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One of my friends refused to bayonet a prisoner on command. For about a week, every day he was ordered to appear before senior soldiers. Each time he came back mangled. For this reason, even when the target was a child, when ordered to thrust, we obeyed.34 Nor need the cause of disciplinary action be so substantial as refusing to obey an order. Another former soldier remembered that once, while on active duty, he let some article of equipment slip off his horse’s back: “one of the older soldiers strode up to me and, screaming that I was a no-good, struck me dozens of times with a length of green bamboo. When he had finished with this he began beating me in the face with a canteen.”35 Ooka, in his well-known novel, Fires on the Plain (Nobi), refers to “the military tendency to raise one’s temper automatically as one raised one’s voice.”36 At Hong Kong, Lewis Bush was watching some Japanese soldiers just after the surrender in December 1941. He had noticed that the ordinary soldiers were never seen with loot. A young Japanese guard picked up a children’s picture book from a heap of rubbish and was reading aloud in English, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” when he was pounced upon by a “kempei” corporal, knocked down, kicked and beaten by a dozen of these monsters until he was covered with blood from head to foot and had to be carried away by his comrades. His oppressors laughed and thought they had had a great joke. My friends said: “Well, bad enough to be a prisoner, but thank God we are not Japanese soldiers.”37 Kumagaya Tokuichi wrote: “People knew that military duty was as hard as a prison sentence.”38 Many POWs observed such occurrences; their memoirs frequently mention beatings of Japanese guards by their own non-commissioned officers for what the POWs viewed as entirely trivial or non-existent offences. They also made the equation between this behaviour and their own ill-usage by their captors. One example will illustrate the point: a young Australian 2nd Lieutenant, captured at Singapore and imprisoned at Changi Camp, could see IJA infantry in training on an adjacent golf course; the young soldiers were “beaten and slapped by their NCOs if they made the smallest mistake in negotiating the difficult course.”39 After the war, the Minister of War, Tojo Hideki, rationalized this method of chastisement. He stated that face-slapping had been a common form of training among the ill-educated classes of the Japanese. In the IJA the use of slapping was forbidden, but it continued “because of the influence of the customs of the people.”40 Not all Europeans, nor all Japanese, reacted similarly to being slapped. Frank Harding, Winnipeg Grenadiers, found that his response was contempt. “Their culture is entirely different from ours and I thought to myself, ‘Ignorant people.’ I suppose they thought it 312 / Long Night’s Journey into Day was the ultimate insult, but as far as I was concerned, I just thought, ‘Do your worst—one day I’m going to get out of here.’”41 But slapping was taught to the Japanese—forced upon them—at an early age. One teenager in the 1940s, Sato Hideo, disagreed with Tojo’s self-serving assessment; she found the process repugnant: The thing I hated most was the habit of slapping among the pupils themselves. Again it was just like the military. All these customs entered our lives in 1944 and 1945. Everything then was done by group. If one member of the group forgot something important, or didn ’t do his homework, everyone in the group was responsible. We’d be made to line up in the hall, two lines facing each other. The teacher would order us to deliver a blow to the student standing opposite us. I hated that….If you didn’t do it at full force, both of you would be beaten by the teacher.42 Of course, much brutality was tied to the pragmatic reality that you can make some sick men work if you beat them enough, or if you withhold their food for as long as they are out of the working force. Here are the instructions expressed by War Minister Tojo Hideki on 30 May 1942, when he was inspecting the Zentsuji Division, which had responsibility for large numbers of POWs: To this Division is attached a prisoner...

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