The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [90]
A Japanese officer told us that we were in a place called Omuta and that our camp was designated Fukuoka Camp 25. It was a few miles from a seaport that owed much of its modern prosperity to the efforts of an Aberdeen merchant called Thomas Glover. He had opened Japan’s first coal mines and developed the country’s first dry-dock in the city. Its only other claim to fame was as the setting of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. That seaport was called Nagasaki.
We were being put to work immediately. This time labouring in a nearby open-cast coalmine. I was still in a terrible state; I barely knew my own name and could hardly stand. I dreaded hard labour. We marched for half an hour along a dirt track to the coalmine, which was quite small, much smaller than the ones I knew of on the east coast of Scotland. We saw very few locals and when we did they never gave us a second look. Vegetable plants grew on the roadside verge. The Japanese mainland was literally starving and food was being grown on every available scrap of land. There was of course no improvement to our rations.
We filled coal carts with our bare hands and sometimes shovels, and then in groups of four had to push the laden carts along a small railway, fifty yards or so up a slight incline to a point where we would tip them over and the coal would fall on to a large mound that trucks would take away. It was quite an effort to get the carts moving, even with four of us hard at it. But I doubt I was much use to anyone – I was completely worn out. It was nothing short of miraculous that I was still alive and I was a husk of a man, certainly unfit to work. I could do no more.
There were several of these mines scattered around Omuta, one of which was owned by a family called Aso. For decades after the war the Japanese government denied that allied prisoners had been used as slaves in any of these mines and factories, and it was only recently when researchers proved that the family of Taro Aso, the former Prime Minister of Japan, had personally profited from the labour of 197 Australian, 101 British and two Dutch prisoners that we received any kind of grudging recognition.
In January 2009 Mr Aso finally acknowledged for the first time that about three hundred allied POWs had indeed been forced to work at the Aso Mining Company’s Yoshikuma coalmine in Fukuoka. Mr Aso would later become president of the company but until 2009 he maintained that the claims about POW labour could not be substantiated and because he was only four or five years old at the time he had no personal knowledge of it.
After a couple of days at the coalmine I went to the hospital hut to sign off sick. In the long room were half a dozen beds filled with acute dysentery and malaria sufferers. A doctor saw me enter and walked down the centre aisle. As he approached I thought I recognised his strut and ruddy complexion. When he got closer I could not believe my eyes.
‘Doctor Mathieson, I presume.’
He grinned and shook my hand in true, reserved Scots fashion. But I was unsure that he had recognised me so I nudged his memory: ‘Kanyu?’
‘Good to see you, Alistair,’ he said and genuinely seemed to mean it too. I was sure glad to see him anyway. He had already saved my life more than once.
Our quick catch-up chat did not dwell on the railway or the hellships – we just wanted to forget that lest it sap what little energy and will we had left. He did not even mention at this stage how he and his orderlies had nursed me on the second leg of our voyage while I was delirious. He signed me off work at the coalmine and reassigned me to camp duties once I had rested up. A few days later I reported to the orderly officer, a lieutenant who gave me all manner of duties to carry out that day. I was the general dogsbody of the camp and relished the role. I started off helping in the cook house, before emptying the contents of the Japanese latrines on their rows of tomato plants. I very rarely saw any Japanese in the camp, even during the day,