Life in a Japanese camp

Life in a Japanese camp

Garden Village Roundup, no 124, Januari/Februari 2019, pp. 5-6.

This will not be a blow-by-blow account of my life story. Rather I will just describe an event in my early life that I have never forgotten. It happened in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. I had been born in 1935 from Dutch parents in Surabaya, Indonesia, which was then a Dutch colony. When the Japanese invaded the country in 1941, my father was captured by them as a member of the Dutch Indies Army and shipped to Thailand to work on the notorious railway of River Kwai. I myself, with my mother and three brothers, enjoyed a succession of Japanese POW camps, the one worse than the other, none of them to be recommended to any holiday tour operator.

We endured four and a half years of near starvation – just one meal a day consisting of a small handful of cooked rice. Four thousand inmates in each camp, packed into barracks with low, wooden, lice-infected plank-beds to sleep on. People were dying all around us. I am sharing this not to evoke your pity, but to set the scene for a truly remarkable event.

Our Japanese and Korean guards treated us with brutality. No surprise perhaps since a handful of them had to keep thousands of women and children in check. It was a formula that led many POWs to hate the Japanese for life, each and every one of them. I escaped that fate through an experience in the Mankubumi Camp, Surakarta. I was eight years old at the time. We were Catholics but no question of common Sunday worship: there was no priest in the camp and public assemblies were forbidden. However, by way of concession, a priest from a nearby men’s camp was allowed to say Mass for Catholics twice a year. I had received first communion just before we had been herded into captivity and the eucharist meant a lot to me.

Imagine a large crowd of us, sitting on the dusty ground or standing barefoot in dense semi-circles under tall Tjemara trees next to the camp’s reeking rubbish dump. Facing us stood the rough wooden table that served as the altar. The priest recited his prayers in Latin. Next to the altar, seated on a comfortable chair, sat Colonel Sakai, our camp commander, his samurai sword plainly visible as it dangled by a long chain from his belt. I was sure he was there to enforce brute discipline if needed.

A bell was rung. Consecration. This is the moment when we remember Christ’s words: “This is my Body, this is my Blood, do this in memory of me.” We all knelt down. I looked at our Japanese oppressor. To my utter surprise he rose from the chair and he too knelt down, his glittering sword lying flat in the dust next to him. I gasped. He bent his head down into the dust. You will appreciate my disbelief better if you know that this same Colonel Sakai, just a few weeks earlier, had displayed all the traits of unmitigated Japanese cruelty.

On that occasion all of us, the whole camp, had been summoned to the opening square. We were made to stand enduring the intolerable noonday sun as we listened to one of his harangues. The Dutch interpreter, who was standing next to him on a raised platform, made a mistake. He slapped her across her face and she, acting on impulse I am sure, struck back. This, of course, constituted an unforgivable offence: the male emblem of imperial authority being publicly humiliated by a female of a disgraced and defeated nation. The scene that followed defies description. He undid his belt and beat her time and again. She sank to the ground, unconscious. He ordered a bucket of water to be poured over her. When she straggled to her feet, he belted her again till she collapsed, this time for good. She succumbed to her injuries soon after. While the beating was going on, we shouted, cried, wept – soldiers right and left pointing their guns at us. I remember my trembling all over with fear and anger, imprinting a trauma of fear and a hatred of bullying that have never left me.

This was the same man who knelt with us and reverently bowed down at the consecration. The event moved me profoundly on a human and spiritual level in a way I find hard to put into words. The paradox of a ‘pious brute’ perplexed me. I suddenly grasped, somehow, that Sakai too was human, frail, groping for God as much as we were. It created a bond with him. Under his mask of cruelty lay a reverence for the divine I shared with him. While remaining a dangerous oppressor, he had humbled himself before the mystery of the universe and so acknowledged himself a seeker in need of God.

I have learnt much more about the Japanese since then, through personal Japanese friends and through reading. What I perceived intuitively as a child, I can now rationalise to some extent. Our guards were formed by their masculine culture, by banzai military indoctrination and unquestioning loyalty to the emperor. The brutes who terrorised us probably loved their wives and children tenderly. They were the victims of a tyranny of mind control which institutions, whether social, political or religious, all too easily slide into.

Violence needs to be checked with a strong hand, as our daily experience proves. Untruth needs to be exposed. We may not tolerate bullying of any kind. But true peace and reconciliation between people can only come about, I feel, by understanding individuals as they are: mixtures of evil and good. What we need is empathy, not black-and-white condemnations. The people who populate our globe are walking paradoxes who, like ourselves, are courageous cowards, blind teachers of partial truths, filled with misconceptions no less than fired by high ideals.

In my eventful life I had the good fortune of meeting my lovely English wife Jackie while working in India – both of us being employed in education. After delightful adventures worldwide, we settled in sunshine village – I mean DGV of course! – in 2012. We love it here.

This will not be a blow-by-blow account of my life story. Rather I will just describe an event in my early life that I have never forgotten. It happened in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. I had been born in 1935 from Dutch parents in Surabaya, Indonesia, which was then a Dutch colony. When the Japanese invaded the country in 1941, my father was captured by them as a member of the Dutch Indies Army and shipped to Thailand to work on the notorious railway of River Kwai. I myself, with my mother and three brothers, enjoyed a succession of Japanese POW camps, the one worse than the other, none of them to be recommended to any holiday tour operator.

We endured four and a half years of near starvation – just one meal a day consisting of a small handful of cooked rice. Four thousand inmates in each camp, packed into barracks with low, wooden, lice-infected plank-beds to sleep on. People were dying all around us. I am sharing this not to evoke your pity, but to set the scene for a truly remarkable event.

Our Japanese and Korean guards treated us with brutality. No surprise perhaps since a handful of them had to keep thousands of women and children in check. It was a formula that led many POWs to hate the Japanese for life, each and every one of them. I escaped that fate through an experience in the Mankubumi Camp, Surakarta. I was eight years old at the time. We were Catholics but no question of common Sunday worship: there was no priest in the camp and public assemblies were forbidden. However, by way of concession, a priest from a nearby men’s camp was allowed to say Mass for Catholics twice a year. I had received first communion just before we had been herded into captivity and the eucharist meant a lot to me.

Imagine a large crowd of us, sitting on the dusty ground or standing barefoot in dense semi-circles under tall Tjemara trees next to the camp’s reeking rubbish dump. Facing us stood the rough wooden table that served as the altar. The priest recited his prayers in Latin. Next to the altar, seated on a comfortable chair, sat Colonel Sakai, our camp commander, his samurai sword plainly visible as it dangled by a long chain from his belt. I was sure he was there to enforce brute discipline if needed.

A bell was rung. Consecration. This is the moment when we remember Christ’s words: “This is my Body, this is my Blood, do this in memory of me.” We all knelt down. I looked at our Japanese oppressor. To my utter surprise he rose from the chair and he too knelt down, his glittering sword lying flat in the dust next to him. I gasped. He bent his head down into the dust. You will appreciate my disbelief better if you know that this same Colonel Sakai, just a few weeks earlier, had displayed all the traits of unmitigated Japanese cruelty.

On that occasion all of us, the whole camp, had been summoned to the opening square. We were made to stand enduring the intolerable noonday sun as we listened to one of his harangues. The Dutch interpreter, who was standing next to him on a raised platform, made a mistake. He slapped her across her face and she, acting on impulse I am sure, struck back. This, of course, constituted an unforgivable offence: the male emblem of imperial authority being publicly humiliated by a female of a disgraced and defeated nation. The scene that followed defies description. He undid his belt and beat her time and again. She sank to the ground, unconscious. He ordered a bucket of water to be poured over her. When she straggled to her feet, he belted her again till she collapsed, this time for good. She succumbed to her injuries soon after. While the beating was going on, we shouted, cried, wept – soldiers right and left pointing their guns at us. I remember my trembling all over with fear and anger, imprinting a trauma of fear and a hatred of bullying that have never left me.

This was the same man who knelt with us and reverently bowed down at the consecration. The event moved me profoundly on a human and spiritual level in a way I find hard to put into words. The paradox of a ‘pious brute’ perplexed me. I suddenly grasped, somehow, that Sakai too was human, frail, groping for God as much as we were. It created a bond with him. Under his mask of cruelty lay a reverence for the divine I shared with him. While remaining a dangerous oppressor, he had humbled himself before the mystery of the universe and so acknowledged himself a seeker in need of God.

I have learnt much more about the Japanese since then, through personal Japanese friends and through reading. What I perceived intuitively as a child, I can now rationalise to some extent. Our guards were formed by their masculine culture, by banzai military indoctrination and unquestioning loyalty to the emperor. The brutes who terrorised us probably loved their wives and children tenderly. They were the victims of a tyranny of mind control which institutions, whether social, political or religious, all too easily slide into.

Violence needs to be checked with a strong hand, as our daily experience proves. Untruth needs to be exposed. We may not tolerate bullying of any kind. But true peace and reconciliation between people can only come about, I feel, by understanding individuals as they are: mixtures of evil and good. What we need is empathy, not black-and-white condemnations. The people who populate our globe are walking paradoxes who, like ourselves, are courageous cowards, blind teachers of partial truths, filled with misconceptions no less than fired by high ideals.

In my eventful life I had the good fortune of meeting my lovely English wife Jackie while working in India – both of us being employed in education. After delightful adventures worldwide, we settled in sunshine village – I mean Denham Garden Village of course! – in 2012. We love it here.