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By Root 1563 0

to learn anything. So I kept playing stupid.” When the corporal assigned to tutor Fujita began to receive beatings from superiors for failing in the task, he began to threaten his understudy in turn. He would rush the American in a rage, back him up against a wall, and furiously whip his saber in front of his face, so close that Fujita could feel the breeze. Fujita was fearless and defiant, boasting to his captors how with E Battery of the Second Battalion, outside Surabaya, he had killed Japanese soldiers in battle, five of them, and had helped shoot down a Zero fighter plane. The daily threats of death inoculated him to fear and deadened the impact of physical abuse.

The Japanese must have realized this, because they responded to his bragging with renewed entreaties and protests. “You’re Japanese,” they would say. “No, I’m American,” Fujita replied. “No, the Americans are enemies.” “No. You’re the enemy,” the Texan said. The Japanese officers listened to the words coming from the mouth of the son of a Nagasaki native and shrugged. What could be done about this wayward samurai?

In time Fujita was something of a sideshow, if not a celebrity. When dignitaries visited camp, the commandant would bring him out and put him on display. “Look what we have here. A Japanese who doesn’t want to be a Japanese.” Meanwhile, the enlisted men—most of them were Koreans, eager to settle scores with Nippon on the best of days—seethed, cherishing the thought of getting Fujita alone one day, a Japanese whom they would have license to beat.

It happened on August 6, 1943, when the officers and the sergeant major were away at a meeting in Nagasaki. The guards seized their chance. Word went out to get Fujita. Two guards grabbed him and took him out to the guardhouse. A guard known as “The Jeep” pulled a large club from a rack of clubs the guards kept handy for setting prisoners straight. He bashed Fujita for all he was worth. They hit him with fists and rifle butts, from all sides, from front and back. Fujita fought to keep on his feet. “I was bound and determined those sons of bitches weren’t going to get me on the ground,” he said. Beatings could turn lethal if a prisoner fell. They beat him from the guardhouse, forcing him to stagger outside toward a fifty-foot cliff. He held his head high as the blows rained down. Somehow he avoided going over the cliff into the bay. The Koreans beat him back in the direction of the guardhouse. Finally tiring, or perhaps growing bored, they stopped, shoved him to the ground amid a throng of POWs who had gathered in witness, and disappeared. The American sergeant missed the next three days of work at the shipyards because he could not see through the swelling in his face.

Prison life in Japan was static. Prisoners worked in fixed locations, in mines or at shipyards. In contrast, the fluid nature of the Burma-Thailand railroad kept prisoners on the move. A lifetime ago, at Changi, the Australians had taken to calling themselves the “Java Rabble.” Colonel Nagatomo picked up the phrase at his welcoming lecture in Thanbyuzayat—“the rabble of a defeated army.” They witnessed the rabble gathering and moving, slogging up the line in loincloths, strung out on the march, skeletal from hunger. Proud British units—Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordon Highlanders, and First Manchesters—traveled with tough Australians, veterans of the Syrian campaign, the Texas artillerymen, and the men of the Houston, the few men who actually put up a fight for Java.

From time to time, Japanese used the road, marching toward the front in Burma. Timor ponies pulled carts full of their gear. Sometimes it was the soldiers who did the pulling. Word passed that they had eaten their ponies as their rations failed. Clyde Fillmore saw a platoon of young Japanese infantrymen, “small, illiterate, absurd little creatures” marching along to the front near 83 Kilo Camp. “Ragged, hungry and bewildered we saw them pass, part of a drama they neither desired nor understood.” They would ask for drinking water from time to time from the staff