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By Root 1502 0

But those less inclined toward their culture’s prejudices may still have been vulnerable to the call to brutality. To be made responsible for imprisoning people is surely, to many guards, an unsettling experience, especially when they are tasked with depriving their prisoners of the most basic necessities. Perhaps some guards forced their prisoners to live in maximally dehumanizing conditions so that they could reassure themselves that they were merely giving loathsome beasts their due. Paradoxically, then, some of the worst abuses inflicted on captives and POWs may have arisen from the guards’ discomfort with being abusive.

Writing of his childhood in slavery, Frederick Douglass told of being acquired by a man whose wife was a tenderhearted woman who had never owned a slave. “Her face was made of heavenly smiles and her voice of tranquil music,” Douglass wrote. She lavished him with motherly love, even giving him reading lessons, unheard of in slaveholding society. But after being ordered by her husband to treat the boy like the slave he was, she transformed into a vicious “demon.” She, like the Ofuna guards more than a century later, had succumbed to what Douglass called “the fatal poison of irresponsible power.”

Of all of the warped, pitiless men who persecuted captives at Ofuna, Sueharu Kitamura stood above all others. In civilian life, by different accounts, he was either a sake salesman or a movie scenario writer. In Ofuna, he was the medical officer. Fascinated by suffering, he forced sick and injured captives to come to him for “treatment,” then tortured and mutilated them while quizzing them on their pain, his mouth curved in a moist smile. Known as “the Butcher” and “the Quack,” Kitamura was Ofuna’s most eager instigator of beatings. He was a massive man, built like a bison, and he punched like a heavyweight. No official in Ofuna was more hated or feared.

Though under great pressure to conform to a culture of brutality, a few guards refused to participate in the violence. In one incident, a captive was clubbed so savagely that he was certain he was going to be killed. In the middle of the assault, the attacking guard was called away, and a guard known as Hirose* was ordered to finish the beating. Out of sight of other guards, Hirose told the captive to cry out as if he were being struck, then pounded his club harmlessly against the floor. The two acted out their parts until it seemed enough “beating” had been done. The captive believed that Hirose may have saved his life.

What Hirose did took nerve. Everywhere in Japan, demonstrating sympathy for captives or POWs was taboo. When a child living near the Zentsuji POW camp expressed compassion for the prisoners, her comments became a national scandal. Camp personnel caught trying to improve conditions for POWs, or even voicing sympathy for them, were sometimes beaten by their superiors. “The general opinion towards POWs at that time was very bad,” wrote Yukichi Kano, a private at another camp who was beloved by POWs he tried to assist. “There was always some risk of to be misunderstood by other Japanese by making humane interpretation of our duty. To resist against the wrong hostile feeling, prejudice, and lack of knowledge was not very easy for the lower rank soldier like me.”

At Ofuna, merciful guards paid the price. One officer, upon learning that another guard had shown leniency to captives, assaulted the guard with a sword. During his nightly walk from his kitchen job to his cell, one captive would regularly see a guard who refused to beat prisoners being singled out for gang attacks from his fellow guards.

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At Ofuna, captives weren’t just beaten, they were starved. The thrice-daily meals usually consisted of a bowl of broth with a bit of vegetable and a bowl or half bowl of rancid rice, sometimes mixed with barley. It contained virtually no protein and was grossly lacking in nutritive value and calories. It was camp policy to give diminished and/or spoiled rations to captives suspected of withholding information, and at times the entire camp’s rations