The Railway Man

  He asked if he could touch my hand. My former interrogator held my arm, which was so much larger than his, stroking it quite unselfconsciously. I didn’t find it embarrassing. He gripped my wrist with both of his hands and told me that when I was being tortured – he used the word – he measured my pulse. I remembered he had written this in his memoir. Yet now that we were face to face, his grief seemed far more acute than mine. ‘I was a member of Imperial Japanese Army; we treated your countrymen very, very badly.’ ‘We both survived’, I said encouragingly, really believing it now.

  A little later, I’m sure he said: ‘For what purpose were you born in this world? I think I can die safely now.’

  He asked me if I remembered the ‘bath house’ where I was tortured. I had to admit I couldn’t recall it; he said that there was an episode between the shouting in the room and the drowning with the hosepipe in the yard, when they took me into some sort of bathroom and filled a metal tub, and the Kempei Gunso held my head underneath the water. ‘You remember big can?’ Nagase asked, making a round shape with his hands. I had to take his word for it. I told him that I did certainly remember the Gunso’s wooden ruler banging on the desk, and that I didn’t like him very much. Nagase agreed that he was ‘a very rough man’.

  It’s impossible to remember everything we talked about, but we sat there so long that the sun moved right around and we were no longer in the shade. (Patti told me later that she was having a sharp argument in the background with a journalist who spotted a story on the terrace and was trying to photograph us; I never heard a thing.) The content of our conversation hardly mattered. We laughed a lot, after a while, and were happy in each other’s company. I can recall snatches of what we said quite clearly, especially some of his quaint phrases, and have an impression of the rest.

  At one point Nagase suddenly began talking about my map. He reminded me that I’d tried to tell him I had a sketch of the line ‘because you are mania of railway’, as he put it. ‘I tried to believe it,’ he said, ‘but at that time in Japan railway mania was not so popular.’ Then he said that he knew we had every kind of ‘mania’ in our country and had tried to persuade the Gunso that I was not the leader of the group. I pointed out that the Gunso hadn’t believed me anyway, and Nagase said that they had wanted a spy; they could not understand otherwise where we had found the makings of a radio, and were obsessed with preventing contacts between us and civilians. He himself had, as I suspected, searched prisoners’ belongings at Singapore when they were leaving for Ban Pong and the north.

  He asked where I had hidden the map in the Sakamoto Butai; it had always puzzled him why they failed to find it when they searched the huts. I explained that it was in a hollow bamboo in the wall of the latrine and that the American-speaking interpreter had only found it later when I’d been reckless enough to hide it in my kit. Nagase spoke of ‘that fellow’s’ suffering as a ‘minority man’ in America before the war, and how he had a ‘hard mind towards the white man’.

  He told me what he had done in the last year of the war after he had recovered from his malaria: translating propaganda leaflets dropped by our planes, patrolling the perimeter of the camps searching for spies and parachutists, generally appeasing the futile hunger for information of a defeated empire; he spent a lot of time hiding from bombers and fearful of treading on delayed-action bombs.

  He wanted to know if Captain Komai, who was held responsible for the deaths of Hawley and Armitage, had beaten us personally; he had met his son a few years earlier. I said that I thought he had probably done so, but I couldn’t be sure. Nagase assumed that I had been tortured again at Outram Road, and I had to explain that there are rare occasions when overt torture is not the worst punishment. He was kind enough to say that compared to my suffering his was nothing; and yet it was so obvious that he had suffered too. ‘Various sufferings, various sufferings in my heart and mind …’ He told me how he had studied history and become totally opposed to militarism; about his wife, Yoshiko, who was quite wealthy, about his English-language school and her teaching of the tea ceremony.

  Later that morning we went into the museum next to the terrace. The long rooms were stiflingly hot. Laid out on the floor were rusty chains which had been used to move the wooden sleepers; a few spikes; some ropes and saws. There was a set of big rusty iron hooks – couplings for goods vans – and a few of the little four-wheeled bogies used to push more and more heavy timber and iron up the line and on to the backs of already-exhausted men. They looked insignificant lying there, the wheels jammed with rust and useless except to remind people what had been done with them. The big iron cooking vessels, called kwalis, of the kind we used for cooking rice when I was mess officer were laid out as though for offerings on a long table.

  By then we had introduced Mrs Nagase and Mrs Lomax to each other, and they were finding a common language of sympathy and understanding. Nagase said he had often walked past the site of the Kempeitai house when he came to Kanburi, so we decided to go to visit it together. The building has of course been demolished and the site built over. We were driven by Tida Loha, who helps so many of the former POWs who visit Kanburi, and Patti sat in the front of the car with her. I sat in the back between Nagase and a Japanese friend of his, and my wife turned around while we were moving through the crowded streets and just looked at us. Our eyes met and we smiled: I knew she was thinking; there I was sitting between two Japanese men on my way back to that place, and all three of us smiling and laughing.

  The Kempei house was well and truly gone. The yard where the ‘monkey houses’ were kept is now occupied by a family dwelling. Places where such things have been done can be wiped out so easily. Torture, after all, is inconspicuous; all it needs is water, a piece of wood and a loud voice. It takes place in squalid rooms, dirty back yards and basements, and there is nothing left to preserve when it is over. Marks on the body can fade quickly too, and it is thanks to people like Helen Bamber that the hidden traces which can’t simply be built over are uncovered and brought back into the light.

  After our inconsequential return to the place where we had first met, we visited the war memorials. To reach the Allied cemetery at Chungkai we took a long-tailed craft which ripped along the river like a speedboat past reed-beds, cultivated fields and green walls of trees. The heat was amazing. Even the river seemed to be sprouting under it – weeds, lily pads, trailing bits of vegetation. When we alighted we walked through the red-roofed portico and a cool gallery. The traditional legend is picked out on the entrance: ‘Their Name Liveth For Ever More’. The vast graveyard is immaculately clean, gardened and swept. Bronze tablets are set into blocks of glittery limestone, shaped like lecterns. Some of the tablets are dedicated simply to ‘A Soldier of the 1939-45 War, Known Unto God’. Might the vanished Bill Williamson be lying here unclaimed?

  We walked around, Patti and I drifting off together and leaving Nagase and Yoshiko behind. We talked a little, and there was then a moment of doubt; I think I finally expressed, among those lines of graves, a resolution for which I had been searching for years.

  The Japanese War Memorial, which POWs were forced to build some time in 1944, is a sadder and more neglected place. A cenotaph now showing blotches of weather and stress was erected in a compound surrounded by low trees; it is ill-kept and deserted. The cenotaph incorporates plaques to the dead of other countries, like an afterthought. Some ex-POWs, who can never forgive, throw stones at the memorial when they come here; the scars are visible on the stained concrete. Mrs Nagase told us that morning that her brother was killed in the last days of the war, somewhere in Burma, one of the many young men who were never given a chance.

  Nagase and I talked a lot about the railway. The utter futility of it still astonished both of us. The Pyramids, that other great engineering disaster, are at least a monument to our love of beauty, as well as to slave labour; the railway is a dead end in the jungle. Most of the track in the border area was torn up after the war, the sleepers used for firewood
or for building houses. The line had some strategic military value at the time, but only in the service of a doomed campaign that cost millions of lives. The line has become literally pointless. It now runs for about 60 miles and then stops. The rest of it is as abandoned as the little line which I found on Unst in the Shetland Islands in 1933.

  As we walked and talked, I felt that my strange companion was a person who I would have been able to get on with long ago had we met under other circumstances. We had a lot in common: books, teaching, an interest in history, though he still found one of my ‘manias’ puzzling; and I warmed to him more and more as the time in Kanburi went by. We were due to fly to Japan together at the end of the week.

  I still needed to consider the matter of forgiveness, since it so concerned him. Assuming that our meeting, in itself, constituted forgiveness, or that the passage of time had made it irrelevant, seemed too easy; once someone raises forgiveness to such a pitch of importance you become judicial. I felt I had to respond to Nagase’s sense of the binding or loosening force of my decision.

  A kind Thai woman who we met that week tried to explain the importance of forgiveness in Buddhism to me; I understood that whatever you do you get back in this life and if what you have done is tainted with evil and you have not made atonement for it, evil is returned to you in the next life with interest. Nagase dreaded hell, and it seemed that our first meeting had made parts of both our lives hellish already. Even if I could not grasp the theology fully, I could no longer see the point of punishing Nagase by a refusal to reach out and forgive him. What mattered was our relations in the here and now, his obvious regret for what he had done and our mutual need to give our encounter some meaning beyond that of the emptiness of cruelty. It was surely worth salvaging as much as we could from the damage to both our lives. The question was now one of choosing the right moment to say the words to him with the formality that the situation seemed to demand.

  * * *

  We flew to Osaka, surrounded by Japanese businessmen. I was separated from Patti until a very sophisticated gentleman, speaking excellent English, heard from her what we were about and gave up his seat so that we could be together. Mrs Nagase and some of her pupils, young professional women of great charm and courtesy, met us at the airport and within a couple of hours we were on the extraordinary bullet train from Osaka to Okayama; it was like riding a missile adhering to the rails. We sat on the top deck as we swept past the continuous spread of small houses and other buildings along the coast of the inland sea.

  Kurashiki, where we went next, is a jewel, an Oxford or a Bath among Japan’s devastated and rebuilt cities, almost untouched by the war and its old city later spared by developers. I loved the wide, clean canal running through it, the swans and the little bridges. Yoshiko took us to ‘the old house’, her family’s pre-war residence which is maintained as a traditional Japanese dwelling. She comes from an old and substantial Kurashiki family, and she is proud of her city. The house is beautiful, with internal paper walls and graceful plain rooms furnished sparsely with low tables and hangings. We sat on cushions for the tea ceremony, though I was unable fully to concentrate on the intricate and graceful ritual because it was some time since I had attempted to sit cross-legged. I was struck, though, by the low doors of the tea-house in the yard, built small so that a man wearing a sword could not pass through them. This seemed a civilized precaution.

  In the ‘new house’, where the Nagases live, I saw the same chaos of books and papers with which I am surrounded at home. One day I sat unwittingly in his study in the same chair, in almost the same position, in which Nagase had sat for his photograph for the Japan Times and in which I had rediscovered him.

  Nagase was determined to show me the cherry blossoms at their finest, and it became a running joke. He would announce each morning that the cherry blossoms were ‘open today 30 percent’, or 45 per cent, and that soon we would be able to see them as they were meant to be seen. He once took us to a park in Okayama, and was disappointed to find that in that particular garden the blossoms could only be judged to be 40 per cent open.

  It was astonishing to be walking around this handsome town: a few years before I could not have imagined meeting a Japanese person voluntarily and now I was strolling in streets full of them, a tourist in my seventies, an honoured guest of two good people. Everyone we met was extremely courteous, and it was wonderful to me to see these crowds of smiling, well-dressed young people who are heirs to an economic superpower that leads the world in electronics, when I remembered my patient explanations of how a radio transmitter works in that wooden room in Siam in 1943!

  Their command of engineering skill was displayed most beautifully in the bridges over the inland sea, connecting Honshu and Shikoku. I asked specially to see them, since the marvel of the Forth Bridge was one of my childhood wonders. They form the greatest span of bridges in the world, nine miles long, a sequence of bridges leaping off and disappearing gracefully over the horizon.

  So we did what tourists are expected to do in Japan, and it was most enjoyable, but this is not a travel book and all the time I was aware of an unresolved question between Nagase and me. I found it hard to choose the right moment; there were always others around, and Nagase had a tendency to wish to make our encounter public, a symbol of reconciliation, and this gave some of our outings the character of official visits, with Japanese pressmen dogging our footsteps.

  Meanwhile, we attended to things that were important to both of us, in different ways. We went to Hiroshima, and Patti and I laid a bunch of mixed flowers on the memorial. A director of the Peace Memorial Museum, himself deformed by radiation, showed us around. Terrible photographs of burnt children, of people with radiation sickness, of obliterated streets; we saw a man pointing out, with the stump of his hand, the image of a human figure preserved as if it had been photographed by the flash of the atomic blast.

  The whole atmosphere of Hiroshima is like that of a shrine. Nagase and I were guilty of violating its respectful busy gravity rather disgracefully. We were walking around the museum together, Patti and Yoshiko in front of us with some of Nagase’s friends. In the background there was a hubbub of chattering and commentary. Suddenly, as Patti later told me, she heard an outburst of unseemly hilarity behind her. There we were, two old gentlemen laughing our heads off in this sanctum of peace.

  We had been talking about the last days of the war. Nagase asked me when I had heard about the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. ‘On 8th August,’ I told him. He was astonished: this was at least two days before he and his unit were told about it. He wanted to know how we could possibly have known, locked up as we were in Changi and deprived of contact with the outside world. Ah, I told him, but of course we had a radio. And for some reason that set us off, even in a place of such awful seriousness.

  One day, to the surprise of our hosts, I asked to see a memorial of a very different kind, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the centre of Japanese imperial tradition and the chief cult centre of what was once Japan’s state religion, Shinto Buddhism.

  Nagase and I had talked about historical truth and he was concerned – almost to the point of obsession – with ensuring that the Japanese should be aware of what their army did in the name of the Emperor before 1945. He believes that there must be a break with all vestiges of the cult of obedience to authority; he is a militant spiritual humanist. He often talked about how there was so little in the way of good history to put into Japanese schoolchildren’s hands; so little encouragement to face up to the past and come to terms with it. Nagase’s crusading spirit, which is courageous and laudable, can become a little wearing, as when he wished to publicize our outings; but the more he talked the more I could understand his zeal. His obsession had become atonement and reconciliation, which need publicity – whereas mine had been with private remembering and revenge. The positions he takes up arouse fierce hostility in Japan. He once said that he would not be surprised ‘to wake up and find myself dead’.

  A
clearer picture of what he is fighting against cannot be seen than at Yasukuni, to which we were taken by Professor Nakahara, who we had the good fortune to meet again. The shrine is at one level a moving war memorial, dedicated to the worship of those who died for the Emperor, but at another it is an unashamed celebration of militarism. Cherry blossom trees are bedecked with little white ribbons with personal messages and requests. In the grounds you can find a monument to the Kempeitai – it is like seeing a memorial to the Gestapo in a German cathedral. In front of a museum building next to the shrine, and very much part of it, is parked a field gun, for all the world like the Imperial War Museum in London – except that this is a place of religious worship. And alongside the artillery-piece, there is an immaculate C56 steam locomotive, described by the shrine authorities as the first engine to pass along the Burma Railway. It stands proud, its smoke-deflectors polished and its great wheels pressing down into the gravel, its beauty a monument to barbarism.

  Nagase told me how he had protested vigorously when the C56 was installed at Yasukuni in 1979. He wrote to the officials of the shrine, and reminded anyone who would listen that Tojo is reputed to have visited Siam when the construction of the railway was about to start, and said that it must be completed even though one prisoner should die for every sleeper on the line; and Nagase had pointed out that this particular engine demanded a sleeper for every metre of track. Both Tojo, as a soldier of the Emperor, and the machine are worshipped at Yasukuni.

  * * *

  In all the time I spent in Japan I never felt a flash of the anger I had harboured against Nagase all those years, no backwash of that surge of murderous intent I had felt on finding out that one of them was still alive. Indeed Nagase gave me the impression of having been prepared for a much more irritated and difficult encounter than ours turned out to be.