After The Sea Otters Tom, who could be seen as conscientious to a fault, became a life-long devotee of Doucette’s story, and others joined him or competed with him in businesslike pursuit of new information. In the end they found out everything that could be known, every little squalor, every little move. About the rest, they had hypotheses on such subjects as what Leo Waterhouse really felt like in the bus from Outram Road prison to Reformatory Road, what mixture of terror and exhilaration – for everyone mentions the evidence of exhilaration! People spoke during the French Revolution about a shining serenity on the faces of some enemies of the state as they travelled in the tumbril to the blade. As if the guillotine were such a total cancellation of the world that it solved many of the victim’s smaller daily anxieties. They no longer travelled in uncertainty.
But I couldn’t bear to discuss that sort of thing with Lydon or any other outsider. It might just encourage them. As it was, they rushed to tell me new information as if I hungered for it. Between these flurries of research by others I felt content, engrossed in my only grandchild, my son’s daughter, a child I felt was very like I had been but thankfully less burdened with painful bush politeness than I was. By now I had seen the sad decline of both my parents, who died with the uncomplaining demeanour of their type, but my world was nonetheless enlivened by Rachel and her capacity from childhood to ambush me with unexpected questions.
Meanwhile, about 1985, Tom Lydon successfully tracked down and visited the Japanese interpreter Hidaka, who had worked on Leo and others. Hidaka had worked under a false name for some decades, precisely because he felt that he might somehow be made accountable for what befell the Memerang men, and Lydon found the man through his disgruntled wife, a former nightclub dancer. Lydon took the ageing man’s photograph outside his broken-down steak-house in Yokohama, with a red banner advertising Suntory at the door and a murk beyond the door to match the mysteries behind his edgy smile. For, like all of us, Hidaka had not even told himself everything! Poor old Hidaka, the former interpreter for the Japanese in Singapore, with his evasions and boasts about a special relationship with Leo and the others!
I stayed away that day because I could not bear to see what was done with them.
That’s one of his claims.
I brought them books. I bought them sweetmeats.
But you did not save them, nor could you, nor did you at a profound level dissent from what was done to them. So you’re no use to me.
And your superiors also valued you for the way the men trusted you and told you things, and you took that credit too!
So to what extent was Hidaka a man of sentimental fraternity, and to what extent a cunning operative?
Every new, well-meaning interviewer and Memerang hobbyist puts the stress-mark between these two possibilities in a different place and then, visiting Hidaka, most of them want to call me up and tell me exactly what they think the formula for Hidaka’s supposed generosity to Leo and the others was. As if that’s a question on which I would still be working, adjusting still my balance of hatred or gratitude when it comes to Hidaka and the Japanese military code.
Some of the researchers are starting to be true scholars now, even a doctoral student who was a captain in the army. They either examine Hidaka’s record or go to Japan to interview him. This raises in me the old fear that something new might emerge which must be borne, something dangerous to the honour of Leo’s ghost and something perilous to me. More than the human frame could carry.
The young doctoral army captain thinks that Hidaka might have been lucky not to be prosecuted by the War Crimes Commission. After all, he did the interpreting for a number of Kempei Tai interrogations. But then, says the captain, dozens of more senior military men were let off too, through lack of personnel to investigate them or because of the war-weariness of the victors. I am a terminally polite old woman, but inwardly I flinch and there’s a trace of acid in my response. Thank you, captain, for your fascinating assessment.
The young captain completed his doctoral thesis, Planning and Operational Shortcomings of Operation Memerang, graciously sent me a copy, and disappeared from my life.
One enthusiast has told me it rained at 1300 hours as Leo and the others made their way in through the gate of Raffles College to appear before the sitting of the Military Court of Seventh Area Army. He had also kindly taken a photograph of the college motto above the gate: Auspicium Melioris Aevi, Hope for a Better Age.
Just a photograph to him, but I am thereby locked into the journey Leo made that day of his trial, and become raddled with the mad wish that I had been there to argue with the judges and offer my head for Leo’s. Over decades, Laurie, a man of great generosity of spirit, learned to read my moods, which were profound but not always very visible, and accommodated himself to them in the days after I’d been visited by the enthusiasts, when I felt myself hurtling down in a pocket of free air between two ages and two marriages.
Anyhow, on the day of Leo’s trial, when the accused parties dismounted from their Mitsubishi truck, guards took Leo and Filmer and the others in amidst the dripping shrubberies of the college garden, the leaves already steaming as the afternoon sun failed to decide whether it intended a cool afternoon or not. The prisoners entered a lecture hall with lead-light windows. I imagine sudden, renewed rain on the roof.
The presiding judge was a Colonel Sakamone of garrison headquarters, but the judge with the greatest experience in the inquisitorial Japanese system, which – as the researchers tell me – is based on the Code Napoleon, was one Major Torosei. A third major filled out the trinity of judges.
Hidaka the interpreter would later tell Lydon that his own senior officer, Colonel Tomonaga, had declined to serve as judge. He had made it clear to Hidaka he thought the men should simply be put in Changi as POWs. But Colonel Sakamone, a former policeman, disagreed. He was a fanatic, said Hidaka, even though fanaticism was getting less popular with officers as the war went on. Sakamone had said at dinner one night that he believed the war would begin only when the Japanese mainland was invaded, and he was looking forward to that cataclysm. Everything up to now had apparently been mere prelude. The war would be won on ancestral land, he said. Sakemone had taken the job which Hidaka’s colonel refused.
The prosecutor or attorney-judicial, a man the judges have already met with to decide the shape of the trial, was a professional lawyer, Major Minatoya. What did Minatoya think as he prepared his papers? Tokyo burning to ash, the home islands falling, even if the great nuclear secret had a month to go before it would be revealed. Singapore gravid fruit hanging on the empire’s tree. Yet at such times of uncertainty men cling to the certainty of routine duty.
Next to Minatoya the prosecutor sat the young Hidaka, Leo’s friend, in his white civilian suit. Hidaka has a slightly spiv-ish reputation amongst the officers for having once worked as a bookkeeper and greeter of foreigners in a Tokyo nightclub before the war, but he was always a meek figure, and the enthusiasts and hobbyists tell me he was not above soliciting women for officers. He was in love with a Tokyo nightclub dancer whom he’d marry after the war.
The supreme figure of the trial sat in the gallery at the rear of the courtroom, above the double-leafed doorway of the lecture hall. Major General Okimasa, head of the judicial apparatus for the Seventh Area Army, wanted to see the process through. He must have had a glimmering, given all his robust activities in Saigon and Singapore, that his own future might contain a suicide by blade, or else a scaffold. In Indochina and Malaya he had been a monster for his gods. I would like to think his foreshadowings of fear were unmanning him even then, but I do not believe they did. He certainly seemed to feel a kind of administrative urgency to get this trial settled.