related how the Moji maru transport in which he himself was a prisoner was bombed in the Andaman Sea. In her stern she was carrying explosives, a fire broke out, and a Japanese officer left his cabin and with no regard for his own safety threw the explosives overboard. This was Captain Wakamatsu, under whom Major Robinson later served in Kilo 100 camp. The court commuted Wakamatsu’s death sentence to life imprisonment on 13 August 1946, yet despite this he was hanged by the Australians on 30 April 1947 at Singapore, an act of retaliatory judgement without retrial. His story, first told to me by Robbie Robinson, was set out in the Asahi newspaper on 4 October 1982.
The militaristic take-over of 1931 re-asserted the right, written into the Constitution of 1898, of giving the war ministers in the Cabinet direct access to the Throne. In 1913, the Constitution had been changed to allow retired officers to serve, but in 1936 the regulation was changed again making the Army and Navy ministers men on active service only. Thus the Army could topple the Cabinet by refusing to nominate a serving officer to serve as minister.
In 1940, Army Minister Lt-General Tōjō Hideki transferred Lt-general Nakamura Aketo, commander of Yamashita’s 5 Division, ‘for violating orders to avoid a clash in advance of the Japanese takeover of French Indo-China’. Nakamura emerged as commander of the kempeitai and by 1945 commanded all 50,000 forces in Thailand, the General with whom my encounter has been described.
Japan’s last war? It is possible that the economic development of the Pacific Basin, with its transfer of world dominance from the Atlantic to the Pacific, would leave Japan powerful enough to influence a consolidation of Australasia, China, and ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, The Philippines), and realistic enough to remember that in war the winner does not take all.
After the war Futamatsu published An Account of the Construction of the Thai-Burma Railway in 1955, and my correspondence with him since 1979 culminated in his illustrated pamphlet, Recollections of the Thai-Burna Railway in 1980. The tale had come full circle from marines in the Pacific to his recreations of the railway. As a Buddhist, he might stress how we all are recreated in an unending series of afterlives leading (we hope) to a predestined nirvana. For Christians, life after death goes on ‘out there’ in a heaven each individual imagines for himself. For the Agnostic, Flanagan and Allen sang of the dawn which comes again after dreams underneath the Arches:
We are men drenched in soaking rain,
Gritting our teeth, gritting our teeth …
But if you wait, Spring comes again,
And boats come up again.
He had been distressed by inaccurate, biased articles and books by Australian and Japanese journalists, and by the brilliantly acted but grossly distorted denigratory account of Japanese railway engineering talent put over in the film version of Pierre Boulle’s novel, Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai, which has been widely shown in Japan under the title Bridge built in the Battlefield. Ex-prisoners-of-war, to whom a preview was given, tried to get excised some of the worst errors, but to no avail. Futamatsu determined the time had come for a definitive history to be published while Japanese and Western survivors were still alive and could verify his statements. His book was published in 1985, a greatly more detailed work than his earlier two pamphlets – an objective, unbiased account, historically accurate, Across the Three Pagodas Pass: the Story of the Burma-Siam Railway, of which my edited translation follows.
Boulle’s 1952 novel contained fewer impossibilities than did the 1967 film, but none-the-less the two principal characters, Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness) and Colonel Saitō (played by Hayakawa Sessue) are caricatures of type-cast Indian Army officers and of Japanese officers passed over as unfit for front-line service. Boulle was unaware that a railway engineer took precedence over a mere prison-camp official. The bridge in the novel was a wooden bridge and so was the bridge in the film which was built in Sri Lanka. In the novel it was not blown up. The real bridge over the Kwae Yai was a steel bridge with eleven steel spans of 20-metre pony-type Warren curved chord half-through trusses. It was, of course, blown up, but by bombing and not by sabotage.
Personnel employed on the railway included about 11,000 Japanese military, 61,106 prisoners-of-war, and 182,948 Asiatic coolies. Of the prisoners-of-war 12,399 were recorded as having died before leaving Thailand and Burma, and it has been estimated that over 90,000 Asiatic coolies died on this work.
My translation is edited to remove a few redundancies, to simplify a few tautologies and to omit detail such as the initial formation in Japan of gunzoku railway engineering units, of small interest to Western readers. The translation is followed by a fuller bibliography than you normally find in works for the general reader.
To the Western reader the intrinsic quality of the book lies in four directions. First, the author is at pains to present the truth in detail about the construction of the railway. Second, he tries to present a case, unconvincingly, for playing down what lay behind a Western journalist’s slur, ‘the death railway’. Third, he describes the real reason why the Japanese did not ratify the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-War, but works the case round to a doubt in his own mind as to how far the Japanese Army violated its clauses. Fourth, justifiable professional pride in the techniques and skills of a civilian railway engineer makes him sceptical of the professional regular soldiers’ attitudes.
Futamatsu printed twenty-eight small photographs in his original Japanese text. They cover the following places and persons: Railtrack over Krian River: Seletar airfield burning: railway stations at Singapore, Nong Pladuk and Banpong: the 0-km post at Nong Pladuk: looking at the Mae Khlaung crossing-point in July 1942: the plank viaduct at Arrow Hill: the Mae Khlaung steel bridge: the same after being bombed: Colonel Imai Itaru: jungle along the Kwae Noi: labouring at earthworks: air photographs of the steel bridge: Kamburi and Kinsaiyok areas: hut construction:
