All this while the producer of the programme, who had brought me into the studio, had been standing silent at my side, caught up in the horror of the story as had been everyone else, from cameramen and their assistants to interviewer. I took him by the arm and drew him with me out of the studio. He followed like someone coming out of a trance. I closed the door silently behind us and begged him to forget all about Africa. I told him that I too had been involved in the tragedy of Hiroshima. No, I had not been in Hiroshima itself. I had been thousands of miles away in Java, but what had happened to me in Java was as much part of the story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as what had happened to the people in the doomed cities themselves. Like all planners, he had a mystique about planning and hated any change of direction. But we had worked together before, and in the end my argument that it would be wrong to let only this one Japanese voice, authentic as it was, speak for the day, won him over. He agreed to allow me, at the end of the prescribed moment, to take over from his interviewer and to put to the little Japanese doctor my own version of the day.
So it happened that when the official interview ended, the voice of the producer announced a change of plan, saying that instead of speaking on Africa, I, who had been a Japanese prisoner-of-war for three and a half years, would have a discussion about Hiroshima with the Japanese doctor. I had only ten minutes for a long and complex story but I remember I began by trying to reassure the Japanese doctor, more tense than ever at this unexpected elaboration of his interview, that I wanted to tell him something which I hoped would help him to make his peace with the tragedy of Hiroshima even more effectively than with his obvious magnanimity he had already done. If I remember rightly I began saying all this very badly in Japanese, not only to reassure him but as the only means available to me of showing him how involved I felt with him and his people in what had happened on that day. I went on then, as quickly as I could, in English to tell him my part of that story. What follows is an orchestration of what I told him, but it reflects much more accurately the spirit of our brief confrontation, in that strange subliminal light of a transitory television set-up, that it is in a living sense far more truthful than a literal transcript of that occasion could be. Truth after all is always so much more than fact.
Story
The depth of darkness into which you can descend, and still live, is an exact measure, I believe, of the height to which you can aspire to reach.
LETTER FROM ALAN MCGLASHAN TO THE WRITER
I BEGAN BY trying to describe to the Japanese doctor what life had been like in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, because he confessed that even after all this time he personally had taken no interest in the matter and had read no literature about it. I tried to make my description as factual as possible, and to keep my own personal emotions out of it, which was not as difficult as it may sound because I had for many years now looked repeatedly and deeply into the experience and it had, I truly believe, left nothing bitter or destructive in my mind. I barely mentioned the physical brutalities we had experienced at the hands of our Japanese guards and particularly at the hands of their Korean converts who increasingly took over from them as the war effort demanded more and more of the Japanese. But they, in the manner of all converts, became much more fanatical than their converters until they were caricatures of the worst kind of Japanese. I skimmed over the grimmest of my own experiences. For instance, I said little of how before I was brought into a so-called Japanese ‘regular’ prisoner-of-war camp I had been made to watch Japanese soldiers having bayonet practice on live prisoners-of-war tied between bamboo posts; had been taken to witness executions of persons of all races and nationalities, for obscure reasons like ‘showing a spirit of wilfulness’, or not bowing with sufficient alacrity in the direction of the rising sun.
I could have digressed on this one facet of my experiences for hours, because I would never have thought it possible that in our time there could still have been so many different ways of killing people – from cutting off their heads with swords, bayoneting them in the many variations of the ways I have mentioned, to strangling them and burying them alive; but, most significantly, never by just shooting them.
I say ‘significantly’ because the omission of this contemporary form of killing was for me the most striking evidence of the remote and archaic nature of the forces which had invaded the Japanese spirit, blocking out completely the light of the twentieth-century day. It was, indeed, the awareness of this dark invasion which made it impossible for people like ourselves, even at our worst moments in prison, to have any personal feelings against our captors, because it made us realize how the Japanese were themselves the puppets of immense impersonal forces to such an extent that they truly did not know what they were doing.
It was amazing how often and how many of my men would confess to me, after some Japanese excess worse than usual, that for the first time in their lives they had realized the truth, and the dynamic liberating power of the first of the Crucifixion utterances: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’
I found that the moment they grasped this fundamental fact of our prison situation, forgiveness became not a product of an act of will or of personal virtue even, but an automatic and all-compelling consequence of a law of understanding: as real and indestructible as Newton’s law of gravity. The tables of the spirit would be strangely and promptly turned and we would find ourselves without self-pity of any kind, feeling deeply sorry for the Japanese as if we were the free men and they the prisoners – men held in some profound oubliette of their own minds.
Accordingly, this aspect of our imprisonment at that moment in the studio seemed so unimportant, if not altogether irrelevant, that it was easily and quickly disposed of. What needed stressing was that by the beginning of 1945 we were all physically dying men. For more than three years the Japanese had steadily cut down our rations. In other parts of South-East Asia, in Malaya, in Burma and on the notorious Siamese railroad, there might have been some excuse that food for their prisoners had to be imported and that as the tide of war turned inexorably against them their means of importing food failed them and they could not, had they wished to do so, have increased the rations for their prisoners. I myself cannot speak with any degree of personal certainty about that, because the whole of that field of war lay outside my own experience. All I could say was that in Java, where we were, there was no such excuse, because throughout the three and a half years of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia there was no scarcity of food in the land.
The Dutch had made Java one of the most highly organized and richest rice-producing countries in the world. On the Bandoeng plateau alone, where I endured most of my captivity, the agricultural economy had been raised to such a pitch of efficiency that the Javanese farmers, in a climate that was for ever one long afternoon of summer, harvested rice five times in every two years. There was always a surplus of rice at least, not to speak of surpluses of protein substances like the kachang-idjoe, a Javanese form of the pea and a valuable leguminous cereal, or the eggs of the ducks bred in millions in the water-filled paddies of that singularly blessed and rich volcanic island. Yet it had been the Japanese policy consistently to reduce our rations to such an extent that the daily portion of rice, which was almost our only food, fell in three years from five hundred grammes per man a day to ninety grammes – a fraction over three ounces. There was not a person in my own prisoner-of-war camp in 1945 who was not suffering from deficiency diseases of some kind; beri-beri and pellagra were, as far as we were concerned, the least of them. The ones most feared were the many complex and painful kinds of malnutritional neuritis, which made men’s nerves burn so much with pain that they could not sleep at night, and in many cases deprived them of their sight or lowered their moral and physical resistance so much that they died of afflictions which in normal conditions would not have compelled them to take to their beds.