Winners of the Essay Contest on POWs of the Japanese

US-JAPAN DIALOGUE ON POWS, INC., a California non-profit organization, is pleased to announce two winners of its second essay writing contest. They are:

              Miss Jessica Goad, Carleton College
              Mr.  Sho Sugiura,   University of Tokyo

Both winners will attend the annual convention of American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (an organization of former POWs of the Japanese) in Washington DC from April 13 to 16, 2007. They will be meeting with many former POWs and their family members, while having a dialogue between themselves on learning the POW history.

*This Essay Contest was made possible by the generous support from Dorothy and Clay Perkins.  

On Learning to Remember

Jessica Goad
Carleton College

This past summer, I was awarded a grant from Carleton College to trace the path of my grandfather, Dr. Lloyd H. Goad, a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps who was captured on Ft. Frank in May of 1942 during the fall of Corregidor.  I have decided that my efforts are best spent in sharing my thoughts and questions about the experience of World War II with people who are in the exact same boat as me- young descendents of Japanese soldiers who are only two generations yet so many memories removed from the War.

My personal objective was simple: journey to the same places my “Pop-Pop” had set foot, while at the same time consuming as much literature and as many anecdotes as possible about the successes and failures of campaigns in the Philippines and the chilling misery of men held for years in Japanese POW camps.  My corresponding questions were simple: What does my generation know about WWII?  What do we learn about it in school?  What slant does that education have?  What do young people my age and from other countries know about WWII?  And what do we not know?  Being the ripe and clearly competent age of 21, I conveniently and (perhaps) foolishly left my plans open to alteration, but my mind open to what these ghosts of the Pacific had to say.   

I began my journey by flying into Manila, visiting Fort Santiago and the old walled city of Intramuros, Bilibid Prison (today the Manila City Jail), and the Manila American Cemetery.  I meandered along Dewey Boulevard (today Roxas Boulevard) at dusk and imagined lavish officer parties in the “Pearl of the Orient.”  I spent 3 days wandering the eerie jungles of Corregidor, drove part of the route of the Bataan Death March, and visited Cabanatuan, the notorious POW camp venerated in Hampton Sides’ Ghost Soldiers and the film The Great Raid.
　　                      Battery Way, Corregidor

Let me not be overly dramatic, but it was here that I truly felt the lingering presence of souls lost to the terrible choices of other men.  The gravity of the definition of a “prisoner” finally made sense to me.  And I felt for the first time that the man I was following knew that I was doing so.

Following my tour of the Philippines, I flew to Japan to see the Omori and Shinagawa camps to which Dr. Goad was taken by the Hellship the Nagato Maru.  As I anticipated, there was no memorial or even any hint of the former existence of a major POW camp at either of these locations, now suburbs of Tokyo.  But I was able to investigate the War in other ways, first by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, in which a number of convicted Japanese war criminals hanged after the war are enshrined and worshipped as deities.  In the museum of military history adjacent to the shrine, I was deeply intrigued to read about the Japanese interpretation of the events leading up to what is referred to as the “Greater East Asian War” and the battle for the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”     

It was these experiences in Tokyo that make me most want to talk to young Japanese students.  I want to know what they learned about the War in school, what it means to them personally, and what it means to their nation.  As I do not speak Japanese, it was difficult for me to presume the answers to these questions while I was traveling, and thus, 8 months later, this is a gaping hole in my experience about which I still wonder.  One of the most important parts of prescriptive dialogue is to understand what the other side knows and the way in which they frame the issues, and this is why I want to talk with Japanese students:  to get a much more complete and real picture of the war in a global context, not just from my American perspective.     

Through my travels I was unexpectedly taken on quite the psychological journey as I continued to read and follow the lives of various soldiers immortalized in memoirs, only one of whom was my grandfather.  My feelings and emotions began to parallel those of the prisoners:  I felt the resentment that many soldiers had for “Dugout Doug” MacArthur, I physically longed for my family and loved ones back home, and, on quite the unflattering level for the daughter of a socially-conscious liberal arts education, I began to feel a hostility verging on racism towards the Japanese.  As I walked the streets of Tokyo I couldn’t help but look at old men and wonder if one of them had forced a soldier to dig his own grave and then shot him into it, or if that man with a cane in the supermarket once beat my grandfather.  Peculiar, I know, but what happened on my travels was that the War became real for me.  I am embarrassed to admit that this happened to me, and I want to ask Japanese students if there is any way that the war has become real for them.    

This is what I want to share with you, that “war” was not and is still not completely real for me or for anyone in my generation minus some 150,000 troops fighting in the Middle East, only a few of whom are seeing active combat.  We young people were born into the antebellum period of the Persian Gulf War, with the Berlin Wall falling as we were learning to finger paint and speak in full sentences.  The smoldering ruins of downed Black-Hawk helicopters on the streets of Mogadishu were fleeting images, for we were only learning what color black even was.  The headlines which screamed news from Kosovo fell upon mostly-blind eyes, as we were more concerned with braces and puberty.  It is only now, as we are on the cusp of adulthood, that this generation realizes the lived truth of war and death, and even so, unless you are related to those troops on active duty in the Middle East or are ambitiously determined to self-educate about conflict, war is something that we see only on TV or in the movies or read about in dusty history textbooks or syndicated columns of our newspapers.  But what is most intolerable is that we- young people- have absolutely no idea what war has meant.    

And yet, we don’t even know about the war.  My high school history textbook devotes a mere 28 pages out of 1160 to the war years, including articles about the American people during war time, the age of swing, and a fairly comprehensive overview of the Western Front.  Never once are Bataan and Corregidor mentioned, and never once are the 140,000 Allied prisoners of war, ¼ of whom perished according to scholar Gavin Daws, even given the slightest recognition.  What kind of pedagogical mishap is this? 

What is secondary education about the war like in other countries, specifically Japan?  I’m convinced that after only two generations the admirable and yet lofty pronouncements that I came across on the memorials and in my readings have fallen short when it comes my generation.  We know names like Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, and Hiroshima, but we are too far removed from the real people- people who once were our own idealistic and passionate age- who gave up their carefree youth to protect an intangible ideal and a country which today we so easily blaspheme against.  Is this the same in Japan?

And thus, here is my question to you:  How can we learn to remember? 

Since most of us do not know what we should remember, and our schools are not filling the historical gaps, I want to come to D.C. to ask you directly:  What do veterans of WWII want members of my generation and those of the future to know, value, and learn from their experiences?  What should we take from your suffering and how can we use it to improve our world?  I invite you to correspond with me and simply answer it before it is too late.  The chance of meeting you at the 2007 American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor conference to have a discussion about these issues and to meet young Japanese students are profound incentives for me to write today.  I know that you may be haunted by the past and I do not desire to be the one to disinter what you have buried.  I merely want to draw upon the precedent of your experience, of which I have learned to remember, and teach others how to remember too.

“History is in the eyes and mind of the beholder and is remembered only if and how recorded.”  --- Robert R. Martindale,
                    “The 13th Mission: Prisoner of the Notorious Omori Prison in Tokyo”

Knowing the Experiences of Ex-POWs

Sho Sugiura
University of Tokyo

World War II was the biggest warfare in human history, and it revealed the limitation of the Imperialism - that is how it is taught in textbooks, and it is the general view of Japanese young generations on the war. I too understand it was an extravagant war for Japan from the beginning. The Imperial Japanese Army made too much of spiritualism and as a result of aggressive policies, many soldiers died by diseases and suicide often fighting to the last man. I, of course, learned about many of the Japanese atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Bataan Death March and Thai-Burma Railroad.

However, it seems to me that my knowledge of these atrocities has been in my mind just as occurrences in history. Therefore, when I read the experiences of Mr. Donald Versaw, although I first felt antipathy against the brutality of the Japanese Army, it was as if I was reading a story of some evil men from a far off country. However, it gave me a great shock to read the following words of him, “After coming to Japan my chances to survive were much better.” Let me explain. The cruelty which the Chinese and Korean forced laborers underwent in Japan is well known, and though Mr. Versaw must have experienced similar or worse hardships, he was able to have a positive perspective of his future after having arrived in Japan. This astonished me.

Why was I so surprised? As I pursued my thinking, I realized how I had been dulled in a peaceful environment, and felt ashamed. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a professional soldier who graduated from Japanese Army’s elite intelligence school. He died in action when my grandmother was eight. My grandfather on my father’s side is eighty-eight now. He belonged to the elite Imperial Guard and had an experience of trying to shoot down B-29s. Even now he never watches any movies or TV related to the war. He seldom talks about the war. My grandfather of my mother’s side originally wanted to study music, but his parents wished to prevent him from being sent to the front, so he chose to study medicine. It was such an unpatriotic thought in those days, which should never be discussed in public. My grandmother’ brother on my father’s side was sent to Manchuria and killed in action, leaving an infant child. One of the cousins on my grandmother was also sent to Manchuria and later interned in Siberia. The entire family thought he had been killed in action, but he returned on the last repatriation ship in 1956. His toe nails are still black for the frostbite he suffered in Siberia.

This is all I know about my relatives related to WWII. I might have held the same mentality as those survivors who wanted to forget the war. Without realizing it, I might have felt the delusion that the war was a taboo subject. 

However, as I was reading the experiences of former POWs, I realized I was wrong. I had never experienced the war. Survivors might want to forget, but it is entirely different if I, who do not know much about it, do not make positive efforts to learn about it. Young people in Japan shouldn’t be apathetic toward learning about the war.

Once a war breaks out, many lives would be lost whether they were soldiers on the battlefield or civilians on the home front. Victors and losers alike would lose their only life. However, I realized my all too complacent attitude attributing everything to the original nature of war, saying that all events were the result of a war crisis situation.

Recently, however, there is an increasing trend within Japan that tries to change the Japanese people’s views on war. The most conspicuous of this trend is the moves to change the Peace Constitution of Japan and new plans for patriotic education with the pretense of supporting the US war against terrorism. The textbook by “Association for Creating New History Textbook” is also well known. In opposition, there are numerous counter movements to view the past war in an objective light. In my high school classes, we studied these supplementary materials. On the other hand, it’s also true that even among young generations some insist the Nanjing Massacre never happened. I remember some time ago, a group of people claimed there was no such thing as the Bataan Death March. Those who do not admit the atrocities of the past are committing the same narrow-minded nationalistic mistake again.

Furthermore, a new problem today is there are some who have never heard of the Bataan Death March. Even among those who know, it’s silly to assume that it was the only atrocity committed by the Japanese Army. Why do such misconceptions emerge? I believe it is because the history we learned was basically from the viewpoint of the Japanese. Generally speaking, the aggressors easily forget what they did. Perhaps the sense of guilt instinctively leads them towards willful amnesia.

Regarding WWII, we Japanese are known as born aggressors. I for one actually feel this labeling a bit unfair, at the same time I know I have to accept that. This might be another reason the young Japanese do not try to face the past.

However, I think we should not be bound with nationalism of one country. If we learned “What Japan did,” it might be natural for Japanese to avert from the Japanese war history. Then I wish we could learn the history from the angle “how the Americans were treated,” and think of the hardships of the American POWs. In many aspects, the distance between the US and Japan has become smaller. Humans can communicate beyond the boundaries of nationality or language. So we can do it. Of course, no matter how many POW stories we might hear, we won’t be able to know every horror and pain they suffered. However, it still is a precious experience for us to listen to their experiences trying to learn them and think about them.

“Why do POWs tell their stories, especially to the Japanese?” It was my next question. I really tried hard to find the answer. By letting the Japanese know the history of the other side, POWs can save and redeem the Japanese people. In other words, by offering the reality to the Japanese, they let the Japanese people face again what they once ignored, regret, and be redeemed. I could at last realize that. And I felt full of gratitude for the ex-POWs, who had generously forgiven the Japanese. Reading Mr. Donald Versaw’s following words, I was so touched, “The gratitude I have and the debt I owe for my own survival extends beyond my comprehensions. Among them were people even among the enemy, I didn't know and never would that in some small way or another helped me to survive.” With much love they had forgiven their awful experiences, which is heavy. I hope as many Japanese as possible will listen to survivors’ stories and renew their recognition of the war.

 in Kendo (Japanese swordsmanship) uniform

I love human beings. I love Japanese people. I never think that the Japanese are a genetically atrocious race. However, I want to accept the facts as facts, and I’d like to have my feelings of apology. I hope war will disappear from the world, in which it will be impossible to hold anything to exist normal; our reasons, soul and body and materials. In order to realize that wish, we should know the history, and not forget it,　and make further efforts to pass it on to others.

It was painful for me to read the fine descriptions written by Dr. Lester Tenney, Messrs. Louis Read, Abel Ortega and others. As I felt gloomy, it was like seeing a light in the dark, reading Messrs. Jack Leaming or Robert Brown’s about their friendly exchanges with Japanese. Knowing the fact that Mr. Abie Abraham was digging out the remains after the war makes me realize another aftermath of the war, which Japan has ignored, using the lack of means and resources of post-war Japan as an excuse. More than anything else, I would like to thank ex-POWs for telling us their stories with great love and courage. I am thankful that rather than criticizing the current Japanese population, they patiently and warmly await our remorse. I am grateful I was given this opportunity to think about this issue.