A civil engineer who I will call Bill (not his real name) I once worked with and who became a close friend in spite of the age difference was captured on Bataan in early 1942 after hiding in the jungle for weeks when the Filipino US Army unit he commanded became separated from the main US force and was practically destroyed. He was shipped to Japan in the hold of one of the Japanese POW "hellships" and somehow managed to stay alive until his camp was liberated after hostilities ended in 1945. But of the approximately 2000 original POWs in his camp at the beginning only about 80 were still alive at the end. Of course thousands more prisoners were brought in to replace the dead, so the camp remained crowded and filthy throughout the war.
He was in a camp near the coal mines on the northern island of Hokkaido where the winters are cold and snowy. They had no shelter from the winter weather except a wooden plank floor surrounded by a board fence with large gaps between boards and a rusty tin roof that leaked like a sieve. They were worked 12-14 hour days 7 days a week in the coal mines with guards standing watch to make sure they worked hard and steady. They were given a 5 centimeter rice ball dipped in a thin fish broth at morning and another rice ball with a few ounces of broth at night. Bill was 6' tall and weighed 190 lbs when captured and only 85 lbs when liberated. His back was covered with scars where guards crushed out their cigarette butts just for the fun of it. Jis face and arms were also scarred by various abuses, and his teeth were false because his natural teeth had been either knocked out by guards or had decayed so badly they had to be pulled after he was liberated. All prisoners were treated that way, and if a prisoner looked up or made a sound when he was burned by a cigarette butt he was beaten to the ground with a rifle butt and then stomped and kicked by the guards.
Bill saw thousands of prisoners die for lack of food, exposure to freezing weather, overwork, and not even the most basic medical care, and many more died because of severe abuse and torture by the sadistic guards. Each morning started with the prisoners lined up facing each other. They were ordered to punch the man opposite them in the face with their fists, and if the guards thought either man didn't punch hard enough both men were beaten to the ground with rifle butts or wooden truncheons. Minor rules infractions were severely punished, often by beheading or bayoneting witnessed by the other prisoners. Breaking a shovel or other mining tool was punishable by beheading if the officer in charge felt like it would set an example, or by a severe beating if he didn't.
My friend Bill passionately hated the Japanese one and all until the day he died, and who could blame him? Several years after the war he was arrested and briefly jailed in California when a Japanese-American man standing on a downtown sidewalk made a disparaging remark to his wife in Japanese when Bill walked by. Bill understood Japanese, and he attacked the man with his fists until passers by pulled him off. Until he passed away he would not ride in a Japanese car or have any Japanese made appliance, TV, radio, or any other item in his home.
Some people who knew Bill thought he was wrong to be so deeply prejudiced against the Japanese people long after the war was over and Japan had become one of our closest allies. But I respected his feelings, and I admit that I can understand his hatred to some degree myself even after all the years since Bill passed away. The Japanese military personnel got off way too easy after the war to suit me after the inhuman cruelty that was done by them to Allied POWs during that war. IMHO every Japanese army and navy officer should have been hung or shot for allowing and often encouraging their men to abuse and kill POWs.
But I don't hate the Japanese people today. I believe they belong to a far different kind of culture than that of their militaristic grandfathers and great-grandfathers in Imperial Japan 60-odd years ago. As a committed Christian I am commanded by Christ to forgive everyone who asks for forgiveness, and I do when asked and also when not asked in many instances. But AFAIK no Japanese official has ever asked for forgiveness from their former American prisoners or their families.
What a moving and touching story, thank you so much for posting.
So very much pain remains after all this time....it’s evident in so many posts here. There is so much pain in this thread that I haven’t been able to bring myself to respond to every post, as I always ‘try’ to do in other threads. The pain here is too great, and I hope that posters whom I haven’t replied to don’t feel offended.
I am thinking that perhaps one reason why there hasn’t been any sort of ‘national apology’ for these barbaric acts from Japan is that even after all of this time, most Japanese people honestly do not know the extent of these horrors. They have likely been shielded from knowledge of them by generation after generation who didn’t want their exalted grandfathers to ‘lose face’ in history.
Having never been to Japan, this is only my guess based upon reading, but it seems to me that it would be one possible logical explanation. The specter of having to contend with ‘loss of face’ over their defeat in WW2 would be magnified exponentially by coming to terms, on a national / cultural level, with a true, unvarnished and complete understanding that their own fathers and grandfathers joyfully engaged in such depraved inhumanity.
By suggesting this, I don’t by any means intend to say that it excuses them; quite the contrary.
Particularly considering the ease by which so much of this information is available nowadays, for an entire culture to wilfully turn it’s back upon it’s own horrific transgressions against all of humanity makes them far less than an honorable and virtuous culture and nation.
But I don’t think that Japan is alone.....has Russia issued a “national apology” for the gulags and the millions who died under Stalin? Have they tried to make amends, paltry as any effort would be?
Although I think that it’s wonderful and commendable that many are able to forgive these evils from within the context of Christianity or Judaism, this, I think, addresses the place that the Christian or the Jew occupies in the view of God. It does not, however, address the place that the Japanese or the Russians occupy with God, and my hope is that all guilty parties will one day be called to answer for what they have done, as well as their failure to come to terms with what they have failed to acknowledge to their fellow man while on Earth.