Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [249]
When Erroll Shearn was digging air-raid shelters outside the Kempeitai headquarters in Batavia, two young Japanese officers emerged. Speaking in Malay, they applauded his gang’s work. Shearn asked them cautiously: “How do you like winning707 the war?” They answered: “We don’t like war. We are engineers, not soldiers, and we would much rather be back at Tokyo University.” Shearn said: “I don’t like war either. I am a lawyer, not a soldier.” One of the Japanese pulled out a cigarette case, said, “You and I are friends. Have a cigarette,” and gave the Englishman the packet. At lunchtime Shearn’s benefactor returned, and asked if the prisoners had enough to eat. Told that they had not, he brought them food and tea.
Little old Mr. Yogi, civilian interpreter in Stephen Abbott’s Aomi camp, had learned his indifferent English in an earlier career as a ship’s purser. “Are you contented708, Abbotto?” he asked one day. The British officer shrugged. Yogi himself always looked miserable. Now, he said: “Some of my people are not worried by trouble. They are young people accustomed to bullying from superiors. I am made unhappy by it because, perhaps, I am too proud. I am older and have seen things different in Japan. You understand? I am proud of being Japanese, but I also know something of how Western peoples live. I am not ashamed of real Japanese customs—but the war has changed the real Japan. We were much as you are before the war—when the army had not control. You must not think our true standards are what you see now.”
Abbott wrote: “I realised that Yogi longed for peace as much as any of us. As a civilian he was treated with contempt by the soldiers…Above all things he wanted to regain his self-respect.” Yogi told the Englishman that his wife was sick with beriberi and needed meat: “I have made decision that our cat must be killed to give meat for my wife.” This unwilling samurai could not face killing the family pet himself: “Will you please ask your cook-sergeant to do this and make stew? I will bring cat tonight. Please do not tell other Japanese. They would laugh at me.”
The terror of Aomi camp was its commandant, Captain Yoshimura. Every prisoner lived in fear of the screamed summons from a guard: “Number one to office—speedo! Yoshimura-San waits!” This officer was “small, stout, effeminate and twenty-six years old. He walked with a Napoleonic strut and his cruel, spiteful eyes blinked at you through thick glasses. He had a high-pitched voice and, when he raved, this rose to a scream which in other circumstances might have been amusing. His power was enormous—extending way beyond our prison camp. In Aomi town everyone, from the mayor to the most humble peasant, obeyed his commands. He was the only army officer for miles around and, as such, took precedence over all civilians.” Yoshimura liked to draw his sword and swish it above the heads of prisoners, shouting contemptuously: “What are the lives of a hundred captives when thousands of brave Japanese are dying each day for the Emperor?”
Then came a day when there was an accident at the quarry where the prisoners worked, and which had already witnessed the deaths of forty of their number. This time, by a happy quirk of fate, it was the turn of Yoshimura to perish. The camp’s senior NCO, Sergeant Sumiki, demanded of Stephen Abbott how he felt about the news. Abbott murmured something about “a terrible tragedy709.” Sergeant Sumiki burst out laughing, thumped the Englishman on the shoulder and cried out: “You lie! You very pleased. Me, too, very pleased!” The Japanese guards hated the tyrant as much as the British did.
One day at Doug Idlett’s camp in the Philippines,