Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (13 page)

After three months of this torment, Jan Ruff and the other young Dutch women were suddenly taken from the brothel: ‘For some reason that we never knew we were told to pack our bags and we were transported to another camp in Batavia — today’s Jakarta.
There we were put in a women’s camp, but the Japanese always kept us separate from the other women.
They didn’t want anyone to find out what had happened to us.
And these other women in the camp thought that we had done all this voluntarily.
They thought that we had worked in brothels for the Japanese in order to get more food and we were called “whores”.
That was a terrible thing.
And the Japanese told us that if we were to talk about this to anybody they would kill us and kill our family too.
So we kept quiet and my silence started there and then — not daring to talk about it.’

Immediately the war was over Jan Ruff broke her silence when a priest visited the camp: ‘He gave mass and I was just so happy, so glad.
And afterwards I asked if I could see the priest.
I just needed to talk.
After all I’d been through I thought that he would be a good person to talk to.
Before the war broke out I was brought up in Catholic schools and I wanted to become a nun — that was the only life for me, that’s what I really wanted.
And I said to this priest, “Is it all right if I tell you my wartime experiences?”
And I told him what happened to me during the war.
And I shall never forget, after I’d spoken to him he said to me, “My dear child, under the circumstances I think you’d better not become a nun.”
Because one of the things I’d said to him was, “I still want to become a nun — all these things have happened to me but I still want to become a nun.”
And then I got this answer from the priest.
Which made me feel terrible.
I felt I had something to be ashamed of.
I felt dirty.
I felt soiled.’

The only other people she told of her ordeal were her mother, her father, and, after she was married, her husband.
‘They’re the only three people I told — and for them it was too much.
My mother, she couldn’t deal with it — her daughter systematically raped by the Japanese military.
My father was even worse.
And even Tom, my beautiful darling husband, he listened to me carefully but we never talked about it again.
It was never discussed.
It was just too much.
And therefore we had to get on with our lives as if nothing had happened, and it was very hard.’

It was not until 1992 — nearly fifty years after the crime had taken place — that Jan Ruff decided to tell the world of her experience during the war.
She was relaxing in the sitting room of her house in Adelaide when she saw an astounding series of interviews on television.
Some of the first Korean comfort women to talk openly about the crimes the Japanese army had committed against them were telling their stories: ‘And when I saw them on television I thought I must back these women up.
They wanted an apology from the Japanese government — they wanted their dignity back.
So then I became the first European “comfort woman” to speak out.
And when I saw the other comfort women in Tokyo, when I came face to face with the Korean and the Chinese and the Taiwanese and the Philippine comfort women, we threw our arms around each other and we hugged each other, because only we could understand what it was like.
Nobody knows — but we did.
And when I hugged the other comfort women from Asia it was as if a whole load fell away from my shoulders all of a sudden.
We could heal one another.
We were the only ones that would understand, because you can never describe it — the feeling.
Yes, it was a very healing moment.’

Documents from the Dutch National Archives confirm Jan Ruff’s recollections from the war.
Altogether thirty-five Dutch women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six were forced to work in four separate brothels around Semarang in central Java.
The first women were installed in the brothels in late February 1944.
Three months later, military headquarters in Japan ordered the use of Dutch women as forced prostitutes to cease (though seventeen of them were still sent to a brothel on Flores island where they remained until the end of the war).
¹
It remains hard to understand exactly why the decision was taken to put a stop to Western women working in the military brothels in Semarang, especially since from the start of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies many local Javanese women had been forced into prostitution, but it seems likely that the use of Dutch women in this way was a local initiative.
Detestable as the experience of Jan Ruff and the other Dutch women unquestionably was, the suffering they endured was very similar to that of thousands of other Asian comfort women who had been subjected to rape in Japanese military brothels in Asia since the early 1930s.

It is significant that the local initiative to force these Dutch women into military brothels was not taken until the start of 1944, when the war was most definitely going against the Japanese.
For Japanese treatment of their captives, whilst not consistent, did often become still more brutal as the war went on — as the history of the Allied prisoners of war held in Sandakan, North Borneo, demonstrates.
In the words of Professor Yuki Tanaka, one of the BBC’s historical consultants on this project, ‘The Sandakan incident provides the clearest picture possible of the relationship between the power structure of the Japanese Army and the occurrence of war crimes.’
²

The Japanese had been keen to occupy not just the Dutch East Indies but also Borneo (which was divided between the British and the Dutch) because these colonies were a major source of the raw material they needed most of all — oil.
To protect this region they decided to use forced labour to build an airfield on the northeast tip of Borneo at a town called Sandakan.
The first 1500 prisoners of war — the majority Australian — arrived at Sandakan in July 1942.
Initially the death rate in the camp was relatively low.
One reason was the availability of morphine, obtained thanks to the subterfuge of Dr Frank Mills, one of the Australian POWs.
‘At that time the Japanese were playing the military games to the hilt,’ says Dr Mills, ‘and they gave the first officer who died a military burial in the town of Sandakan.’
After the funeral Dr Mills asked his guard if it was possible to visit the local pharmacy and purchase a dose of morphine for one of the POWs lying sick in the camp.
‘He said, “Yes, one dose.”
I said, “Two doses.”
He said, “One dose.”
So we went into the pharmacy and I said in a loud voice, “Give me one dose of morphine sulphate, half an ounce.”
The little pharmacist took a quick look — a little Indian pharmacist in his early thirties — and took out a packet of morphine and cut it in half and handed it to me.
It was half an ounce, about a thousand normal doses.
The Jap said, “You pay!”
The pharmacist said, “No, too small, no pay.”
“You pay,” he [the Japanese guard] said, “you pay.”
So I handed over some money and he give me some change and we walked out.
I had a thousand doses of morphine.
And of course it came in very handy in camp — it was very, very necessary.’

Security was so lax in those early days that around a dozen POWs managed to escape by crawling under the perimeter fence.
All of them were eventually recaptured — the area was surrounded by dense jungle and the locals knew that if they were caught helping escaped POWs they would be killed themselves.
As a result of these escape attempts the camp commandant, Susumu Hoshijima, acting on orders he had himself received, ordered the prisoners of war to sign a contract pledging that they would not try to escape.
Thereafter it was normal practice to shoot any prisoner who escaped, even after he had been recaptured unharmed.

As another security measure the Japanese introduced a special punishment for those prisoners who had committed relatively minor offences — wooden cages.
‘They were raised off the ground about two and a half feet,’ says Dr Mills.
‘The bars were made of wood and they were completely open to the atmosphere.
People could only sit in them, not stand.
And people went almost out of their mind, at times, in there.
It upset the camp terribly.
Everyone was on edge, especially when those in the cage were yelling and screaming.’
Altogether three wooden cages were eventually in use in the camp.
Each day the prisoner would be released for ‘exercise’ — which consisted of the guards beating him up before locking him back in the cage.
Some POWs had to endure 40 days of this torture.

Around the same time, because of the harshness of the work on the aerodrome and the inadequate diet, more POWs started to become sick.
‘Beriberi and pellagra were very prevalent,’ says Dr Mills.
‘Everyone was suffering from them to some degree.
The earliest manifestation of this was aching of the feet.
People couldn’t sleep at night because of their feet aching.
They’d walk all night, trudge up and down.
It’s called “happy feet”.
People did go to the wall.
We did have deaths from vitamin deficiency, and we continued to have them all the time.
In general it was a very poor diet, and a lethal diet over a long period.’
Jim Millner, another Australian POW, was one of those who complained to Hoshijima about the food, ‘and the Japanese commander told us that people die of starvation every day in Japan.
You’re only POWs — why should we feed you?
The Japanese only feed POWs if they work.’

During March and April 1943 another 1200 prisoners of war, the majority British, arrived at Sandakan.
Amongst them was RAF officer Peter Lee.
He and his men had previously been held in a camp along the coast of Borneo at Jesselton (today’s Kota Kinabalu), where they had been imprisoned in an overcrowded local jail and had only been given congealed rice to eat.
Initially he thought the open aspects of Sandakan camp an improvement on Jesselton, but it soon became clear that many of the British prisoners, already weakened by two years of imprisonment, would not survive.
‘Every day I used to go and see our men in the sick bays,’ he says,’ and you’d find a young man that I’d known as a typical example of young British manhood, fit as a fiddle when we were in Singapore.
Now you’d either find them horribly emaciated, ghosts of their former self, or incredibly bloated with beriberi, with enormous distended stomachs, their private parts distended, and just lying back naked on the bench.
And inevitably, of course, people who’d reached that degree of malnutrition didn’t recover.’

Meanwhile, the Japanese were concerned about the lack of progress on the construction of the aerodrome and as a result the brutality with which the POWs were treated began to increase.
‘If you didn’t obey an order immediately,’ says Peter Lee, who worked at Sandakan, ‘depending on the personality of the particular Japanese soldier you’d get a crack over the head or a crack over the backside with a stick.
There was one occasion when an officer intervened when one of his men was being beaten up, and he was horribly beaten up by quite a number of them.
The natural emotion of anyone, any reasonable person, if they’re attacked is to defend themselves.
But as a prisoner of war of the Japanese you very quickly realized that this was not on.
If you attempted to defend yourself you were bashed senseless by the man and his comrades.
In this situation you have to take it.
In the old British phrase you have to grin and bear it.’

’There was a great deal of bashing at the airport,’ says Dr Mills, ‘to force the POWs to work harder, and they had a ruthless gang of Japanese who would beat people up.
I saw the result of it.’
Jim Millner led a work party of Australian POWs at the aerodrome and was ‘bashed’ by the Japanese ‘on many occasions’.
‘We had to bow to all the Japanese officers,’ he says, ‘which was very degrading.
And any Japanese, no matter what his rank, could bash you if he felt like it, and they used to take great delight in it.
The main thing was to stand on your feet.
If they knocked you down, they put the boot in.
But eventually, if you stood on your feet, they’d end up with a grudging respect for you and you got away without being too badly bashed.’

However, much to the surprise of the POWs at Sandakan (ignorant as they understandably were of the methods of training used by the Imperial Army), the Japanese guards would, on occasion, ‘beat themselves up’.
‘To give them justice,’ says Dr Mills, ‘they did it to themselves.
It was their policy.
If some soldier was getting down in the dumps or out of sorts he would be beaten up in front of his own group — knocked down, then kicked.
Then he would have to present arms to the man who did it.
And the incident was finished.
It was very good psychologically because they never allowed people to feel sorry for themselves.
I have seen funny occasions when the NCO beat up the young soldier, the lieutenant beat up the NCO, the captain beat up the lieutenant — it went right to the top, beating each other up quite publicly.
We used to applaud it.
They took no notice.
It was some of the only fun we got, when the Japs started to beat themselves up.’

Then, in the summer of 1943, the POWs suffered a severe setback.
A resistance group within the camp, led by Captain Lionel Matthews, had managed, with the help of Malayan collaborators, to build a small radio in order to listen secretly to BBC news bulletins, whose content was then passed around the camp.
In May 1943 they attempted to obtain more radio parts in order to build a transmitter — but their luck ran out and they were betrayed by a Chinese civilian.
Immediately Matthews himself and all the POWs who had been working with him were arrested by the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret military police.
Originally formed to ensure discipline within the Japanese armed forces, by the 1930s the Kempeitai were also engaged in political surveillance and their role had become similar to that of the German Gestapo.
The Kempeitai habitually used sadistic methods of interrogation, and Captain Matthews and the rest of the POWs suspected of being members of his resistance group were all brutally tortured.

Not surprisingly, few former members of the Kempeitai are prepared to talk about their work — which is why the interview we managed to obtain with Yoshio Tshuchiya is so valuable.
He joined the secret police in 1933 when he was twenty-two and remained with them until 194S, by which time he was head of the ‘information unit’ based in Qiqihar in Inner Mongolia.
He used similar methods of interrogation on his prisoners to those that his colleagues in Borneo would have used on the Allied prisoners of war.