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I had beriberi710. I was sitting holding my foot and typing with one hand. A Japanese interpreter named Sekiyawa asked what was wrong with me, and I told him. Next day he handed me a bottle of Vitamin B. I never saw him again, but I felt that he had contributed to me being alive. Later, at the coalyards in Japan where we worked, there was a shunting engine driver named Yoshioka. One day he was resting by his can when we saw a daikon, a big Japanese radish, floating in the water by the tracks. We bent down and pulled it out. I stuffed it in my pants. Yoshioka asked: “What are you going to do with that?” I said: “Eat it.” He said: “You cannot. It’s dirty. Give it to me.” Later, he gave it back to us cleaned, sliced and cooked. From that day on, he always arrived with his leggings full of corn or something else for us to eat.

Lt. Masaichi Kikuchi, commanding an airfield defence unit in Singapore early in 1945, was allotted a labour force of three hundred Indian POWs from the Changi compound. The officer who handed over the men said carelessly: “When you’re finished, you can do what you like with them. If I was you, I’d shove them into a tunnel with a few demolition charges.” Kikuchi was told of the standing order that any prisoner who disobeyed orders or attempted to escape was to be executed out of hand, “and I knew that this was being done.” However, when two of his Indian POW detail broke out and were returned after being betrayed by local Chinese among whom they had sought refuge, Kikuchi handed them over to their own officer, a captain of the Indian Army, for punishment. He often asked himself afterwards why he had not killed them, as so many others were killed. A cynic would suggest that it was because Japan’s defeat was plainly so close. Kikuchi himself simply claimed to regard executions in such circumstances as unjustified: “I told myself after the war711 that the only reason I had been allowed to survive was that I had done nothing bad to others.” Likewise, in 1945 American and Dutch doctors at Kobe POW hospital signed a joint testimonial to its Japanese medical supervisor, Dr. Hiyajiro Ohashi, praising the extraordinary efforts of himself and his staff to assist Allied prisoners.

The point of such stories is not that they contradict an overarching view of the Japanese as ruthless and often wilfully sadistic in their treatment of despised captives. It is that, as always in human affairs, the story deserves shading. All the Japanese described above showed nuggets of courage, in defying a pattern of behaviour towards prisoners which their culture encouraged, even demanded. There is another issue. Because the Allies won the war, much was heard about the maltreatment of prisoners in German or Japanese hands, almost nothing about the reverse of the coin. There is ample anecdotal evidence that some American, British and Australian guards in POW camps behaved inhumanely towards their charges.

Some German prisoners—sensationalists claim tens of thousands—died in Allied hands in north-west Europe in the summer of 1945, chiefly because the administrative machinery was overwhelmed by their numbers. This was an argument advanced to justify some POW deaths in Japanese hands in 1942. Nobody in London or Washington, however, troubled to investigate the fate of abused German or Japanese prisoners, far less to frame indictments against Allied personnel. In the nature of military affairs, those selected to guard POWs are among the least impressive material in every nation’s armed forces. None of this represents an attempt to suggest moral equivalence between Japanese treatment of Allied POWs and the other way around; merely that few belligerents in any war can boast unblemished records in the treatment of prisoners, as events in Iraq have recently reminded us.

WHAT ENABLED some men to survive the unspeakable experiences of captivity, while others perished? Mel Rosen attributed 5 percent to self-discipline, 5 percent to optimism—“If you didn’t think