Guest of Hirohito

by Ken Cambon

Chapter Five - No Geishas or Cherry Blossoms

In the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.
—General Dwight Eisenhower

Our group was now split in two. It was a strange feeling seeing half of our group disappear into the darkness. This was the last time we were to see many of our comrades and some we were not to see until years later.

The 300 Canadians had straggled to the railway station in the drizzling rain. We boarded regular coaches, a pleasant surprise, as after our sea voyage in the hold of a collier we expected to be herded into box-cars. We were allotted two coaches on what must have been a regular run, as there were civilian passengers on the rest of the train.

The seating was smaller than on Canadian trains and quite hard, but it was heavenly after our recent experience. Everyone was tired and as the blinds were kept shut, most were soon asleep. We had no idea where we were going as the Japanese were quite paranoid about giving out any such information.

The next morning we stopped at a station, at what appeared to be a small town. We were not permitted off the train or even to lift the window blinds, but as usual there was somebody who was able to discover what was happening around us. Of all places, the benjo (toilet) had no blinds on the window! There were numerous people on the outside who were curious as to what strange cargo was behind the drawn blinds. From our side there was a rush to use the benjo, which was already overtaxed by those with chronic diarrhea.

We learned after much confusion, that the purpose of the stop was to pick up some food. Our first meal in Japan was a pleasant surprise. The guards with some civilian help handed out little wooden lunch boxes. These contained attractively arranged portions of rice, pickled fish and seaweed, and a small set of chopsticks. I wolfed down my breakfast and when the same procedure was repeated at noon, felt that this pleasant introduction augured well for a better future. Even I was optimistic.

The prevalent rumour was that we were destined for a show camp, working on a cattle farm to demonstrate to The Red Cross and the world, how well prisoners-of-war were being treated. I have always marvelled, while a prisoner and since, how such rumours originate, and why they seldom suggest anything but future delights. While we had been marching to the boat in Hong Kong, it was seriously mooted that we would be boarding a large Swedish liner, well marked with the Red Cross.

Perhaps it was better not to know the truth, that we were on our way to open Camp 5-B in NiiGata. This was to be the worst Camp in Japan, by any standard, in those days isolated enough from Tokyo to give the Camp Commander absolute power. Unfortunately the first and third Commanders turned out to be pathological personalities. As a result, the morbidity and death rate were to be staggering, much higher than any other camp in Japan. It was to be an unhappy introduction to the so called Land of Cherry Blossoms, Geishas and Chrysanthemums.

Late in the day our coaches were shunted off the main train and we were lined up on the station platform. There was a fair sized crowd of onlookers gawking at us as though we were from another planet. We were herded outside to some waiting trucks, where we could see the station sign “NIIGATA”. We had arrived.

It was some distance from the station to our camp which was located outside the city. It consisted of a two storey building with a small yard that could barely contain the three hundred of us. We were given a meal of barley and greens, while in the yard and following this the Camp Commandant made a grand entrance flanked by the honchos who were to be our foremen at work.

Lieutenant Yoshida was a small, squat, ugly man who remains as a clear photograph in my mind. He was smartly dressed, with the open white shirt collar draped over his army serge. His highly polished boots reached up to his knees and this with his trailing sword gave him a peculiar duck-like waddle. His thick horned rimmed glasses and two or three steel-capped front teeth completed the caricature.

He stood on a table and “welcomed” us to NiiGata. He screamed and shouted like a madman and we soon discovered that indeed that was what he was. Most of his talk was in Japanese, translated hesitatingly to his annoyance by a young interpreter whose English was obviously inadequate, but he ended by addressing us in English:

“You are prisoners of the Imperial Nipponese Army. The war will last a hundred years and you will be here forever.” Then drawing his sword, grasping it with both hands, he slashed it through the air, shouting: “This is the punishment for disobedience.”

The future did not look too bright as we bedded down for the night. For once there were no optimistic rumours.

The camp was woefully inadequate for three hundred men. There was only one outdoor pump for the water supply and no other washing facilities. The outdoor toilet or “benjo” could not hope to accommodate this many men, let alone such a group who almost all had chronic diarrhoea. The benjos were emptied periodically by “honeywagons” pulled by bullocks, as the Japanese still used night-soil as fertilizer.

Each person had a space the size of a tatami mat, about a metre by two metres, with about thirty or forty men to a room. A narrow hail ran along the building and that was it. There was a small shack outside where the cooking was to be done.

Apparently this was supposed to be a temporary camp, for use while the permanent camp was completed. It was temporary for four months.

We were divided into three groups, Rinko were to work in a coal dock, Shintetsu in an iron foundry and Marutsu as stevedores in a general cargo dock. I was unlucky and as number 124 was a member of the Rinko crew, which was by far the toughest place to work.

We were roused at five in the morning and after a breakfast of a potato and some greens we set out for our first day on the job. It was about a two mile walk to the coal docks where we were “welcomed” by the manager of the operation, Kojima, an older man with a long black beard, a black military style tunic and plus-fours to match. The dark ensemble was marred by the customary khaki army hat that all the Japanese men wore and brown puttees. He spoke quite tolerable English and commanded a good deal of respect from the honchos, so we knew he was the number one man. He gave us a repeat of the Camp Commandant’s speech in a lower key, emphasizing that we were there only to work for the greater glory of Japan. “Whiskers”, as he was known to us, was to be a hard taskmaster in the months ahead, and was indirectly responsible for many deaths. He had a good lawyer in the later War Crimes trials and was not punished, a miscarriage of justice.

Coal was brought from Manchuria and unloaded into small cars each holding about a half-ton. Each car pushed by one man along rails mounted on a trestle about 30 feet off the ground, was to be dumped over different storage places around the dock... or sometimes directly into a railway coal carrier on the tracks below. Other railway cars were loaded using the two baskets on a pole technique we had never mastered building the Kai Tek Airport in Hong Kong. Now we soon became experts as any error or slow down was rewarded with a sharp whack of the honcho’s stick.

By any standards it was a most inefficient primitive operation. The rickety trestle and crudely built coal cars belonged more to a scenario by Dickens instead of a country at war with the highly industrialized West.

NiiGata was quite a backwater in those days and no doubt Japan had some more modern industrialized areas then, but it still astonishes me to read how they are now using robots to make cars, leading the world in electronics and leaving us all behind in the world of business. What happened?

Most of us had no proper boots and this type of work was really tough on the feet, particularly feet swollen with beriberi. The Japanese who worked beside us had no such problems as they wore rubber-soled “tabis”, shoes with a split to accommodate the big toe. These were ideal for working on the high slippery trestle. Unfortunately we never did get any adequate footwear and the trestle took a heavy toll.

We were still wearing the clothes that we had been using in Hong Kong, most unsuitable for autumn in NiiGata let alone winter. I had picked up a sleeveless sweater in Bowen Road, and still had my original Canadian Army shirt and shorts. Somewhere along the line I had scrounged an old Al Capone type fedora of which I was very proud. It was great to keep the rain and snow off my face.

After we had been working for an hour or so it began to rain heavily, the first cold rain we had felt since leaving Canada almost two years previously. We were given straw raincoats. I remembered having seen pictures in “The National Geographic”, of Japanese peasants wearing these as they planted rice in the rain. It had all seemed so picturesque. Reality was quite a different picture! The coats soon became intolerably heavy and awkward with moisture, making manoeuvring on the trestle even more precarious and dangerous.

The foremen, known as “Honchos” or sometimes as “7Ups” because of the Japanese script on their armbands, were a mixed bag. A deplorably few were quite decent chaps who were understanding and perhaps even sympathetic to our problems. Others were just ornery and mean while still others were plain psychotic. They were all veterans of the army, most having served in China, who had been discharged from active service. As a general rule, the less action they had ever experienced, the harder they were on their charges.

They wore old army uniforms, complete with puttees, but without any military insignia. They all carried long heavy sticks, worn like samurai swords. Anyone who stepped out of line was given a whack with the stick, a very effective form of discipline.

In Japan the common hand signal to summon one is similar to what our body language uses to wave someone away. The consequent confusion could be quite hilarious even though it resulted in a sore head.

Sato was without doubt the worst of the honchos. He was small, even for a Japanese of those days and had a narrow, evil, hawk-like face. He was a sadist who was only happy if he was beating or shouting at some unfortunate. He walked, or more correctly, strutted about in a jerking gait like a bantam cock. Now I can understand that he almost certainly was a paranoid schizophrenic, who had been discharged from the army as mentally unfit. On the slightest suspicion he would unmercifully beat some poor soul into semi-consciousness. Even his fellow honchos were afraid of him.

In contrast, Saito, whose name only differed by a letter, was one of the good eggs. He was tiny, almost like a toy doll, and had a positively cherubic face. He would let us rest whenever the coast was clear and even shared the odd cigarette. At times he would shout and scream, but it was clear that his heart was never in it, and he was understandably under severe peer pressure. Oddly enough he was much decorated veteran who had been twice wounded.

What is surprising is that there were so few such guards or honchos. It would appear that they had been purposely screened to include mostly pathological personalities.

In comparison to the standard uniform of the guards and honchos, the dress of the P.O.W.s was an exercise in fantastic variations. Headgear varied from pukah-sahib topis to gangster type fedoras, the occasional wedge cap that had survived the war in Hong Kong and even the odd British regimental dress hat. South African and Australian wide brims contrasted sharply with the Japanese army caps that even the civilian workers wore.

Your prison camp number in Japanese script was on a flap sewed on the back of each hat. On the back of out shirts we had our numbers printed on a white cotton patch about a foot square.

There were many Japanese women in the civilian work force who worked beside us. They wore baggy trousers and padded jackets which would never make it into Vogue, but their appearance was not how I remember them. In contrast to the guards and the male workers they were always smiling and kept up a constant chatter punctuated by peals of laughter.

The work day was long, the conditions tough and the food most inadequate for such heavy labour. The first meals consisted of a potato and some greens. At first we were delighted to have a potato, but it soon became evident that rice or barley or sorghum was more filling. Seaweed was an occasional luxury and a more esoteric dish was grasshoppers cooked in soya sauce. These were quite tasty.

Reveille was at 5 a.m. The work party lined up at 6.00 and roll call was taken. This was often an exercise in confusion as some chaps never could master numbering off in Japanese, so it was usually 6.30 before we moved off. The coal yard was about two miles away and we were supposed to start work at 7.00.

There was next to no traffic as we trudged through the narrow streets; the odd bullock pulling a cart, the occasional truck and a rare car, sometimes with a big bag on top of it, filled with coal gas, as petrol was in very short supply.

Lunch was brought to us from the camp by a hand pulled cart and was cold. The potato was later replaced by a somewhat purple cereal which we called Korian. It was probably a form of sorghum. Usually there was a daikon soup made from the giant Japanese radish, and very rarely a small piece of fish or fish soup.

At 5.00 p.m. we were marched home. At first while the weather was still warm we were allowed a quick dip in the bay, which was wonderfully refreshing.

There was no place to move around in the barracks. We were confined to an area hardly larger than the space sufficient for each person to lie down. I remember the building as consisting of about ten large rooms, separated from each other by paper walls, connected by a hall that ran down one side of the structure. Thirty people were crammed into each room. We were each given a cotton blanket and a hard little pillow.

At one end of the building was the “benjo”, an outdoor toilet; at the other a pump, the sole supply of water for the camp. I forced myself to bathe every night in the cold water, which was a bit of an ordeal, but few did this and soon most were grimy with coal dust and before long everyone was lousy.

Such lack of elementary sanitation soon took its toll. Almost everyone got diarrhea with stomach cramps and vomiting. Food became scarcer and the weather turned cold and wet. We would return from work cold, hungry and despondent, with no chance of dry clothes, warm food or words of cheer. I was down to ninety pounds and could barely drag myself to work and back. I realized that if I was going to survive I would have to get off the coal detail.

One of the rooms had been converted into a hospital, if it could be called that. There was no doctor but two orderlies struggled to cope with the sick and dying. I approached the Japanese interpreter, Shiga, and told him I had been a medical student, which of course was not true, and that I would like to be a medical orderly. It was a desperate move and most disappointing when I received no enthusiastic response. The outlook was gloomy.

Shortly after this I had an acute bout of dysentery and had to go on the sick parade which was conducted by the Japanese Medical Corporal, Takeo Takahashi. The interpreter was there and told my story to him.. This time the reaction was more favourable as I guess they were overwhelmed by the numbers of sick and dying.

So I became a medical orderly again. It was a hard, thankless job as the small room set aside as a hospital was filled with cases of pneumonia and dysentery. The lack of a doctor and adequately trained personnel was compounded by the absence of any modem medications. We were given injections of camphor to use for pneumonia. This was understandably ineffective, in fact I sometimes wondered if it made things worse. The dysentery was treated with bismuth subnitrate, but we had no way of coping with the dehydration that was the killer.

As winter approached a curtain of gloom fell over the camp. There were no optimistic rumours.

Then a group of American prisoners arrived from Cabanatuan in the Philippines. They had been captured at Bataan and Corrigedor and were in much better shape than the Canadians. In the Philippines there had been a large farm at the camp, which kept them much better fed. They were better clothed, all had mess tins and water bottles and their high spirits temporarily boosted morale in the camp.

At first they boasted how easy the work was at Rinko, pushing the cars around at a great clip, but this did not last long. The diet, dreadful working and living conditions soon took their toll. Soon they were indistinguishable from the rest of us.

The only medical care, if it can be called that, was offered by Corporal Takeo Takahashi. He was a vain pompous little man who had been a dental assistant before the war, and did not hide his contempt for the prisoners. In the two years or so that he was in control of the health care of the camp, I never once saw him show any compassion for a sick or injured man. He would smile at the oddest situation and it was only after a long time I realized this facial gesture was to show off his gold tooth of which he was very proud. He dispensed useless powders to those with diarrhoea and the inevitable camphor injections to those with pneumonia. Nobody died without receiving a shot of adrenalin in the chest. He suspected even those at death’s door of malingering. Many died and more became disabled. Work parties shrunk to a fraction of their original size.

The Camp Commandant perhaps became frightened about possible blame by his superiors. There was no knowing whether he tried unsuccessfully to get a Western type doctor or whether he believed strongly in his home tutored medicine. In any event he arranged for two acupuncturists to treat, or at least to tend our ailments.

Two saffron robed gentlemen appeared early one morning. Those of us with the most severe dysentery or pneumonia were assembled in one hut and ordered to lie down. The acupuncturist kneeled beside the patient. After exchanging a few words to and from the interpreter and the sufferer, he took the patient’s pulse at both wrists and ankles, brooding over the count as some venerated Merlin in a mystic trance.

Some of the group he treated by inserting the conventional acupuncture needles into their skeptical hides, twirling the needles with remarkable dexterity.

Other sick prisoners were detoxified differently. Small cones of dried leaves were placed in a pattern of the Cross of Lorraine on the abdomen. The occasional patient had one placed on the pinna of the ear. These cones were then ignited and the tiny smouldering fires allowed to burn so far down as to raise a blister on the skin. The procedure was somewhat painful but no one whimpered. Pride dictated stoicism.

This type of treatment, known as moxybustion or moxa, is a cousin of acupuncture. The little cones are made of powdered mugwort leaves, (armesia vulgaris), the word moxa being a corruption of the word mokusa, meaning burning herb.

This scene was repeated several times over the next few days. The treatment was uniformly successful... in producing tender infected sores... the dysentery and pneumonia raged on unabated. In two or three weeks a British doctor arrived and the priests never returned.

The arrival of the doctor, Major Bill Stewart, R.A.M.C., helped raise the sinking morale. Even though there were next to no drugs available, it was comforting for the sick to be in the hands of a professional. He was a kind and gentle person who tried hard to cope with the impossible. We became close friends despite the difference in rank and background and it was largely due to his influence that I later went into medicine.

He was an Ulsterman, who had been in Singapore with the British Army, but after the surrender, managed to escape in a small sail boat, making it safely to Java. There he embarked on a British ship bound for Australia. Unfortunately the ship was sunk by a German raider and his bad luck was compounded when the raider dropped off all the passengers and crew in Japan.

The following is an extract from the report he gave the Canadian Government on returning home. It was written while en route from Tokyo to San Francisco while NiiGata was still fresh in his memory. This is copied from his original pencilled notes and I have not edited it in any way. His dates and some names differ from some of my text. No doubt his are correct as the passage of some forty odd years can somewhat dull the brain.

He and his charming wife, Helen, visited us in the summer of 1983 during which time he gave me these notes as well as some forbidden medical records I had helped keep in camp and had managed to hide from the Japanese.

This is all of Dr. Stewart’s diary that I have available. It may be that he did not write more than this, as he became heavily involved in the later War Crimes Trials.