Authors: Fergal Keane
His 138th Regiment counterpart, Chuzaburo Tomaru, returned to find that his father had been killed in an air raid. For Chuzaburo the end of the war had been a time of madness. An officer he knew, a man who had survived the march out of India, took a pistol and blew out his own brains when he heard news of the surrender. Chuzaburo was sad at the defeat, but he had never been a committed warrior like so many of the others. The war was a hell that followed him into peace. The images flashed before him constantly. He saw himself running in torn shoes; he saw a man slip into the jungle and kill himself with a hand grenade, another shoot himself in the mouth; one time when he had amoebic dysentery he saw a wild dog slink out and eat his shit. The pictures kept coming into his old age.
In the Japan to which he and the other veterans returned, the old military was a leper caste. Men deserted in droves after the defeat and
there was widespread criminality. The eminent American historian of Japan, John Dower, described how ‘officers and men engaged in looting, sometimes on a grand scale, and police reports expressed that public disgust would extend upward to “grave distrust, frustration, and antipathy towards military and civilian leaders”, even “hatred of the military” in general’. About 70 per cent of the military’s remaining supply stocks, including machinery and vehicles, were stolen by the upper echelons and much of them sold on to the black market. By contrast, disabled veterans and war widows were abandoned to fend for themselves. Prices soared by 539 per cent in the first year after the surrender, and nearly four million people were left without housing. Destitute veterans begged in the streets of ruined cities. Hans Baerwald, an American brought up in Japan, returned to work for the Occupation administration and saw ‘vast stretches of flatness, dotted with shacks made of cardboard, corrugated tin, and bits of wood for most of the way from the docks of Yokohama to downtown Tokyo’.
There were 350,000 American military personnel in the country by the end of 1945 and these new soldiers moved with their shoulders back and their chins up, as if the future belonged to them. To speak to the veterans of the 31st Division, it was as if they were barely aware of the victors’ presence, certainly in the first few months after their return from Burma. Home, with all its losses and ambiguities, was still home. The machine-gunner Yoshiteru Hirayama was in hospital with cerebral malaria when he dreamt that he was on a train going home to his father’s monastery in Saitama, outside Tokyo. But when the train would not stop he shouted and tried to jump off. When he woke up, there were guards trying to stop him from jumping from the hospital window. Hirayama believed that his spirit had travelled home ahead of him. Back in Saitama, he studied for the Buddhist priesthood, eventually taking over from his father as abbot. He married and had three children, but never spoke of Kohima until his children asked. ‘My children wanted to know about it but I hesitated and even then when I did talk I didn’t tell them the worst. I don’t really want to talk. I felt such grief.’
When General Sato came home to Amarume he was a man without a job or a home of his own. He moved with his family into his brother’s home, where they occupied a few small rooms in an annexe. There was no bathroom and when he wanted to bathe the general would cross to his brother’s house and ask to use the facilities there. ‘I want to take a bath in my own house some day,’ he told his son Goro. There was a military pension, but the family was constantly short of money. Eventually General Sato sent his son to the pawnshop with the family’s valuables. ‘He pawned stuff in order that we could feed ourselves,’ Goro said. A cousin across the river in Sakata gave them firewood which Goro and his sisters went by boat to collect.
General Sato knew there were some in the area who regarded the retreat from Kohima as a betrayal, among them a veteran of the
Kempeitai
who ran a seed store in town and began to whisper against him. His younger brother, Kinchiko, an army colonel, was also among those who felt he had done the wrong thing. Most veterans of the 31st Division took a different view. He was invited to reunions and hailed as the man who had saved their lives. But it never removed the guilt he felt for those who had been left in the mountains. When he had finished his journey of atonement, walking the roads of Amarume to visit the families of the war dead, General Sato helped to organise a lobby group for the relatives. To his own children, though, he said almost nothing about Kohima.
Goro would go for walks with his father, or work in the family plot with him. ‘I sensed it as a great loss inside him,’ he recalled. The general took up calligraphy and studied with a local master, devoting hours to the delicate choreography of the brush. ‘I will leave depressing days in the past,’ he wrote. He went fishing with a friend but would ignore the float in the water and stare instead at the sky, a man with thoughts miles away from the river. At some point in the late 1940s, Goro noticed that his father’s drinking was getting worse. He had always been a heavy drinker, but the alcohol had a grip on him now. When he became ill and went to hospital they diagnosed liver disease. ‘Afterwards he asked the doctor, “How long do I have left?”
and he wanted to know the name of the sickness. He pushed him to say the truth. He said: “Don’t lie” … The doctor said he had a year and a half. My impression was that he looked relieved when he knew how long he had left.’ From then on, he went to more veterans’ parties and meetings.
He told his son, ‘Okay, from now on I live only eighteen months so I will do what I want to do.’ The general’s body could no longer cope with alcohol and his son watched him vomit many times, even after the smallest amount. ‘It was so sad to see him like that … just throwing up. He would ask me to massage his body because he was in so much pain.’ There was a summons to the war crimes tribunal, where prosecutors questioned him and decided there was no case to answer; he was flattered when the Americans called him to Tokyo to tell their officers what it was like to fight the Russians. The drinking and his health got worse and he could be irascible with his family. His daughter, Yukiko, found him strict and chose her words carefully when answering his questions. ‘I was careful of answering his question because he would consider words like “but” or “because” to be directed against him. My father would get mad saying, “you are not honest”, if I forgot to do something. I tied ribbon around my finger not to forget things before I went out. If I took a rest due to a headache, my father scolded me for being “Lazy”.’ He lived by the codes of an older Japan in which a parent’s word was law. Yet Yukiko would always revere him for making sure she had an education. By the summer of 1958 he had undergone an operation for the removal of a liver tumour. ‘He was nothing but skin and bone,’ his wife Fumiko recalled. The following February he went into hospital for the last time. He told his family to build an altar and then make a bonfire of his letters and documents. Only the list of the dead from Kohima was spared. He thought of them to the end. Kotuku Sato died on 26 February 1959 on a day of heavy snow.
On the day of his funeral veterans from across the division came to the Jigan temple. There were also men who had served with him in Korea and fighting the Russians. His old infantry commander,
Miyazaki, came, dressed in a grey woollen suit and looking like a prosperous businessman. He told the curious that he now made his living running a pottery shop. Goro Sato noticed a small stir at the back of the room. When he looked across he saw General Renya Mutaguchi standing among the officers. ‘I didn’t have a feeling of hatred. I was too busy to notice what was happening. I just said, “Well, he has come.” We just accepted the fact.’ What happened next astonished the general’s family. Suddenly Mutaguchi got down on his knees and prostrated himself before them. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. The room was silent. After a few minutes General Sato’s wife said something in response, but Goro Sato was so overcome that he cannot remember what it was. Word filtered out of the room to veterans in the temple corridors. Mutaguchi had apologised! The man who had never admitted he was wrong had said sorry.
If it had rested there, Mutaguchi might have seemed a larger man to them. But his post-war life was a prolonged exercise in self-justification. He was cursed by 31st Division veterans and he knew it. ‘Some said, “how dare you still live?” It was a painful experience,’ he told an archivist. Four years after Sato’s funeral he was interviewed by a researcher from the library of the Japanese parliament, the National Diet. He began piously enough. ‘General Sato passed away already. It is not right to whip the dead for his mistake,’ he said. Mutaguchi then proceeded to trample over the dead man’s memory. Sato had made a ‘terrible error in leadership’ and had disobeyed orders; he was surely mentally imbalanced. Mutaguchi even cited Slim’s criticism of Sato in his list of charges, and then berated Kawabe for holding him back from Dimapur. The agreement was that the interview would not be released for thirty-three years after his death.
For a period after the war Mutaguchi had been held as a suspected war criminal. Troops under his command had taken part in the massacre of patients and staff at the Alexandra Military Hospital in Singapore. The Prosecutor General rejected the case because Mutaguchi had not been present when his troops ran riot, bayoneting and shooting the wounded. ‘The massacres were committed in the heat of battle and I do not see how responsibility can be attached
to a Senior Officer who was not present unless it can be shown that he had some cognizance of what took place.’ He was released from Changi prison in Singapore on 5 June 1947 and sent home to Japan, where he was appointed to the staff college of the Self-Defence Force, a piece of excellent fortune for a man who had presided over the greatest battlefield defeat in his country’s history, to say nothing of the disaster he had inflicted on the people of northern Burma and the Naga Hills.
The 31st Division veterans would back Sato until the end. But it took forty years to erect a memorial to him in Amarume. A monk friend of his family explained that locals wanted to forget the war. Also, Sato’s actions had divided the townspeople. Abbot Hakuho Abe, over a hundred years old when we met, told me that veterans approached the family soon after Sato died. ‘They asked his family for permission to construct the stone much earlier, but they could not say yes because they were blamed a lot after the war. They were made to feel ashamed.’ The simple grey obelisk was erected in the spring of 1985 and after prayers the veterans posed together for a photograph. Every year they went to 31st Division reunions, and to the dinners of its component regiments. Many went back to Kohima to see the place where the bones of their comrades were buried in mass graves. As for the thousands who fell along the tracks to the Chindwin and beyond, they had a champion in the form of Hiroshi Yamagami, the colour-bearer of the 58th Regiment. I met him in his small, file-cluttered flat in Tokyo, where he has lived alone since the death of his wife. They had no children and had travelled widely together around the world. But it was Burma that kept drawing him back, and he visited the old battlefields, searching for the remains of the dead. When he found some bones he offered prayers. Some of them must have been of men he had once known. Of that he was sure.
On the train there was a bunch of Birmingham lads he got chatting with, all going home like himself, and all of them wondering how it would have changed. When he got off at Coventry they skimmed their berets across the platform through the carriage windows and cheered him on. Dennis Wykes waved goodbye, shouldered his duffel bag and walked out of the station. He was wearing his bush hat and hoped someone would notice and say, ‘Hey, were you in the Fourteenth Army?’ He would nod modestly if they did, even answer a few questions about how tough it had been. But nobody said anything. People looked tired and the city was in a state. Bombed to blazes. Still, the excitement kept him going for the two mile walk home. Jesus, he thought, home. How many times at Kohima had he pictured his feet quickening up Melbourne Road and then forced the thought out of his mind, because nothing is so far away as the home you might never see again.
He turned into the road and started to walk up the hill. ‘I started to feel “Oh God” and then I saw they had all the flags outside and “Welcome Home”. And there was a neighbour woman who was always leaning over the front gate of her house. And there she was still leaning over the front gate! She saw me coming and dashed out and rushed down the road and threw her arms around me.’ Dennis walked on, up the steps, and knocked on the door. He heard feet racing through the house. The whole family was there, his mam and dad, aunts, uncles, cousins. After that it was all cheering, crying, patting him on the back and questions. He could answer them up to
a point, but found himself sticking to generalisations. It was bloody hard, he told them. The Japs were savage fighters. But there was a point you could not go beyond. His parents didn’t need to hear the truth of it, and he was not sure he could get the words out in any case.
There was the person who had left England and then there was him. They were so different he couldn’t even start to explain. ‘It was pretty hard to take … My mother and father, I think they thought I would come home and be the same fellow. Of course I wasn’t. She said, “You sit in that armchair and read your
Beano
, Dennis. It’s always been your armchair, it’s yours now.” And I thought, “I don’t want no armchair. I’ve been on the trot for four years in the army, at war.” I never stopped moving.’ Now there was time that stretched ahead forever and the habits of four years to break free from. He got up at dawn each day, put on his uniform and went out walking, looking for anybody he knew. He found himself searching the faces for dead men.