Throughout the next two years I could not decide what to do with my information, which seemed the product of incredible and precious coincidence. Meanwhile, for the first time, and solely to benefit the Medical Foundation, I allowed myself to be interviewed by journalists. Hitherto, the prospect of anything resembling interrogation filled me with horror, but I managed to get through an interview with a woman from the Sunday Times and even, late in 1990, a television programme about the Medical Foundation, which was broadcast in January 1991.
I spent that year at my periodic meetings with Dr Turner discussing the effect of the discovery of Nagase on me and considering what I should do. I still thought often about striking him down, but Stuart helped me to see beyond murder. He thought that I should not try to meet my former interrogator at all, arguing that to do so would be to enter uncharted territory. Despite the range of their awful experience, not one of the Medical Foundation staff could find any precedent for a meeting such as I proposed. Helen Bamber could not recall a voluntary encounter between a person closely complicit with torture and his victim in the history of post-war Europe; while Stuart Turner more than once reminded me that there were many records of US veterans of the Vietnam War suffering traumatic flashbacks when confironted with strong reminders of their wartime experiences.
Still consumed by the desire to make Nagase suffer fully the consequences of his actions, I decided that I would like to surprise him, revelling in my superior knowledge and his ignorance of me. Aid for this vengeful plan came from an unexpected quarter. The director of the brief television film about the work of the Foundation and my own predicament, Mike Finlason, became so fascinated by the story which he saw unfolding that he decided to try to make a full-length documentary about Nagase and me. My intention was that a meeting should be arranged but that Nagase should be told only that I was a former Far East POW, and not be told that I had identified him as a member of the Kempei. At first Finlason acceded to my plan, but he became understandably and increasingly reluctant to stage a surprise assault on Nagase of the kind I wanted.
The ways of television were completely new to me, but I soon learned that there is many a slip between the ftill cup of excited plans for a film and the actual lip of the audience. Mike Finlason was then an independent director and this was his personal enthusiasm. Funding for the film proved elusive, and the early summer of 1991 passed without any of my plans nearing fulfilment – a delay that has almost certainly infinitely benefited at least two people’s lives. Stuart Turner was warmly concerned about my intentions, and suggested that I should try to meet some Japanese people socially to prepare myself for the encounter which I was determined to arrange. Given that I had not spoken to a single Japanese person since 1945, this was no easy matter, but I agreed to try. Various schemes were canvassed: visiting a Japanese travel or airline office, for example, so that I could flee without difficulty if I found it necessary to do so.
No embarrassing meetings with startled Japanese ticket clerks had taken place when one day in early July 1991 I answered the phone at home, which I very rarely do; Patti has screened calls for a long time past, at my request, and she was out when the phone rang. The caller was a historian of my acquaintance, who asked whether I would be willing to meet a Japanese professor of history, a woman from Tokyo called Nakahara Michiko, who was researching the exploitation of POWs and Asian labourers by the Imperial Japanese Army on the Burma-Siam Railway. I said yes. My wife returned to find that I had arranged a meeting with a Japanese person at our own house. She was more than a httle astonished.
For a few days before the meeting in late July I was frightened of my own response, but when the time came it was a revelation. It was a beautiful summer day, our best clear and light northern weather. Patti went to meet her at Berwick Station, and a little later I heard our garden gate clatter open. I saw my wife walk up the garden path beside a petite, smiling woman wearing elegant trousers and a black silk jacket, her hair a striking deep blue-black. We shook hands. Professor Nakahara spoke superb English, and within a few minutes I could tell that it was going to be all right. She is a considerate and learned woman, and after lunch we sat outside in the garden exchanging information and looking through papers, books and relics. Her husband, she told us, had been wounded at Hiroshima. She wanted to rescue the labourers from obscurity; dozens of books have been written about the POWs, but almost nothing about the romusha, as they were known to the Japanese. There were a quarter of a million of them: Malays, Indonesians, Chinese, Burmese, Tamils, a disorganized and starved multilingual army with no internal leadership or organization, unlike us. Michiko was interested in my memories of work in the railroad camps; I was fascinated by her as my first new link with Japan. She told me that she had once met Nagase.
The man who had crept under my skin and stayed there in 1943 seemed different through the eyes of others, and aspects of Japan began to interest me. Here, for example, was a historian unafraid of the truth, delving into her country’s most shameful actions, and I liked her. Soon after her return to Japan, she wrote to us to say that she had received an invitation to the Akasaka Palace to give the new Emperor Akihito a lecture on modem South-East Asian history, prior to his tour of the area. She accepted with the condition that she be allowed to speak freely.
In the month of Nakahara Michiko’s visit I was given a copy of a small book by Nagase which he had published in Japan. All I knew was that it was called Crosses and Tigers, since my Japanese studies had not progressed much since my efforts with Bill Williamson in 1943, but I learned that an English edition had been published in Thailand in 1990. I ordered a copy and eventually a small package arrived. The book was a tiny paperback, with a picture of the railway bridge over the Kwae on its light green cover; it had less than seventy pages of text, roughly printed with bad type, but I sat down to read it as though it were a rare manuscript.
The book opens with a brief introductory account of Nagase’s conscription in Tokyo, in December 1941, when I was waiting for his Emperor’s army at Kuantan. He was classified B3, presumably an indication of low physical fimess, and the photograph he reproduces, taken on 20th December 1941 shows a very slender young man with a face I remembered too well – an intense, fine, timid and mournful face – dressed in Japanese Army uniform and forage cap, clutching a sword that looks too big for him. He describes how he was sent to Saigon to serve with the oddly-named ‘Literal Intelligence Bureau’ of the General Staff Office, and how he was then sent to Java to interpret for an intelligence officer collecting information at the end of the Indonesian campaign. By early January 1943, he was working in ‘transport operations’ at Singapore, snooping on POWs who were being sent up to the railway, and presumably searching their baggage for precious firagments of the kind that Fred Smith had taken with him on his way to Ban Pong. In March 1943, when we were already in Kanburi, he was assigned to Bangkok, to the headquarters of the Railway Construction Staff, and in September he received an order to serve with what he calls the ‘military police platoon’ at Kanburi. He acknowledges the terrible cost of the railway, and that a prisoner or labourer must have died for every sleeper laid; and that today it runs for less than a third of its original length.
The rest of the little book has three main sections: his memories of Kanburi; his reconstructed diary of his three-week expedition with the war graves group, including Padre Babb, in September-October 1945; and some brief remarks about his post-war experiences in Thailand.