Entry 25: thursday, march 06, 1952

 

The first prisoner of war I met on the Burma border in the spring of 1944 had two deep bayonet gashes ion his throat and his tongue, half bitten off, was swollen and bleeding. He had inflicted these wounds upon himself in two suicide attempts.

"Do you still want to die?" I asked him.

"No, I want to live if the Americans will let me."

"Why did you attempt suicide?" I asked him, although we assumed from the reports we read that practically all Japanese prisoners of war tried to take their lives.

"Because," the POW answered, "to be a prisoner is the supreme disgrace of an imperial soldier."

Sgt. Kenji Yasui and I talked to him, paying close observation to his views and sentiments. The prisoner was a Japanese peasant who had been physically and psychologically drilled to become a fearless and ruthless automaton, with "Yamato spirit" and the "Code of Bushido."

He had no deep social philosophy. His thinking had been restricted and simplified by the Japanese militarists and their big financial backers. He was a product of a society where thought control prevailed, and where the people had been silenced and whipped into conformity by Japanese militarists and their big financial backers. And such shackling of the people's rights to speak and listen, to read and write and to hold and advocate non-conforming political views was necessary for the warring elements to eliminate opposition to the invasion of Manchuria, to the war of aggression in China proper, southeast Asia and the Pacific.

I saw then how different this soldier was from us.

Back in the states, General DeWitt had said, after we had been evacuated from the West Coast defense area he commanded, that "a Jap's a Jap!" and citizenship for us is a scrap of paper. And the governor of Idaho had said a few days before we arrived in the southern part of the state to work as volunteer sugar beet workers: All of us "Japs" were like rats, bred like rats and ought to be dumped back on the Japanese islands to be drowned like rats. We were then afraid of vigilante action resulting from such official agitation.

This prisoner had talked to other Nisei GIs who were with Merrill's Marauders at the time of his capture in Northern Burma. The 14-man Nisei team with the Marauders, led by Sgt. Edward Mitsukado of Honolulu, was doing invaluable work as infantrymen and intelligence operators.

Emperor Worship Took Minds Away From People's Problems

The Japanese prisoner told us that he was shocked when the Nisei GIs first came to Interrogate him. He was of the opinion, after reading about the evacuation and treatment of the Nisei and their parents, that we were all still being ill-treated.

This soldier still clung to emperor worship. The "Imperial Way" to him was the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," and "Asia for the Asiatics." The "Imperial Way" was actually camouflaged International profiteering and banditry. Not aware of this, the soldier had made his supreme arid heroic sacrifices for the emperor.

The inculcation of emperor worship in him and other soldiers by the Japanese imperialists to the point of blind fanaticism stopped their minds from questioning the conditions of poverty, landlordism, tenancy, low wages and unemployment. They had been told to sacrifice everything for the "Imperial Way" and the "Co-Prosperity Sphere."

The "Imperial Way" Was Like Today's Wall Street's "Freedom Crusade"

All this propaganda was like the present-day mouthing of "freedom" and "freedom-loving nations" by the imperialist powers, who include among the "freedom-lovers'' the fascist Franco. "Freedom" is today's substitute for the "Co-Prosperity Sphere" and the "Imperial Way," and the Asian people see this quite clearly.

In the bamboo hut in the prisoner of war compound on Lido Road I saw how the nature of war itself molds soldiers. There was a Corporal Suehiro, a POW, who appreciated the good treatment by Americans. To show his gratitude he sang for the MPs who guarded the prisoners. He sang loudly of how his invincible 18th Division routed the British from Mayala, marched through Indonesia and chalked up victories in Burma, too. He sang of the innocent people he had killed and of the women he raped. I interpreted Suehiro's songs for the Americans. They laughed at the irony of this situation where a POW sang of Japanese victories to his captors to show his gratitude.

The Nature of War Determines Behavior of Soldiers

We were then a liberating army. The Japanese troops were the aggressors, forced to fight the natives and to deal with them ruthlessly. There is no getting away from it that the behavior of imperialist soldiers is brutal, for they are in unfriendly territory. And their tasks make them so. They must search civilians, shoot everyone that moves and hold people as hostages. The allied soldiers have been forced into a like situation in Korea today, because of the nature of the war they are fighting.

One day in the early summer of 1944, a Japanese second lieutenant walked into an American command post to give himself up with one of the tens of thousands of surrender leaflets we had prepared and dropped over enemy troop concentrations. When this report came in, we were extremely happy.

Already by then we were discussing the desirability of re-educating some prisoners so that they would be our propagandists. Some of them in responding to our good treatment, were writing leaflets for us. We went over these carefully, reproduced some and dropped them among Japanese troops.

Converted POWs Used In China For Front-Line Propaganda Work

At this time we heard of a Japanese political refugee in China who had re-educated Japanese POWs and was using them for psychological warfare on the front lines.

I spoke to a state department official who was one of General Stilwell's political advisers, about the advantages and need of doing that ourselves. Why not use POWs in psychological warfare to save lives? Why not remold them with democratic ideas? A defeated Japan would need such people to proceed along democratic reconstruction. And the POWs needed a new faith after their illusion of the "Imperial Way" had been crushed. They must not be left alone, to turn back to militarism at some future time.

The political adviser told me that we were bound by the Geneva covenant on prisoner treatment, that we cannot indoctrinate the POWs. I recalled then that I had heard the same argument in Manzanar from the camp administration, that the rich tradition of democratic processes cannot be indoctrinated among the aliens because of the Geneva covenant.

We Were Committed To Return of the Imperialists

There were many other heart-breaking restrictions upon our psychological warfare activities. We could not stoke - the fire of national liberation in the hearts of millions of Asians. We were committed to a policy, of the British return to Burma. We were to elicit Indian resistance without invoking freedom movements. It was like this everywhere. We were told that in Washington, British and Dutch officials requested OWI to tone down or not use at all stories of native Philippine resistance in our overseas propaganda. To the imperialists, the idea of people's resistance once planted in the minds of Asian masses, foreboded the beginning, of the end of their empires.

In June 1944, the director of OWI in China came to observe our Burma front psychological operation. He said that the Kuomintang government had finally lifted the ban on Nisei from China. He recruited me and three members of my team for his China operations.

quote...

The hope lies in the people, here and on the Mainland. We have deep faith in them to struggle for progress. It is the duty of those who understand the situation, including those who have been silenced, to awaken the conscience of the whole populace.

We spoke of our common struggles, of the need of preserving and extending constitutional rights. If the people got together and kept special interest elements from dividing them, we would have a better country, a better world.

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