Posted on 02/26/2007 9:16:10 AM PST by Kaslin
For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War?
He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a grueling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan — after number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees.
“My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines, she called me ’war crazy,'” said Makino, a frail old man who lives alone in Hirakata near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realized.”
Only in the twilight of his life, has Makino begun to talk about the secret which he had carried.
In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Japanese Imperial Navy, he was stationed in the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort — the medical dissection and murder of living prisoners of war.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Guess Eastwood left out this chapter.
Why is this man walking around?
While I would prefer to see this man torn limb from limb--slowly, and then fed to hungry dogs...
The fact that he suffers mentally is perhaps the best I can hope for.
Next time he goes to the Phillipines, he can go to the US Cemetery there and apologize to my uncle. I am sure he'd be willing to forgive him. I am not.
The Japanese were a lot more brutal than the Nazis. Many POWs died, like 1/3 of them.
He cut out 'still beating hearts' for educational purposes.
I am so glad that he did not win an Oscar for his enemy-promoting movie. Japan is a great ally today, but was awful during WW2.
Of course, this same Hollywood has done whatever it can to make sure we don't turn a Middle East enemy (Saddam) into an ally (Iraq) today.
Every bit as evil and brutal as the Nazis.
My Mom and Dad were the WW II generation, and years later my Mom admitted that she didn't like Japanese, she couldn't feel any love for the Japanese people and she preferred not to be around them, based upon stories she heard from her fellow citizens who fought in WW II. Today such a viewpoint would be called politically incorrect.
Wow, this is beyond belief!
I have "flyboys" right beside me. I haven't started reading it yet. I have read that the Japanese were very had on American airmen, officers in particular.
had = hard
If he had that much experience cutting open bodies, why didn't he do his own and long ago?
My husband was glad Eastwood did not win an Oscar. Ironic that he was nominated for the Japanese view of the war.
Yes and we buy there stuff now.
This never happened, the man is some kind of right-wing fanatic. Ask the Democrat's Party or the Japanese government... /s
This is why Poppa Bush said he carried a sidearm... to do himself in rather than fall captive and have his liver eaten teriyaki style.
It doesn't promote the Imperial Japanese at all. It depicts them brutally bayonetting unarmed American soliders. Did you see it?
Yes, it was.
If I recall the stories of this were classified until sometime in the 1990s?
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