The first section, and especially the first five pages of it, held me spellbound. Nagase arrives at Ban Pong in dark and cloudy weather. The scene as he recalls it is hellish, the sky overcast and grey, flocks of large black vultures perched on roofs and in the branches of tall teak trees. He thinks at first that vultures are native to this place, but then realizes that they are attracted to the smell of carrion around the prison camp.
The next day he goes to Kanburi. ‘Again there were ghastly flocks of vultures when I walked across the field of tall weeds. The birds moved their heads back and forth every time they made a forward step.’ Nagase meets a funeral procession of prisoners, carrying a body on a stretcher covered with a faded Union Jack, followed by a Japanese soldier with a gun and behind him four or five vultures nodding their heads to and fro. He sees the rough bamboo fence of the camp and is told by the sergeant accompanying him to pretend to be an inspector of the camp, since he is unknown and the prisoners may unwittingly give him information. He is shocked at the sight of the camp, and sees shabby roofless huts, sick prisoners shivering in soaking blankets, malaria victims rolling feverishly on their bedding or on the floor. The rain starts falling as a British officer comes up to him, pleading for improvements in their conditions, telling him that they have had no roof on their hut for over a week with malaria patients exposed to the rain. The ‘weak dimmed eyes’ of the malaria patients affect Nagase badly. He remembers seeing the same mournful gaze when prisoners were being packed thirty at a time into box cars in the scorching sun at Singapore railway station. There a blue-eyed British officer had persistently asked him where they were headed, over and over again, repeating the question, but Nagase was unable to answer. ‘Why do blue eyes look so sad?’ he asks.
He is assigned at Kanburi to the squad responsible for Tokko, intelligence and counter intelligence. He accompanies the head of the squad or a tall sergeant with a ‘bluish, clean shaven face’, at all times. Sometimes he is asked to impersonate a Thai and to talk with the prisoners in order to learn their thoughts and movements. I had not known that he also spoke Thai, or perhaps he was mimicking a Thai villager who knew a little English.
Some time before the opening of the railway in October they suspect that a radio is in operation among the prisoners, and that we are listening to Allied broadcasts. They discover the set when they inspect the prisoners’ belongings without warning. When all the ‘suspects’ are brought to his intelligence squad, he writes, they have already been beaten badly. He thinks that one prisoner has been beaten to death.
Suddenly it’s as though he steps out from behind a screen and I am looking at a scene familiar to me distanced as though in a dream. He writes:
Let me talk about a prisoner for whom I worked as an interpreter. It was found that he had a rough sketch of the Thai-Burma railway with the names of all the stations when the inspection of their belongings took place. He claimed that he was a railway fanatic and intended to take it home as a souvenir. His explanation was not convincing because the railway was a secret matter in those days.
Nagase says that they had to approve the charge of spying against this prisoner in order to commit him for court martial. He is interrogated but the POW stubbornly denies the charge, knowing that he will be condemned to death if he admits to being a spy.
The fierce questioning continued from morning till night for over a week, which exhausted me as well. The military policeman sometimes shouted at me because he got too excited to differentiate between the prisoner and me. The suspect looked weak and good natured, but he repeated his stubborn denials… The MP beat him with a stick. I could not bear the sight, so I advised him to confess to avoid further mental and physical pain. He just smiled at me. Finally, the policeman applied the usual torture. First they took him to the bathtub… Then his broken right arm was placed on his front and his left arm behind his back, tied with a cord. They laid him on his back with a towel loosely covering his mouth and nose. They poured water over his face. The soaking cloth blocked his nose and mouth. He struggled to breathe and opened his mouth to inhale air. They poured water into his mouth. I saw his stomach swelling up. Watching the prisoner in great torture, I almost lost my presence of mind. I was desperate to control my shaking body. I feared that he would be killed in my presence. I took him by the broken wrist and felt the pulse. I still remember cleariy that I was relieved to feel an unexpected normal pulse.
With the prisoner screaming and crying, ‘Mother! Mother!’ I muttered to myself, ‘Mother, do you know what is happening to your son now?’ I still cannot stop shuddering every time I recall that horrible scene.
Nagase pauses to criticize the Imperial Rescript, the long oath of loyalty, which all recruits had to memorize, and the authoritarian system of absolute obedience that underlay it, which held a person’s family responsible for his actions. He contrasts this system with the respect for fundamental human rights which seems, in his eyes, to be rooted in the minds of people in the West.
For the rest of the war Nagase spent six months in hospital, and was then returned to Kanburi, from which he set off with Padre Babb and his fellow officers on their special train in the search for abandoned graves. Nagase describes the quiet, restrained hostility of the big English and Australian men with whom he was forced to travel, the difficulties of persuading Japanese troops to co-operate with the search, and the sad state of the bewildered surviving romusha, clustering around the Allied officers and pleading to be sent home. Their plight moves him since the Japanese army units are by now attempting to clean up the POW graves, but the Asian labourers’ graves are ignored by everybody. 1 feared that this contrast would make people think that the Japanese did not care about romushas’ souls.’ They find countless abandoned mounds of earth and wooden markers in the jungle, already strangled by vegetation. Nagase is disgusted by the fertility of the jungle, the myriad centipedes and worms, and comically afraid of tigers, which he imagines are lurking by the side of the track wherever he goes. He describes a tense confrontation with armed, desperate and ‘awftilly ferocious’ Japanese troops at the end of the line in Burma, whose commanding officer at first refuses to salute the British captain leading the war graves party.
One evening, the Allied officers take him into their roofed wagon and sit him down, putting headphones around his ears. He hears a broadcast describing how the Japanese Railway Corps, the POW administration units and the ‘special police’ are suspected of being major war criminal groupings, and how a unit of the Allied forces is currently engaged in the collection of information about Japanese war crimes such as maltreatment of POWs along the railway. ‘I was aware,’ he writes, ‘that all the officers’ attention was focused upon me and my face turned pale, my throat and lips dried up and became frozen.’ After a long silence he admits to them that he used to work for the special police. They ask him gravely if he has ever had any trouble with prisoners. ‘Nothing in particular,’ he answers, and they tell him that he will be all right, as long as he is with them, if he does his duty well.
Nagase notes that he began then to sense a breach between British and Japanese points of view regarding the value of human life and began to try to comprehend why GHQ in Tokyo should have pushed ahead with a railway line that British engineers had rejected ‘because of the predicted large number of victims’. He concludes that it was the cult of absolute obedience and the absorption of the army leaders in ‘an armchair plan’ that made the difference. Later he decides, after seeing like a terrible revelation the thousands upon thousands of crosses behind the POW hospital at Chungkai, near Kanburi, that ‘the refined civilization should be based upon humanity’.