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By Root 4546 0

and the war crimes trials ceased, Japan began to press for the proper burial of its war dead. For many Japanese the recovery of a dead soldier’s remains for burial on home soil was crucial to the continuity of families and their chain of ancestry. On his visit to Tokyo in 1955 Nu offered Burmese co-operation in the recovery of the bodies of the more than 85,000 Japanese soldiers who had perished on Burmese soil.58 The government formed a survey mission to plan the recovery and repatriation of the dead. For years afterwards towns and cities in Japan were host to sad little ceremonies as urns and caskets were returned from Burma. More gruesome tales went the rounds. The activities of guerrilla levies and special forces in north Burma, the Philippines and Borneo had led to an upsurge of head-hunting among the tribal peoples. Quiet negotiations went on to have severed heads returned to the military authorities and properly disposed of. Soldiers’ groups were particularly active along the Burma–Siam railway, of course, and 1955 saw a series of memorial services hosted by the Thai and Burmese governments and the British Burma Star Association. The huge numbers of Thai, Burmese, Malayan and Burmese civilians who had perished on the railway were also commemorated, but most remained without named graves. Their bodies had simply been thrown into huge lime pits.

Many people’s memories were very personal, almost picaresque. When he was in northern Burma the writer Norman Lewis met a cheerful Burmese former soldier who had served in the forces fighting alongside the Japanese. He took Lewis to a tree where, he said, Chinese soldiers had tried to hang him as a traitor following his capture. Laughing heartily he explained how the Chinese were too ‘weak from semi-sickness and starvation’ to hoist him off the ground. His proposed execution, according to Lewis, degenerated into ‘a lurid Disney-like farce’ with the Chinese attempting to pinion him while hoisting him into the air. Eventually he escaped, but the memory was not so easily defeated. It is unlikely that Lewis was the only person he took back to his hanging tree to marvel at the wound on the branch where the rope had rubbed it raw.59 There were also grander, public memorials. In Mandalay, nursing nuns at a hospital had vowed to construct a miniature Lourdes if the building was spared during the wartime bombing. At the end of the war a Japanese POWcamp had been stationed near the hospital and the commanding officer had despatched some of the inmates to do the sisters’ bidding. The POWs set to work enthusiastically and on Mandalay Hill, traditional home of votive shrines, they created a miniature mountain landscape with a meandering stream and a delicate Oriental bridge – to Lewis’s eye it was Lourdes as it might have appeared on a willow-pattern plate. The Japanese captain himself carved the statue of the Virgin, which bore a striking resemblance to Kwannon, the Japanese goddess of mercy.60

Religion played an important part in people’s reconstruction of the past. The Burmese intellectual Khin Myo Chit had passed through an atheist and communist phase in her youth. She had been disgusted by the corruption and selfishness she discovered while hiding in a monastery during the Japanese invasion of 1942. In the straitened circumstances of newly independent Burma, however, she rediscovered a simpler and heartfelt Buddhism, as she recovered from a mental breakdown with the help of her meditation master. She became a ‘lay sister’ in a monastery, replicating in her own life the prime minister’s tilt towards Buddhism and illustrating how Nu’s revivalism was more than a simple political tactic.61 Several Allied soldiers, too, recounted how they had to dig deep into their reserves of Christian faith to find forgiveness for the brutality of their Japanese captors. But as early as ten years after the war, soldiers on both sides were beginning tentative meetings for the purposes of reconciliation and creating a true record of the terrible events they had witnessed. For their part, the Japanese were