IJA War Veteran Haunted by Horrors In China

ralphrepo · Apr 9, 2009

IJA War Veterans Haunted by Horrors In China

As former Imperial Japanese War veterans get nearer to death, many have now come forward to educate their young, and to warn their nationalists of the danger in excessive hubris. Call it a guilty conscience, or reluctance to carry so much emotional baggage into the great beyond, whatever; they have an important story that only they can tell, and Japan, as well the world, should listen. They remain a living but quickly fading touchstone to Japanese history. Once they're gone, their regrettably tragic yet important tales will die with them:

In a rush? For a quick synopsis, just read the red highlighted lines.

Imperial army war vet haunted by horrors in China
By NATSUKO FUKUE
Thursday, April 9, 2009
23rd in a series
WITNESS TO WAR

Ichiro Koyama's schedule is filled with lectures, talks and interviews. The 88-year-old, a former soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Jinan, Shandong Province in China, believes he has a duty to pass on his war experiences to younger generations. "I'm old now. This may be my last chance to tell what really happened," Koyama said in a recent interview with The Japan Times, adding that the war turned him into a monster who didn't hesitate to kill.

Ichiro Koyama as a young IJA soldier, and as he is today

Koyama was working at an ironworks when he was drafted at age 20 and five days later shipped off to Qingtao, China. He later moved to Jinan, which a major general said was enemy territory. "He gave us five bullets, saying four were for fighting the enemy and one was for killing ourselves," Koyama recalled. "I had been a salaryman the week before, and the first thing I learned on the battlefield was how to commit suicide."

One of Koyama's most terrible experiences was being taught how to execute Chinese civilian prisoners.

One day, Koyama saw seven or eight Chinese men from a village in Zaozhuang, Shandong Province, blindfolded and tied to trees. They were being punished because they would not reveal the location of the Chinese Red Army. Seasoned soldiers ordered the green recruits to execute them for not cooperating. "I was scared to kill a man at first," Koyama said. "I felt much guiltier killing someone with a bayonet than with a pistol from 100 meters away." With his comrades, he tried to pierce a man's heart, but was unable to because the victim kept squirming to avoid being stabbed.

Koyama eventually bayoneted the man in the stomach and shoulders.

After his first killing, he said he was unable to eat. But eventually he started training new recruits to also execute their prisoners, justifying his actions by arguing he had no choice because it was war. "It was hell," he said. "I still cannot forget their blood spraying." Koyama said the new recruits, by this process, also got used to killing. However, one comrade, who used to teach traditional Japanese dance, committed suicide because he could not bear it. The teacher missed training one night, saying he was sick. Koyama told him to rest and left on a two-hour exercise. As soon as he returned, a commander told them the man had killed himself while they were away. The commander decided to report his suicide as death in battle because a suicide during training would be dishonorable. "He was a kind man. He could not become a monster," Koyama said.

Koyama was mainly involved in patrolling towns the Imperial army had captured, but in 1944, his unit was caught in a firefight with the Chinese army in a village of Shandong Province. It was a surprise evening attack on a farm field that offered no place to hide. As far as Koyama can recall, seven or eight fellow soldiers died and more than 10 were wounded in the attack. Koyama remembers it took several hours to cremate his fallen comrades, and he found it horrifying to think he himself might be turned to ashes one day soon. On Aug. 15, 1945, he received word of the Imperial army's surrender while he was in Hamhung in what is now North Korea, preparing to fight the Soviet army. Koyama said he felt relieved he no longer had to face death on the battlefield.

However, he and his comrades were captured by the Soviets a few days after the war ended and he was kept in Soviet and Chinese prison camps for 10 years. The five years he was held in the Soviet Union, most of which he spent working in coal mines, were especially tough, he said. He was always starving and ate anything he could, even dandelion leaves. Others who were there were so hungry they mistook bricks dropped on the ground for loaves of bread. "All I did there was count the days until I returned to Japan," Koyama said. In 1950, he was transferred to Fushun, Liaoning Province, in China. Although he was interned there for five years as a war criminal, he said he was grateful for the good treatment he received. The Chinese fed him three meals a day, unlike the Soviets.

"I used to be prejudiced against the Chinese . . . but I received good treatment in China. My attitude changed."

While imprisoned in China, Koyama said he gradually became aware of the tragedy and suffering the war caused and regretted what he did to the Chinese. When put on a military trial in Shenyang, he realized he was trembling, even though he felt ready to accept whatever penalty was meted out, Koyama said. After being told he would be freed, he cried and bowed to the judge. "We must not resort to war to solve our problems," said Koyama, who is well-versed in world news and domestic politics. Since Barack Obama was inaugurated U.S. president, he said he hopes the world will become more peaceful. "We need to pursue real peace, and that means to cherish each person's life." In this occasional series, we interview firsthand witnesses of Japan's march to war and its ensuing defeat who wish to pass on their experiences to younger generations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayb2yAtB3zs

Source:http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090409w1.html
Click to expand...

Vivisectionist recalls his day of reckoning
Doctor put conscience on hold until war atrocity confession time came
By JUN HONGO
Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007

11th in a series
WITNESS TO WAR

Donning the crisp, Imperial Japanese Army khakis gave Ken Yuasa a sense of power, as a superior being on a mission to liberate China from Western colonialism. "The uniform made me feel incredibly sharp. Once I put it on, I was convinced Japan would triumph," recalled the wartime surgeon, who was deployed to Changzhi (then Luan) in Shanxi Province in February 1942. His fervor, and the nationalist indoctrination of his schooling, quickly subordinated any sense of conscience. By his second month at Luan's army hospital, Yuasa was aggressively performing vivisections on live Chinese prisoners, and diverting dysentery and typhoid bacillus to Japanese troops for use in biological warfare. "I was in denial of the things I did in Luan until the war was over. It was because I had no sense of remorse while I was doing it," Yuasa, 90, told The Japan Times in a recent interview. "We believed that the orders from the top were absolute. We performed the vivisections as ordered. We erased any sense of culpability by doing so, even though what we did was horrendous." In the six decades since the end of the war, Japan as a whole still has not come to grips with its responsibility.

Doctor Ken Yuasa (front row center) in the IJA Hospital, Luan, Shanxi, China [1943], and at him home [2007]

But Yuasa, who has confessed his inhumane acts and in so doing suffered condemnation at home, believes the only way for Japan to avoid war in the future is to accept the misdeeds committed by the Imperial army. Born Oct. 23, 1916, in Saitama Prefecture, Yuasa grew up in Tokyo and attended a high school near Yasukuni Shrine in Chiyoda Ward. The students often were lectured by army officers, who portrayed the emperor as a "living god" and said the Japanese, as a superior people, had an obligation to rule Asia. Students were compelled to bow toward Yasukuni on their way to school, Yuasa said, recalling that the Hinomaru flag and "Kimigayo" anthem symbolized the wartime zeal. "And back then, we had no choice but to blindly follow what we were being taught," he said. After graduating from Jikei University's School of Medicine in March 1941, Yuasa followed in his father's footsteps and became a doctor. Initially, he had intended to visit rural villages that had no doctor and treat unprivileged patients. But at the time, it was near compulsory that graduates enlist in the military

Once in China, it took only six weeks for Yuasa to become a coldblooded vivisectionist, murdering live prisoners. The army placed great importance on the operations performed on live Chinese prisoners. It was considered an ideal way to learn how to care for casualties, as there were few wounded Japanese troops making it back from the front.

Surgeons were encouraged to conduct improvised operations in the most authentic battlefield circumstances available, using prisoners as guinea pigs.

Yuasa took part in his first vivisection in March 1942 in the dissection theater in the army hospital in Luan. Two operating tables were surrounded by some 20 people, including medics, surgeons and hospital directors. Chinese prisoners — one tall, brawny young man and an older man who appeared to be a farmer — were handcuffed and waiting beside the tables. "Many of the Japanese were chatting pleasantly as they prepared," Yuasa said, noting the occasional cries from the older prisoner was the only sign of discomfort. The vivisection started with an appendectomy, but it took the doctors three incisions to locate and cut out the organ because it was "perfectly healthy." After suture practice, Yuasa proceeded to perform a tracheotomy, causing bright red blood to gush out and spill on the floor. "Impelled by interest," he also amputated the prisoner's right forearm. Although the farmer was lifeless by the end of the procedures, the young prisoner was still breathing. Yuasa injected anesthetic into his vein and executed him. The two victims were then dumped in a hole near the hospital.

"I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to do it," Yuasa said.

Over the next three years, Yuasa said he participated in 14 prisoner vivisections. Calling it "practical training," he once operated on a Chinese prisoner who a Japanese soldier deliberately shot twice in the stomach just for the surgery. To accurately re-create battlefield conditions, doctors were ordered not to use anesthesia.

After the war ended, it was Yuasa's turn to become a prisoner. The People's Liberation Army of China held him in a camp for five years, during which a Chinese officer gave him paper and pencil to describe the atrocities he engaged in at the hospital in Luan. "I felt no self-reproach at first. I was convinced that compared with what troops must have done at the front, what I did at Luan hospital was of little significance. But facing the paper with a pencil in my hand, I realized the magnitude of what I had committed," said Yuasa, who was allowed to return to Japan in 1956. Although he provided dysentery and typhoid bacillus strains for Japanese forces, it was only at confession time that he was able to accept that he played a role in biochemical warfare. Until he wrote it down, he had also kept from his conscience that he had provided brain tissue samples taken from prisoners to be used for experiments by Japanese medical companies.

Yuasa now believes at least 1,000 people, including surgeons, nurses and servicemen, were involved in similar atrocities all over mainland China. Only a handful have stepped forward to confess their misdeeds. "It is difficult for anyone, including myself, to admit having done something evil," Yuasa acknowledged. But for him, the decisive blow came when he was handed a letter from the mother of a vivisection victim, which demanded that the Chinese army severely punish him for brutally murdering her son and causing intolerable pain. "I couldn't hold back from crying when I read the letter, because I felt so sorry for the horrible things I did. I was ready and willing to receive the harshest punishment after that," Yuasa said in tears. After he was released from the Chinese prison and returned to Japan,

Yuasa embarked on a path of redemption by publicly detailing the army's atrocities. His lectures were sometimes met with jeers and scowls from rightwing nationalists. One time, firecrackers were thrown to disrupt his speech.

"After an appearance on TV in 1981, I received a letter with no return address. It was a threat written by a rightwing activist," he said. The writer told him to feel shame for making such revelations and warned him to "be careful when choosing what to say." Even a former colleague at Luan hospital contacted Yuasa and urged him to "go easy" on the revelations. But Yuasa, who practiced medicine until he was 84, has been active to this day in exposing some of the darkest secrets of the Imperial army. He is propelled by a sense of guilt, as well as the fear that Japan is on a path toward committing the same mistakes again. "It is painful to talk of my sins, and the sins committed by my country. But concealing the atrocities will only cause more problems," he said.

Yuasa says that by covering up the wartime atrocities, the government has succeeded not only in justifying a war of aggression but also leading the Japanese people on the path to war again. One example is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's 2003 directive calling for any public school teacher who refuses to sing the national anthem during ceremonies to be reprimanded. "Such orders are identical to the wartime schooling I received," Yuasa said. "The atmosphere in which we cannot freely express our opinions and challenge government orders is eerily similar to that of my time. And back then, before we knew it, we were heading into a wrongful war," the doctor warned.

Source: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20071024w1.html

Click to expand...

I applaud these men's courage to come forward with something that they're surely not very proud of. Regret of this kind is most likely a severe burden to have to carry into the next world.

IJA War Veteran Haunted by Horrors In China

ralphrepo Well-Known Member