Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (22 page)

Opposite top
An American carrier is hit by kamikaze attack in the spring of 1944.
The flight decks of the American carriers were made of wood, and so a hit like this was potentially devastating, with the fire quickly spreading to the decks below.
Opposite left
One of nearly 400 Japanese planes shot down during an attack on the Allied fleet off the Marianas in June 1944.
Opposite right
Emperor Hirohito leaves the Yasukini Shrine near the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, after paying his respects to Japanese war dead killed in the war in China.
Right
In Arizona, the girlfriend of an American serviceman fighting in New Guinea, writes a thank-you note to her boyfriend for sending her a Japanese skull signed by his comrades.
Below
A marine cemetery in I wo Jim a at the foot of Mount Suribachi.
It was the sight of thousands of crosses like these that so affected US flyer Paul Montgomery (see p.
114).

Left
One of the thousands of Japanese families torn apart by the fire-bombing of Tokyo on 9 March 1945.
Yoshiko Hashimoto (top row, first from right) lost her father (bottom row, left) and mother (top row, middle) and only survived herself thanks to a piece of luck (see p.
116).
Below
As the wooden buildings burned after mass incendiary attacks on the night of 9 March, a firestorm was created that engulfed much of Tokyo.
Opposite top
In the aftermath of the bombing, tens of thousands of charred bodies were found on the streets — men, women and children, the fire burnt them all indiscriminately.
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A whole section of Tokyo simply disappeared as a result of the fire-bombing, in scenes prescient of the more famous aftermath of the nuclear bombs.

Opposite top
US marines stand on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands in April 1944 after a fierce battle to remove the Japanese from their underground defences.
Opposite below
For many Japanese soldiers this was the honourable way to embrace defeat: suicide.
The Japanese marine holding the rifle has used his toe to pull the trigger while pointing the barrel at his head.
Right
Michael Witowich of the US Marine Corps.
In the course of his action in this brutal conflict he shot children as they fell to their deaths at Saipan (see p.
108).
Below
A sight that became less rare as the war entered its last days.
A Japanese officer surrenders on Okinawa in July 1945.

Above
The most famous single image of the war — perhaps of all history.
A mushroom cloud rises over Hiroshima in the wake of the explosion of the world’s first nuclear bomb.

On 27 March around 800 villagers, mostly old men, women and children, gathered in a ravine at the southern end of Tokashiki.
The Americans were less than half a mile away.
‘The children had been told that they would be killed if the enemy captured them,’ says Kinjou, who was there with his mother and brother.
‘And also that to be captured would bring great shame — so it was better to choose to die.’
Suddenly there was an explosion — a small American bomb had dropped nearby.
Then one of the village elders started to kill his family with the branch of a tree.
At this sign that a senior member of the group was prepared to sacrifice those whom he loved, other villagers started to follow his example.
‘The first person we killed was our own mother,’ says Kinjou.
‘Our mother who gave us life.
Everything around me, including my mind, was in absolute chaos and I don’t remember the details.
But what I do remember is that we first tried to tie her neck with rope.
Finally we took a stone and bashed in her head.
That’s the brutal thing we did to our mother.
I couldn’t stop crying because of a sadness that I had never experienced before.
I will never cry like that in my life again.’
Around 320 men, women and children died in the mass suicide on Tokashiki.
After killing their mother, Shigeaki Kinjou and his brother decided to make a suicide charge towards the Americans but were captured alive.
‘I think we were dreadfully manipulated,’ says Kinjou.
‘As I got older my soul started to suffer.
It’s fifty-five years since the end of the war and I still suffer today.’

Just as with the kamikazes, it is hard for those of us in the West fully to understand the mentality of people like Shigeaki Kinjou and to appreciate why, at the time, committing matricide seemed, incredibly, the proper course of action.
What Westerners lack, of course, is the understanding gained by growing up exposed to Japanese cultural values.
Even today it is not uncommon in Japan for a disgraced wife to kill her children and then herself.
Japan may not have the highest suicide rate in the world, but the suicides that do occur are often of a different kind from those in the West.
Suicide is still seen as an ‘honourable’ way out of an insurmountable problem.
The intense desire to remain part of the group is such that in a crisis some people prefer to take their own lives rather than face shame and ostracism.
On the island of Tokashiki, what choice did the teenage Shigeaki Kinjou really have on 27 March 1945?
Surrounded by his family and members of his community, told that he would be killed (and perhaps tortured first) if he was captured, lectured that the divine emperor himself expected him to die, witness to the village elders killing their own loved ones, what effective alternative was available to him?To run away?
But where to?
Straight to the ‘murderous’ Americans?
No, like most human beings he chose the path of least resistance — the tragedy was that, in the warped system of values that then prevailed, the course of least resistance was also the path to murder.

It is also important to remember that even those Japanese servicemen committed to the kamikaze cause, like Fujio Hayashi, were never the mindless automatons of Western popular myth.
While waiting in vain to be chosen to fly on a mission, Hayashi debated with himself what his last words should be: ‘In Japan, when you die you were supposed to say “Banzai!”
[Hooray!] to the Emperor.
But most of us actually wanted to say “Mother” before we died.
But my mother had died when I was small.
My father brought me up.
But it’s hard to say “Father” before dying, in a way.
And there was this geisha that I loved very much — her name was Misako — and I thought I would probably scream her name when I crashed into an enemy ship.’