The Railway Man

  This half-thought desire took a long time before it could be expressed. One or two people suggested that perhaps it was time for me to forgive and forget. I don’t normally argue openly about anything, but I began to argue just a little about this. The majority of people who hand out advice about forgiveness have not gone through the sort of experience I had; I was not inclined to forgive, not yet, and probably never.

  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 confronted 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 full 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 little 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 modern 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 fitness, 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 fragments 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.

  The first section, and especially the first five pages of it, held me spellbound. Nagase arrives at Ban Pong in dark and cloudy weath
er. 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 clearly 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. ‘I 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 ‘awfully 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’.

  Eighteen years after the war, when travel outside Japan became easier with the lifting of restrictions, Nagase and his wife went to Kanburi and stood in the large war cemetery, among the neat stone graves and the bronze plates with the name of each dead soldier.

  In the center of the grand cemetery, a white cross stands against a blue sky. The cross is surrounded by approximately 7,000 officers and soldiers lying in the tropical serenity. They were the people who were searched and checked just after the
war ended.

  My wife and I moved forward to the white cross and offered a wreath at its base. The moment I joined my hands in prayer … I felt my body emitting yellow beams of light in every direction and turning transparent. At that moment I thought, ‘This is it. You have been pardoned.’ I believed this feeling plainly

  … After I returned home I worked as an interpreter for the Occupation Army in Japan and a teacher at senior high school. After a year I had tuberculosis. When the tuberculosis took a turn for the better, I fell ill again. I suffered a most malignant cardiac neurosis. I had fits of palpitation … After the fit was gone, both my body and mind were worn out … Every time I had a fit, the torture scene in the military police flashed through my mind. I told myself that those prisoners suffered far more, and endured great pain.

  … The sense of guilt had lain in my mind for a long time. The moment I visited the graves, I felt the sense of guilt vanish through my recognition that my wish finally came true. My health was getting better and my business went well.

  Nagase visited Thailand many times after that, and did charitable work for the surviving Asian labourers, many of whom were unable to return home to India or Malaya after the war and dragged out miserable lives in villages near the railway; and he opened a temple of peace on the River Kwae Bridge, and spoke out against militarism.