‘Commit suicide rather than dare to shame me by returning home as an ex-prisoner…’
—The mother of a Japanese soldier
In 1940, Kochi City was a large rural town set in lush, green hills at the mouth of the Niyodo River, which flows through the mountainous island of Shikoku. The 144th Regiment was raised here. Keen volunteers, the sons of rice farmers and tradesmen, they were ordered to form up at the nearby village of Asakura, on 1 August. Many—such as Imanishi (who would join the Yokoyama Advance Force)—were experienced troops who had participated in the invasion of Shanghai in 1937.
The soldiers of the new regiment were trained to excel at beach landings. They practised night and day, using local boats and old weaponry, on Katsura-Hama Beach, a place of scenic beauty. The training started in March 1941, and the regiment swiftly grew expert at the mock-invasion of its home town.
The Kochi combat troops joined an amalgam of carefully chosen units—mountain gun artillery, engineers, supply and transport troops—to be later joined by the 41st Infantry and 15th Independent Engineer Regiments. The force was called the Nankai Shitai—the South Seas Detachment—and commanded by the diminutive figure of Major-General Horii Tomitaro. Crack naval landing units, such as the Sasebo 5 Special Naval Landing Party would support the Shitai’s southern trajectory, especially during beach landings. At this stage, there was no plan to attack Papua, according to the 144th Infantry Regiment Official Record; the Shitai’s mission was to occupy Rabaul and Guam Island. The 3500 troops of the 144th Regiment formed the Shitai’s core infantry—formal recognition of the famed courage (known as Tosa-jin Kishitsu) of the Kochi soldier, whose ancestors had helped depose the Shogunate and restore the Emperor. His performance in Shanghai had impressed Tokyo—not least his expertise at beach landings.
The Nankai Shitai had a special status, being the only Japanese force to come under the direct control of Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo, and not, initially, answerable to any single army division.
Called up in the strictest secrecy, the troops were ordered to wear mufti to their first parade and hide their military possessions in a cotton bag. Local curiosity was to be discouraged. The troops were told little—only that they were heading for the South Seas, the furthest outpost of the Japanese Empire. It is unclear exactly when the Japanese Navy pressed the case for the invasion of Papua, and possibly Australia. But in early 1942, the shadow of the idea had little impact on the Army, whose commanders would reject it as a bad idea of the Navy’s (the two services did not get on well). It was not until 2 February 1942 that General HQ in Tokyo approved the overland attack on Port Moresby.
The Shitai left Osaka Port on 27 November 1941 and sailed on a southerly course; the troops knew not where. In early December the Shitai occupied the island of Guam, with little resistance, and on 23 January, they ran their barges ashore at New Britain. After fierce resistance by a small Australian force, they overran Rabaul and captured about a thousand Australians, 160 of whom were tied to coconut palms at Tol Plantation and bayoneted to death1—‘combat training’ for young Japanese warriors.2
Bayonet practice on live victims was common, and appeared to have been officially sanctioned.* It ‘eradicated the sense of fear in raw soldiers’, says the Kure Naval Station’s ‘Notes for Unit Commanders’: Chi Matsuri [literally ‘Carnivals of Bloodshed’] are most effective,’ it advised. ‘Killings with the bayonet should be carried out whenever an opportunity occurs.’3
Surviving veterans of the 144th claim not to recall the Tol Plantation massacre. Yet the execution of prisoners was routine. Imanishi says he personally intervened to stop the execution of an Australian medical officer. He asked for it to be delayed a day. Over his last meal, the Australian spoke of his family back home, and Imanishi persuaded the executioner to let the man live.4
Private Hisaeda Akiyoshi seemed a model Japanese warrior. In his diary he reminded himself of the need for ‘Resolution to death’ and ‘Necessity of victory’. At all times he would ‘Be loyal to Emperor’s orders’ and ‘Strictly enforce military discipline’.5 He would not ‘needlessly kill or injure the local inhabitants’; nor would he rape women or burn local property in enemy territory ‘without permission’. This was all in accord with his copy of the ‘Guide to Soldiers in the South Seas’. This pocket guide is a disturbing read because one senses that, with permission, or under orders, some Japanese troops might readily burn, rape, loot and kill—such was the brutal code of obedience imposed on the Japanese soldier. That they were obeying an order, of course, hardly excuses Japanese atrocities – of which there were many committed against civilians. That should be set against the fact that Australian soldiers raped Japanese women in Kure City after the war, and Americans raped hundreds of Okinawan women (including twelve-year-old girls).
Many Japanese soldiers, like Hisaeda, were unusually sensitive to their environment and conditions, but rarely is this latent humanity noted—such is the intensity of condemnation of a minority’s war crimes. Reading their diaries, it is clear that many ordinary troops were decent men caught up in extraordinarily violent circumstances over which they had no control. That one feels the need to remark on this at all is perhaps a comment on the banal uniformity of Western perceptions of the Japanese people. Like many soldiers, Hisaeda wrote innocuous poetry and drew exquisite landscapes of the invaded territories. In his diary of 28 May 1942, he drew the Rabaul volcano, under which he penned haiku, the Japanese verse form of three lines and seventeen syllables, which tended to describe the natural world:6
The full moon
Reflects my home village
Like a mirror of water
Pacific Ocean
Enemy ship disappearing
Quiet waves7
Hisaeda was one of about 10,000 troops of the Nankai Shitai who garrisoned Rabaul in August 1942 and impatiently awaited the order to invade Papua. Their advance force—the Yokoyama—had already captured Kokoda. Lae and Salamaua were occupied in February. After the Japanese navy’s failure at the Battle of the Coral Sea (May) and crushing defeat at the Battle of Midway (June)—losing four aircraft carriers and 250 planes—the seaward invasion of Port Moresby was abandoned. Instead, Imperial Headquarters hastened plans for the overland invasion of Port Moresby, and alerted Lieutenant-General Hyakutake in Rabaul. The Nankai Shitai was promptly transferred from General HQ in Tokyo to his command, as part of the 17th Army.
Who were the soldiers of the Nankai Shitai? Were they the monstrous fanatics as portrayed in the West? How far did they conform to Allied propaganda posters of ‘loathsome, buck-toothed, little yellow savages’?8
The cliché is well known: the Japanese soldier was a fanatical, sword-wielding warrior, heir to the samurai code, for whom surrender was unthinkable. His training inculcated a sense of unquestioning obedience within the collective will of a vast military machine. His destiny was to die fighting for his Emperor, or to terminate his life in captivity. He was entranced by the ‘divine cause’ of imperial conquest, and thoroughly imbued with the righteousness of his mission, for the sake of which any act appeared justified, however cruel or barbaric.
That is the Western image of the Japanese soldier, and to some extent it was true. But there are heavy qualifications, and exceptions. For one thing, the troops of 1942 bore little resemblance to their samurai antecedents. The vast majority of the twentieth-century Imperial Army were not of the original warrior class; they were typically conscript peasant farmers or public servants. Their most-likely ancestors were the proletarian ranks of the new army formed after the Meiji restoration, in the late nineteenth century, when the samurai were in a state of terminal decline.
These intense young men sent off to fight the White imperialists and conquer the Pacific were fashioned as an ‘Army of the Gods, liberating a billion people in East Asia’.9 It appeared that any act that expanded the Japanese Empire, crushed resistance and served the imperial will would be exonerated. Their attacks on defenceless civilians in China, notably in Nanking10, can be seen as the barbaric manifestation of this expansionist policy.
In building their new army, successive regimes ruthlessly appropriated the Spartan traditions of the old warrior code. In two respects did the modern soldier resemble the samurai: burnt into his being was utter obedience to his superior; and scored on his heart was the wish to die for his country and Emperor. Of course, there were varying degrees to which Japanese soldiers were receptive to such relentless propaganda; many questioned and later resisted their brutal indoctrination. But even the samurai were not so blindly obedient as the Japanese troops of 1942, as one son of a samurai family explained: ‘If his lord did a wrong or shameful thing, the samurai had to scold and correct his lord to choose a better way. If his lord was stupid enough not to listen to him, then the samurai should commit Hara-kiri to make his lord understand.’
In the eyes of the new government, however—most of whom were from the samurai class—the Imperial Army would be like no other, an army for whom duty was weightier than a mountain and death lighter than a feather (in the words of The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors). Under the blazing red orb of the Sun God would march the ultimate expression of the art of war. The Japanese military machine would conquer Greater East Asia—and the world—by virtue of one ineluctable truth: Japanese troops, unlike their all too human Anglo-Saxon enemies, were not afraid to die.
The typical Japanese soldier welcomed death, thirsted for a glorious end, and volunteered eagerly for suicide missions. (Again, there were degrees: not all pleaded for the chance to sacrifice themselves—many despised the regime that demanded their corpses.) Suicide was state-ordained; schoolchildren were told to write to soldiers, urging them to ‘die gloriously’.11 There are many stories of very young officers weeping at being denied the opportunity to steer a human torpedo into the belly of an enemy battleship or fly a rocket onto the deck of an aircraft carrier. The kamikazes were revered as living gods at the end of the war. The army, too, had its suicide squads—‘human bullets’—the supply of whom seemed inexhaustible. Australian veterans recall the uniquely terrifying experience of facing waves of such troops rushing from the jungle with bayonets raised, yelling ‘Banzai!’ or ‘Yaruzo!’ (‘Let’s do it!’) or ‘Chiesuto!’ (‘Damnation!’ in the Kagoshima dialect).
The single lightning strike, the unexpected body blow, followed samurai tradition. It would never cease until the enemy capitulated. One Japanese instruction manual stated: ‘each man must go into battle with the firm conviction that he would not stop unless the enemy had been completely annihilated’.12
The soldier gave his life for his Emperor. There was no greater glory than to die for Hirohito, whose divine presence would one day rule over Hakko Ichiu, ‘Eight Corners of the World Under One Roof’.
The soldier’s sacrifice was absolute, as conveyed by a popular song of the day (originally a poem by Otomo no Yakamochi [718–785AD], to which music was added in 1937):
I will become a water soaked corpse
If I were to go to the mountains
I will become a corpse sprouting from the grasses
Even far from our Emperor
I will give up this life
I have no regrets
There will definitely
Be no looking back.13
Many Japanese troops did see themselves as the appointed emissaries of the imperial will. It might have been a scorned, or laughable, piece of indoctrination, were it not so sincerely believed. Others simply acknowledged their duty, for the sake of Tatemae, or ‘making a public impression’. In practice, however, most Japanese soldiers were heavily armed puppets. They blindly did what they were ordered to do. Realms of power weighed on the ordinary soldier’s mind, and his notebooks and diaries reveal little dictatorships of thought, packed with self-warnings, chastisements, and personal checklists: ‘I must be worthy of the Emperor’, ‘I must be resolute unto death’, ‘I must be a better soldier’.
The notebook of Okamato Shigeo, who was captured at Milne Bay, is typical: ‘To serve is loyalty to the Emperor which is being loyal to your parents,’ he wrote. During a field lecture entitled ‘Imperial Instructions’ he noted: ‘Emperor—Parent—Leader. Emperor is Aragitogami—Personification of the Way.’ He reminded himself to ‘Be thoroughly prepared for your duties; reflect and examine things before doing it; be reliable.’ He told himself: ‘To exterminate the enemy in the attack is to become a warrior.’14
Senior officers’ and staff diaries carried endless lists of the aims of their ‘Sacred Campaign’:
In theory the Emperor enjoyed absolute temporal and spiritual power under Article III of the Japanese Constitution; in practice Hirohito was a figurehead, the amanuensis of Tojo’s military junta. In many troops’ minds, nonetheless, Hirohito occupied a sacred place of transcendent purity. Never would their devotion falter, not in the worst extremes of battle.
The summit of the Emperor’s spiritual power was his incarnation as the Shinto Sun God, which apparently beamed down on the Japanese soldier wherever he may be: ‘The Imperial Army is an immortal army,’ Major-General Okabe told the Nankai Shitai on 29 December 1942, ‘and we are immortal soldiers’.16
The person and power of the Emperor were placed constantly ‘in the forepart of the troops’ consciousness’.17 Acts of worship were conducted daily. Troops in their bomb shelters and foxholes would bow in the direction of the Imperial Palace before battle; few failed to honour Japanese memorial days.*
Many officers of the Nankai Shitai clearly saw themselves as leaders of an army ‘on a mission to free East Asia from the yolk of white colonialism’.18 Their exuberance matched that of their comrades at the fall of Singapore, who sang:
This day we have waited for! The history of aggression, blood-stained by the whip of America and Britain burning with selfishness! Look up, as the sun sets on their withdrawal from their positions: the Sun of East Asia rises. Ah! This deeply stirring morning! Singapore has fallen.
Raise both hands high! Shouting the victory of East Asia, vowing the union of blood, the great march now goes on. May its rhythm echo through the world! Ah! This deeply stirring Greater East Asia! Singapore has fallen.19
Copies of the song were found on the bodies of soldiers in Buna.
The Nankai Shitai were similarly embarking on a divinely inspired crusade. The Western 34th Butai of the 144th Regiment sang*:
Of Heavenly Japan,
The Emperor’s power is clear
We must build a new World Order,
Everlastingly, all nations under one Roof.
While we have this weighty Mission,
Even if in the waters, grass-grown corpses soak,
Let us go, Comrades, with hearts united—
The Western 34th Regiment!20
How were such soldiers produced—insofar as an individual is the product of his environment? The Japanese boy’s training in obedience and his exposure to the culture of self-sacrifice started at junior school. It was no coincidence that several ministers for education were army generals. Japanese schools were run like little armies. The Japanese boy was a piece of malleable metal to be hammered on the military anvil. He was ferociously disciplined, and routinely beaten.
Children were exposed to death as ritual from a very early age. Tales of Hara-Kiri** was on the junior school curriculum in 1940. It tells a story of the first year of the Meiji era (1868), when clansmen of the Tosa tribe assaulted the crew of a French vessel. Twenty men were obliged to commit hara-kiri to atone for this disgrace. This group disembowelment was performed in the presence of a French minister, who stopped it after the eleventh man died: ‘He could not bear it any longer.’21
The punishment regime immeasurably hardened when the boy reached the age to attend military training school. One leading private told his Allied interrogator: ‘The first three months of military life were hardest. Whether they were right or wrong, recruits were kicked and knocked about.’22 He knew of one or two suicides. Another, Sakamoto Eizo, stated that he was sometimes hit so hard he was unable to eat for days.23
Watanabe Fukuichi, Second-Lieutenant with Yazawa Butai, survived the special officers’ training school. He reported that some of his tutors seemed to enjoy watching him stumble through his duties. Reveille was at 6.00 a.m., when he and his comrades were taken out for ‘warming up exercises’ which consisted of rubbing down their naked bodies with a sharp brush or towel. Manoeuvres in the snow were frequently held; some went all night and into the next day.
Japanese officers treated their own troops sometimes worse than they treated prisoners. The cruelty to which Allied POWs were subjected ‘partly reflects the brutality to which their captors were subjected’, notes an Allied intelligence report.24
The troops of the Nankai Shitai had experienced the full rigours of Japanese military training by the time they left Kochi. The officers were the products of a grinding daily regime of study, exercise and punishing indoctrination, animated by a ‘will that knows no defeat’.
The cult of ritual suicide served the modern army, too: an army that fought to the death was believed to be unconquerable. So the military junta resurrected the samurai ideal that a dishonourable life was not worth living.* A soldier must destroy himself rather than submit to capture. If he failed he would be severely punished on his return to Japan—executed, as happened to repatriated prisoners from China, or gaoled. A Manual of Military Law, read out to the 144th Regiment before they left Kochi, noted that, depending on rank, or other extenuating circumstances, the death sentence that normally applied to returned POWs may be commuted to a maximum of 30 years’ imprisonment.25
Elite troops needed no such encouragement. The Nankai Shitai, as befitted a crack unit, were determined to commit suicide if caught; many left Rabaul eager to give their lives for the Emperor. One POW said: ‘Each soldier kept one grenade or bullet to be used by him for taking his own life.’
Imanishi, Yamasaki and Shimada agreed that, if captured, they would certainly have killed themselves. To this day, belief in the tradition survives. Indeed, one survivor of the Cowra break-out—a 144th veteran—returned to Kochi, joined the New Guinea Veterans’Association, and helped organise their annual reunions. Some families are still angry that the man did not kill himself in captivity, and refuse to attend the reunions.
A persuasive incentive for a Japanese POW not to return was the attitude of his family to his capture. Many wives and mothers believed their husbands and sons would kill themselves, if captured, rather than return to disgrace the family. On his departure, one POW’s mother told her son to kill himself rather than ‘dare to shame [her] by returning as an ex-prisoner’.26 There are numerous similar examples. Another POW emphatically declined a suggestion that he might write to his wife, as being a prisoner was to him the greatest shame imaginable. However, evidence suggests that much of this apparent pressure from mothers and wives was mere lip service paid to the new regime.
Shame could ruin the family. Fathers of imprisoned sons lost their jobs or citizenship; children of imprisoned fathers were ostracised at school. ‘If it were known in his neighbourhood that he was a POW,’ noted the dossier of POW Kunisawa Yuki, a 27-year-old private in the Kusunose Butai, ‘his children would have no chance in life. He himself would lose his citizenship.’27
An especially pathetic case was that of Matsuoka Kazuo, a 25-year-old superior private, captured near Gona on 12 December 1942. He failed to blow himself up with his last grenade because he was shot in the hand before he could pull the pin. He told his interrogator he would have to commit suicide if sent back to Japan.28
First Lieutenant Horiguchi Tsugio, a medical officer and veteran of the Russo–Japanese war, used to visit the homes of those who died in action. The families would rejoice and shed tears of happiness if their son had died an honourable death. But those whose sons had disappeared were inconsolable: they feared their sons had been taken prisoner, ‘which is the worst thing that could happen to a soldier’.29
Yet, as we shall see, not all Japanese soldiers were deaf to the call of life, nor were they all blindly obedient. Many resisted the compulsion to kill themselves. At the appointed time they simply couldn’t squeeze the trigger or drown themselves or pull the grenade pin. The will to live overwhelmed the lessons of their indoctrination. Under interrogation, some soldiers, in their despair, rubbished the regime that demanded their lives.
Tsuno Keishin, a Japanese POW, said that Japanese officers, especially junior ranks, treated the men very badly, and therefore, he said, ‘it is not uncommon…for an officer to be shot from behind by his own men’.30
In captivity, Japanese troops—especially older, more experienced men, and fathers—occasionally vented their extreme anger at the regime. An extraordinary example was a 35-year-old first class seaman captured at Milne Bay on 17 October, whose name Allied interrogators transliterated as Katsukara Kanemidzu—not a recognisable Japanese name and probably an alias. In a remarkable outburst, he told his interrogators that few of the men, young or old, had much interest in the war. They resented being called up, and preferred to stay at home with their families, he said. ‘None of them liked war and all were far more interested in getting back to Japan.’ Katsukara vehemently criticised the war, and complained of vague orders and lack of food. But he said he could not return home ‘as he would be killed’. He personally knew of few young men who went willingly to war, but they had no choice, and accepted their three years in the armed forces ‘with the best grace possible’.31
Clearly not all were robots of the regime. Many ordinary troops were privately disgusted by the cruelty they were expected to inflict on the orders of brutal officers. Some openly resisted, for example, orders to bayonet live victims:
‘It did not last, as the men could not stomach it…Many found they could not sleep at night because of the nightmares,’ said one POW, whose name is given as Nakino Tokuhashi—again, not a familiar Japanese name, and probably an alias. Another stated that he and his comrades, in disgust at what they were doing, deliberately missed the victim, or penetrated the side of the body; which only made it worse, because it took several thrusts to kill him.
Such was the psychological diversity of the 10,000-strong Nankai Shitai, who sailed from Rabaul to Papua in mid-August. As they crossed the Solomon Sea, the troops sang their favourite military song, Futsuin Dayori, to the tune of Tidings from French Indochina:
Just below the Equator
We are under the Southern Cross
The warrior’s blood runs hot
As the Rising Sun flag advances.
Ahead the enemy pleads for his life under a white flag.
A brisk divine breeze blowing
Towards Australia at the limit of the south.
The ultimate place to reach.
The dawn of a new world…32