Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

  Already, the Palauan islanders were evacuating the city. There was little reason to stay. Though the colonial Japanese had been relatively benign in the 1920s, building roads and schools and transforming Koror into a modern city, the relationship between Palau and Japan had been degenerating ever since. Islanders would not soon forget the segregation policies of the 1930s, when their children were taught to reject island customs, mimic Japanese manners, worship photos of the emperor, and celebrate jingoistic holidays like the “Day for Appreciation of the Imperial Flavor.” And as the war escalated, indignity gave way to oppression. “All residents of the Palau islands,” the historian Wakako Higuchi wrote in Remembering the Pacific War, “including both Palauan and Japanese women and children in elementary schools, were made to work on the construction of military facilities.”

  Faced with such dismal prospects in town, many islanders returned quite literally to their roots. Building camps in the Babeldaob jungle, they learned to subsist on the tubers of the taro plant as their ancestors had. When the war dragged on and the taro ran low, they turned to wild nuts called keyna, and when the keyna ran out, they scraped by on the poisonous fruit belloi, soaking its bumpy brown flesh to remove toxins, then boiling it and choking it down. Life in the jungle camps was hot, wet, dangerous, and dispiriting, but at least it didn’t require them to build barracks for the occupying army.

  But the Palauan refuge on Babeldaob was not to last. As US planes began to canvass the islands in late July, an increasing number of Japanese soldiers began to settle on the big island. There had been a small detachment of the kempei-tai on Police Hill since the beginning of the year, but according to a journal kept by the commander of the kempei, Colonel Aritsune Miyazaki, the rest of the unit began to arrive on Babeldaob soon after. In fact, on the same day in July that George Bush sank his first enemy ship in the northern atoll, a flight of thirty-one additional American planes laid waste to the kempei facility on the island of Koror. The next day, while Roosevelt, Nimitz, and MacArthur were gathering in Hawaii, another strike demolished several of the Fourteenth Division’s buildings downtown. Then, the following day, yet another bombardment left the division headquarters on Koror in shambles. “Bombers attacked. Barracks were burned. Forty soldiers and sixteen natives were killed,” Miyazaki scrawled into his journal. Within days, both the kempei and division troops were relocating to Police Hill.

  For Palauans, the sight of Japanese officers streaming onto Babeldaob was as ominous as it was unexpected. Peering through a curtain of foliage at the massive construction on Police Hill, they began to whisper that the Japanese had come for them. Soon there were a number of theories and rumors circulating through the Palauan camps, and today the wartime legends of Palau offer a vivid glimpse of the island experience.

  One of the most widespread stories that summer involved a bunker that Japanese soldiers were building in the district of Ngatpang. The bunker, islanders believed, was too large to be an air raid shelter. Instead, they guessed that it was part of a secret plan to exterminate them. The Japanese, they whispered, were still angry with the Palauans for abandoning the city, and one day soon, they would come into the jungle to round everyone up. They would lock them all inside the new bunker and detonate a bomb. There was no evidence of such a plan, and none would emerge after the war, but in an atmosphere already rife with resentment, the story quickly gained the currency of fact. Six decades later, many Palauans still spoke of the “extermination plan” as though it were settled history.

  At the same time, a countervailing legend formed in the jungle, this one with an American hero. His name was Captain Morikawa and he was ethnically Japanese, but was said to be a spy for the United States who had penetrated Inoue’s command. By day, Palauans said, Morikawa walked through the jungle in all-white clothes. When he encountered the islanders, he would offer them food, water, and advice on how to tend their land. A skilled farmer, he helped many families improve their gardens. Then he would return to Inoue’s headquarters at night to spread misinformation about the Palauans—tricking the Japanese commander into thinking the islanders were far away. Eventually, the Palauans wrote a song to honor Morikawa, with the lines “They were preparing an air raid shelter at Ngatpang, in an attempt to exterminate us all. Were it not for our rescue by Morikawa, Roosevelt’s spy, we would have all perished.”

  Years later, the historian Wakako Higuchi investigated the Morikawa legend. She found a retired officer named Yoshiyasu Morikawa living in Japan, who had spent two years working for Inoue during the war. Trained as a surveyor, Morikawa confirmed that he often walked through the hills and jungle alone. His assignment, he explained, was to traverse Babeldaob in search of possible US landing sites, but Inoue had asked him to be especially friendly toward the Palauans he met. The Japanese, Morikawa insisted, were nearly as frightened of the islanders as the islanders were of them. “According to Morikawa, one great anxiety the Japanese military had during the war was the civilian unrest that prevailed throughout Babeldaob,” Higuchi wrote. “In order to alleviate the food shortages [Morikawa] taught the Palauans how to enlarge their farms, and especially how to cultivate tapioca and sweet potatoes.” It was a measure of how deeply Palauans mistrusted the Japanese that they interpreted Morikawa’s kindness as proof that he wasn’t really Japanese.

  “The Pacific War was the turning point in relations between Japanese and Micronesians,” Mark Peattie wrote. “It began with the generally passive and sometimes even willing acquiescence of the islanders toward Japan and its war effort; it ended with the near total abandonment of the Japanese cause by these same people.”

  But if the war drove a wedge between Japan and Palau, it also brought up divisions within the Japanese army itself.

  —

  OFFICIALLY, THE KEMPEI were Japan’s military police, but in practice they filled a role more like secret police—tracking down political enemies, real and imagined. Like the Nazi Gestapo, they were widely feared, functionally autonomous, and influential in ways that did not come through on an organizational chart. Often, the leader of a kempei unit answered only to a regional general, and only in an oblique way. In a place like Palau, that meant the kempei commander experienced little oversight from Sadae Inoue, who spent far more time worrying about the gun emplacements on Peleliu, Angaur, and Battery Hill than about the comings and goings of a few kempei men.

  That suited Aritsune Miyazaki just fine. As leader of the South Seas Kempei-tai, Miyazaki was in some respects Inoue’s opposite. Where Inoue was a battle-hardened general, with such a martial bearing that his own wife described him as “strict,” Miyazaki was long-winded and excitable, given to regaling his subordinates with stories of his own valor. As his personal assistant, Keishiro Imaizumi, put it, “The unit commander liked to talk about himself, and when he grew tired of that, he would talk about old times—for example, stories about the time when he was in officer’s school, stories about women, stories about the time when he was Kobe detachment commander . . .”

  The kempei under Miyazaki were divided into sections, including the Intendance Section, for administrative affairs; the Special Higher Section, to dispense military discipline; and the Criminal Section, to manage the unit’s prisoners. Among them, the Criminal Section was by far the most feared among Palauans. It had been the first kempei detachment on Police Hill, and it was the one that might arrest a Palauan and hold him indefinitely for a minor offense.

  The commander of the Criminal Section was Kazuo Nakamura, who relished his independence from Miyazaki almost as much as Miyazaki sought distance from Inoue. Born on a farm just west of Hiroshima, Nakamura was skittish, careful, and mistrusting; he found Miyazaki’s braggadocious manner offensive. As a child, Nakamura was routinely beaten by an alcoholic father, and he dropped out of school after third grade to work on the family farm. In his teens, he began to follow long days in the field with even longer nights on the town, and by the time he was twenty, he’d contract
ed a debilitating strain of syphilis, which left his legs permanently unstable, his ears ringing, his vision blurry, his reflexes slow, and his penile urethra glutted with ulcers. After that diagnosis, Nakamura met and married a young girl, Fujiko, who lived near his family—and soon she was ill, too. A year after the wedding, their first child was born with severe intellectual disabilities, and a year later, a second child arrived with gross nervous system malfunction. By the time Nakamura was drafted into the army at age twenty-seven, his assignment to the elite kempei-tai seemed like a rare stroke of luck. Yet he quickly discovered that, in Miyazaki, he would answer to a commander with little sympathy for his health, and whose violent tantrums mirrored his father’s.

  “If we opposed his intentions,” Nakamura said of Miyazaki, “he would scold us and berate us angrily in a thunderous voice, or strike us, or chase us subordinates with his sword, shouting that he would kill us.”

  In his first months on Police Hill, Nakamura had enjoyed the distance from Miyazaki, but the dank tropical air of Babeldaob worsened his health. His migraines were constant and racking; he felt a strange burning sensation on the skin of his head; and the syphilis began to creep into a large vein by his heart, shunting the flow of oxygen to his brain. At the end of the war, doctors would diagnose him with “paresis of the insane.”

  Somehow, despite his condition, Nakamura managed to supervise a dozen men in the Criminal Section, many of them with health complications to rival his own. Yoshimori Nagatome was a sergeant from the southern tip of Japan, whose wife, aging parents, five siblings, and nine children all lived together on a three-acre farm, where half of them suffered from a debilitating autoimmune disease. Nagatome had been spared the illness, but contracted yellow fever within weeks of his arrival in Palau, and by summer he was grappling with a persistent case of bronchitis as well.

  Sergeant Major Chihiro Kokubo was beset with a case of dengue fever that seemed to recur or flare up every few days, and he had been fighting dysentery since the day he landed on the islands. Kokubo had grown up in extreme isolation. Born to a large family, he’d been sent to live with childless relatives at the age of eight, taking their surname so that he and his parents could inherit their fortune. As part of the arrangement, Kokubo was rarely allowed to see his mother and father. “I always experienced loneliness when I saw my brothers and my own parents,” he said later. Drafted at the age of twenty-one, he’d served two years on the home islands, then a year as a civilian, before being drafted back into the kempei and sent to Palau.

  As crude as the conditions were on Police Hill, they continually grew worse. While the Long Rangers relocated from Los Negros to Wakde Island in late August, the kempei were in the middle of a move themselves, building a new hideaway in the jungle below Police Hill. In a dark patch of forest, they carved a network of caves and tunnels into the banks above a small stream, and by the time the Long Rangers began their missions to Palau, most of the kempei had taken up residence in the sodden jungle camp. Trudging through the mud between caves, it was easy to wonder how they had sunk so low—from the exalted status of secret police to the crude and primitive conditions of the natives they had come to occupy.

  Throughout the spring and summer, the Criminal Section had been arresting dozens of new prisoners, including Palauans who stole bread or failed to avert their eyes, Indian Muslims working on the islands as indentured servants, and the Jesuit missionaries who were suspected of having sympathy for the United States. But as the conditions of the kempei camp devolved, the Criminal Section began making more arrests than ever—patrolling the islands to provoke confrontations and hauling in multiple prisoners each day. “There is no kempei-tai in the whole world,” Miyazaki bragged, “that makes as many arrests as we do.”

  —

  THE BRUTALITY OF Japanese prison camps in World War II is legendary. Like the Nazi machinery of death, it was so dehumanizing that it can be difficult to comprehend. Captured troops were routinely starved, bludgeoned, mutilated, decapitated, and used for bayoneting practice. A US prisoner in the Pacific was ten times as likely to be killed as his counterpart in Europe.

  But what makes the Japanese prison camps of World War II even more shocking is the ruthless speed with which they arose. Just a few years earlier, the camps had been the opposite: a model of civility and respect for captured soldiers. In the years leading up to World War I, Japan was allied with Britain, and when the war broke out in 1914, Japanese leaders honored their alliance by seizing German territories throughout the Pacific Rim. The German soldiers stationed in those territories were rounded up and shipped to Japan, where they spent the next several years in large prison camps. Yet as the war crept by, the camps saw little of the abuse that would come to characterize Japanese prisons in the next world war. In fact, many of the camps were so comfortable and accommodating as to seem like small towns.

  One of the most famous camps was the Bando facility, spread across fourteen acres on the small southern island of Shikoku. Bando provided spacious housing for its prisoners in a residential district, along with a commercial zone in which they were free to open businesses. Over time, a collection of about forty German shops rose up in the district, which the prisoners called Tapatau, and Japanese citizens would often visit the prison to shop for German wares.

  As Charles Burdick and Ursula Moessner recounted in The German Prisoners of War in Japan, 1914–1920, “Tapatau had many specialists. Among the craftsmen were several carpenters, painters, mechanics, draftsmen, photographers, watchmakers, instrument makers, bookbinders, locksmiths, blacksmiths, printers, and more. For those individuals interested in their personal appearance, Tapatau provided a barber, a tailor, and a masseur. To please the palate after a long day’s work, Tapatau’s inhabitants could rush to the ‘Sanitas,’ a spa-like establishment, open day and night, with a restaurant that served wonderful coffee cake. The coffee cake was obtained from the Geba, Tapatau’s bakery, known to everybody as ‘delicious, delicious.’”

  Some of the German prisoners at Bando also took jobs in town. Each morning, they would walk through the front gates of the prison to spend the day working for pay in Japanese shops. Afterward, they would return to the prison for dinner, which was typically made from the camp’s abundant livestock, including some two thousand chickens, thirty pigs, and countless ducks that bobbled freely through the vegetable gardens and onto the game fields, where prisoners passed the evening playing soccer, hockey, and stickball, or else holding gymnastics competitions. There was a prison newspaper at Bando, an orchestra that performed more than one hundred concerts, and two theater companies.

  Not all Japanese prison camps in World War I were as lenient as Bando, but many of them tried. In the towns of Asakusa and Hijemi, the camps offered prisoners a similar level of trust, with the option to take long walks outside the prison and to work in local stores. Even the more restrictive camps, like those at Osaka, Matsuyama, and Kurume, were benevolent by any normal standard. According to Burdick and Moessner, after the 1915 crowning of Japanese emperor Taisho, the commander of Kurume announced that “every prisoner should receive a gift of apples and beer to celebrate the joyous occasion.” When a handful of German officers declined to celebrate the coronation of their captors’ king, the prison commander briefly lost his temper and hit one of the men. The incident led to a formal investigation, and the Japanese commander was forced to apologize to the prisoner.

  What caused such a dramatic change in Japanese prison camps over the next thirty years is a matter of some debate. It’s a question that invites lazy generalization about the psychology of empire and “the Japanese mind.” Certainly, by the onset of World War II, Japanese troops had been at war for an additional three decades, and the drastic expansion of the Japanese empire placed them farther from home than ever, while their training had become a grueling process that sometimes involved physical assault by senior men. These and other factors may have contributed to a shifting attitude towa
rd prisoners, foreigners, and the native population of their territory islands.

  However one accounts for the change, it was clearly evident before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese troops raiding the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937 were already committing atrocities that would have been unthinkable to the prison guards at Bando, Asakusa, and Kurume a few years earlier. In her treatise on the Nanking massacre, Iris Chang described the capture of one shoemaker’s apprentice, Tang Shunsan, who was found in a trash bin and herded with hundreds of other prisoners toward an open pit. There, Chang wrote, “the Japanese ordered Tang and the other prisoners to line up in rows. . . . Then, to Tang’s horror, a competition began among the soldiers—a competition to determine who could kill the fastest. As one soldier stood sentinel with a machine gun, ready to mow down anyone who tried to bolt, the eight other soldiers split up into pairs to form four separate teams. In each team, one soldier beheaded prisoners with a sword while the other picked up heads and tossed them aside in a pile.”

  As the war with China morphed into a war with the United States, Japanese soldiers turned their attention to Allied prisoners of war, marching some seventy-eight thousand soldiers, including twelve thousand Americans, up the Bataan Peninsula, while beating them, stabbing them, running over them with trucks, and denying them food or clean water. Another sixty thousand Allied troops were forced to construct a railway between Burma and Siam under hellish conditions, later immortalized in the novel The Bridge Over the River Kwai. A quarter of those men died.

  In many cases, the abuse of Allied prisoners was either tacitly or explicitly condoned by Japanese leaders. Prime Minister Tojo himself had set the terms for prisoner abuse by announcing early in the war that “the present condition of affairs in this country does not permit anyone to lie idle, doing nothing, but eating freely. . . . In dealing with prisoners I hope you will see that they are usefully employed.” Tojo was well aware that this was widely interpreted as a “no work, no food” injunction.