Still in a turmoil of doubt and wondering what I should do to resolve the crisis, my turn came to face Mori. I walked towards him suddenly feeling strangely calm. It was as if I had become another person and somewhere far down within me, someone far wiser and with the benefit of having had to face this kind of thing ever since the beginning of man on earth, took command of me. I faced Mori, and this other self gauged Mori’s blows and anticipated his kicks so accurately that it was able to make me move my head and body at the last moment before the blows and kicks fell in a manner not perceptible to the enraged man and his satellites, yet sufficient to rob them of their severity – to such an extent that I hardly felt them.
Indeed the physical impact of what Mori was trying to do to me seemed so irrelevant that, during the whole time of his assault on me, this process within me of appraising the full meaning of the incident and searching my imagination for a way of putting an end to it all before it developed into something worse, even something which Mori himself might possibly not have intended, went on unimpeded, and if possible with greater clarity than before. The result was that, when Mori delivered his final kick and pushed me back to my place in the line and I once more caught a glimpse of the machine gun at the gates, it was as if I heard from deep within myself very clearly a voice of command from this other self, ordering me as with the authority of life itself: Turn about! Go back and present yourself to Mori for another beating.’
Rationally, everything was against such a course of action. If there were normally anything which provoked the Japanese to extremes of punishment it was any action on our part that broke their rules and sense of order. Yet this voice that rang out almost like a bell within me was so clear and insistent that I turned about without hesitation, walked back and once more stood to attention in front of Mori before the next officer could take my place.
Mori was already in position to beat up his next victim. He was on the point of attacking again when the realization came to him that he was being confronted with the very person whom he had beaten just a moment before. The shock of this slight variation in a process which he had taken for granted was great, and showed immediately in his eyes. He looked at me over his raised cudgel, arrested in its downward move, as a cliché would have it, like someone who was seeing a ghost in broad daylight. Indeed, so grave was the shock that it utterly broke up the accelerating rhythm of passion and anger in which he had been imprisoned. Slight as the irregularity was, it began drawing him out of the preconditioned processes of collective and instinctive reaction in which he had been involved and made him, I believe, suddenly aware of himself as an individual facing not an abstract and symbolic entity but another individual being. He stood there glaring at me, a strange inner bewilderment at this unexpected turn of events showing in the sombre glow of his dark eyes. Then, taking another sort of half-hearted swipe at my head, he grumbled with a kind of disgust that he thought the whole matter utterly incomprehensible and beneath contempt. He gave me a shove in the direction of our line, turned about, and still muttering tensely to himself walked away and out of sight, Kasayama at his heels. We were left standing there until late that night, when Nichols and Jongejans, catching a glimpse of the Japanese lieutenant in command of our camp through a lighted window in his office, risked breaking ranks and, going to him, unorthodox and dangerously provocative as it was, got permission at last for us to dismiss.
Thinking it all over for hours that night in my own private little world underneath my mosquito net, I came to the conclusion that the afternoon’s scene could not have happened six weeks before, and that it was in its own way slight – slight by our prison standards – evidence of the tension mounting in the Japanese military spirit – evidence perhaps of what the now mysteriously silent Kim had warned me; ominous testimony that the Japanese were near to breaking through such restraints as had governed them in our treatment up till then. The whole incident that afternoon could have been a slight instinctive dress-rehearsal for the final parade, the ultimate cataclysmic phase of our time in prison.
The third and most serious of the three things to alarm me was that, within a few days of Mori’s outburst, our secret radio packed up and we had no means of telling what was happening outside. Although Nichols and I had from the beginning realized, I had thought to the full, the importance of knowing by radio how the war was progressing, I had not until that moment appreciated its overwhelming necessity to us.
We knew that the war in the Pacific and Burma was very close to its climax. We knew all about the fall of Okinawa and Rangoon, and the invasion of the Philippines. Above all we had listened to a programme on the effects of the American and British submarine war against Japan, which had ended with the staggering conclusion that in two years alone some four million more tons of Japanese merchant shipping had been sunk than Japan had been able to replace; that the far-flung and widespread Japanese armies were for all practical purposes cut off from their home bases and main sources of supply, and that the overcrowded main island of Japan itself must be near the beginning of a process of slow starvation.
Yet nothing we had heard up to the moment our radio gave out had suggested that the Japanese home government was even thinking of ending the war by negotiation or, more vital as far as we were concerned, that their Commanders-in-chief, supreme and independent overlords in their various theatres of war, had any intention other than that of fighting to their and our end.
News, like the detailed reports we had heard of the Kamikaze pilots who crashed their planes loaded with bombs into American ships of war and transports, despite the most formidable barrages of anti-aircraft fire warships had ever been able to mount, was proof to me of how accurate had been my reading of the dangers implicit in the Japanese attitude to this war. Even in time of peace I had been amazed by the vast extent to which Japanese, of all sorts and conditions of society, tended to idealize death at the expense of life. In some mysterious but extremely profound fashion, the way a person died seemed to be almost more important to them than the way he lived. It was almost as if, on balance, they despised life in the here and now. Their real romance often seemed concerned less with living than with dying and with death. Below the Buddhist layers of their national culture, there was firmly embedded in their Shinto form of ancestor worship the myth of their direct descent from Ama-Terasu, the goddess of the sun. Yet it was not the day which ruled their imagination, I suspected. Their secret minds turned with infinite longing to the night, where their hearts were governed by the moon. The tides of instinct and feeling in their blood always seemed to me to be pulled by some inner moon of their unlived selves into action in their own lives, as the great tides of the Pacific Ocean were pulled high up and down their island shores by the outer moon they praised continually in paint, word and music. What they themselves regarded as the great triumph of the individual, my reading of their history and their literature told me, seemed to be inverted disaster. So often, triumph of the spirit for them was to be found, not in victory over an enemy so much as in a noble acceptance of unjust defeat, and in overcoming its shame with self-inflicted death.