The men couldn’t believe the change. Then it dawned on them that Haroishi’s previous behaviour towards them in Burma was a calculated plan aimed at self-preservation. If the Allies won the war, he’d be remembered as a good Christian who had treated the prisoners well, thus making him safe from reprisals. Now that they were on Japanese soil and he wouldn’t see them again, he had no need to keep up the pretence.
The prisoners added Haroishi’s name to their hate list.
From the ship, they were marched to a parade ground where they were lined up and ordered to take off their clothes. It was freezing, but the tattered scraps of clothing they wore weren’t keeping out much of the cold anyway.
The men stripped and stood naked in the snow that was now falling heavily.
The Japanese guards ordered them to exercise. Crowds of Japanese civilians, both men and women, stood around the parade ground laughing and jeering as the shivering, emaciated, naked prisoners waved their skinny arms and jumped about.
They were ordered to stop when the Japanese officer in charge, clad in a fur-lined greatcoat, fur gloves and a balaclava, emerged from the guardhouse and stepped up onto a wooden box. He proceeded to make a speech, telling the prisoners they were in the arms of the Emperor and should be grateful for his care and protection.
Care and protection? The icy welcome to Japan meant that many of the naked prisoners, weakened from years of maltreatment and further debilitated by the horrors of the voyage from Singapore, were to catch pneumonia and die.
When the Japanese officer stepped down from his box, the landing formalities were complete. The prisoners were broken up into groups and marched to a camp. Jim Bodero’s group comprised about a hundred Australians, including old mates Fred Barnstable, Chilla Goodchap, Ron Crick and Bob Davis, and thirty Americans, marines from the USS Houston and soldiers of the 106th Artillery Regiment that had been captured in Java.
Flying Officer Sutherland of the RAAF was in charge of administration and work parties in conjunction with Captain Ardsetter of the Netherlands East Indies Air Force. Medical needs were the responsibility of the Australian Army Medical Corps’ Captain Higgins and Lieutenant Commander Goodman, a medical officer from the USS Houston.
As usual, there were no medical supplies, but the camp had well-constructed slate-tiled huts that, for a change, were dry. Each hut was divided into rooms about twelve feet square into which twelve to sixteen men were crowded. The rooms had front and back walls of glass to allow the guards to check on the prisoners.
The men slept on the floor on uncomfortable cane matting. Each man had just one blanket, even though it was the middle of winter and snow was thick on the ground. To keep warm, the prisoners huddled as close to one another as possible.
It became even colder when the Japanese issued an order that each prisoner must have his head shaved. When this was done, photographs were taken for identification purposes.
The camp was in the coalmining town of Sendryu, on the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Japanese group. Nearby was the major city of Nagasaki.
The prisoners were told they were to work down the mines.
The entire population of Sendryu was controlled by the Japanese mining company. Directly or indirectly, everybody worked under the mine’s administration. Rations were issued from the mine store to the town’s residents on the basis of the type of work they did. No money was exchanged. Each week, the Japanese civilian workers were issued with a chit from the mine headquarters. It designated how much rice, fish, vegetables and other commodities the worker was to get.
A labourer on heavy manual work received more than someone whose job was less physical. A coalminer was allowed a bigger ration than the mine manager, a clerk or a schoolteacher. Prostitutes, considered essential for the morale and well-being of the mine workers, were high on the ration allowance list, while housewives, who were treated like a piece of household furniture, were on the bottom of the ration scale because they were not considered essential for the production of coal.
The war effort demanded that the population contribute their maximum effort. The rule was no work, no eating.
Schoolchildren were a youthful army dressed in uniforms with army ranks from one-star private up to three-star officers.
Clothing and footwear were issued to the civilians in the same way as the food rations. All the necessities were drawn by paper chit from the mine store.
One of Jim Bodero’s roommates at the Sendryu camp, Ron Banks, was among those who died from pneumonia brought on by the naked exercise in the snow upon their arrival in Japan. Among the survivors in the room with him were Fred Barnstable, Mick Armstrong, Sam Atwell, Fred Asser, George Adamson, George Beavis, Frank Chattaway and Alan Campbell.
The prisoners’ accommodation was based on the first letter of their surnames. Bodero’s room contained men with family names commencing with the letters A to C. His identification number was jyuban (10), Barnstable’s was sichiban (7) and Beavis’s was hachiban (8). The three were to survive the war and remain close friends in Australia, even though they lived a long way apart, Beavis at Parklands, outside Melbourne, Barnstable at Numurkah in Victoria and Bodero at Lismore in New South Wales.
Jim had lost track of Tellemalie at Sendryu. He was in the ‘M’ room, M being the first letter of his assumed name, and was probably trying to talk his way out of going down the mine.
The prisoners were issued with the first real clothes they’d had in three and a half years. One set was a jacket and long pants made of a very light khaki material, a white cotton singlet and sandshoes for work in the mine. They also were given a green Japanese-style army uniform of tunic and pants to wear in the camp. Although the uniform appeared to be of good quality, it was a synthetic material made from seaweed and fell to pieces at the first washing.
All sandshoes were the same size-large. Prisoners with small feet had to flop around in footwear that was many sizes too big for them.
However, even though the size and quality weren’t up to scratch, anything extra to wear was appreciated in weather that remained intensely cold.
The men, who were not required to work on their first day at the Sendryu camp, wondered about the strange structure the Japanese were building in their compound. It was a square bamboo tunnel, a yard high and a yard wide, and about fifty yards long.
When the bamboo tunnel was completed, the Japanese told the prisoners it was where they’d be trained to mine coal in confined spaces.
They had to be quick learners because the training lasted for just one day. Fifty men at a time, prodded by bayonets and blows from rifle butts, were forced into the bamboo tunnel and required to crawl on their hands and knees and take up work positions, each almost touching his neighbour in the yard-high space. The squatting men were given picks and shovels. With their pick, they had to pretend they were digging coal, while the shovel was used to throw the pretend coal back over their shoulders into a make-believe trough behind them.
Not so hard, the men thought as they played at being coalminers. They were to learn that it was a far different proposition doubled up in foul air a couple of thousand feet underground, with the only light coming from a flickering miner’s lamp.
After one day of practice that was supposed to turn them into coalminers, the men were sorted into two shifts. The day shift worked from five in the morning until seven at night, when the night shift took over.
Only medical orderlies and those on kitchen duties or other camp jobs were not required to work down the mine. They were the lucky ones.