Tears in the Darkness (53 page)

He liked his job as well. At sixteen he had graduated from the mining branch of a prefecture technical school and the next year started
working for the Sanyo Muen Mine at Omine-machi. He was a good-looking, agreeable boy, and his bosses were impressed that someone so young went about his work with such purpose. His father had died when he was a child, and now he was the sole support and head of his household—mother, grandfather, two younger brothers, and a cousin. He'd been at the mine only a short time in the fall of 1942 when the British prisoners arrived, but already he'd decided to make mining his career and thought of himself as a loyal company man. Company officials responded by putting him in charge of the British prisoners, whom, by all accounts, he treated well, slipping them extra food from his own stores, buying them tobacco in town.

When three hundred Americans arrived at Omine-machi in the fall of 1944, the mine bosses thought Nobuyasu Sugiyama the right man to take them over. He'd done a good job with the British; he'd do a good job with this new group of
gaijin.

Sugiyama assumed, as would most Japanese, that there was little difference between white English-speaking foreigners, and he expected that his relationship with the Americans would be as harmonious as it was with the British. But to the hard-bitten Yanks, Sugiyama was just another Jap jailer, and a wet-behind-the-ears jailer at that. At first they dubbed him “the Boy.” “Hey, Junior,” they would sometimes yell, and Nobuyasu Sugiyama could tell from their tone that the term was no compliment. These American
furyo
(POWs) were different, he thought. With them, there would be no singing.
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SOMETIMES
, walking the mile from the barracks to the colliery to begin his shift, Ben Steele would survey the countryside—the emerald green hills and mountains, the odd little homes in the village, the women coming down from the slopes with firewood in baskets on their backs. “This place is quite scenic,” he'd think. Then he'd remember how tired and hungry he was or, looking himself over, scowl at the accumulated layers of soot and mine grime on his trouser legs and think about the long day he was about to spend in a dark hole under tons of rock.

The colliery—a collection of buildings and sheds on the surface connected by a lattice of pipes, chutes, conduits, and spillways—was spread out in a valley and occupied the slopes of Mount Botayama, a region that had produced a granular, oil-rich variety of coal since 1877. Here and there in the valley were a dozen mine heads, arched entranceways
leading to a subterranean complex of diagonals, tunnels, laterals, and dusty coal drifts, “the sunless depths of the earth,” as Stephen Crane described the nocturnal world where men spend long hours digging and shoveling in the dark.
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At the beginning of a shift (5:30 a.m. for the early shift, 4:30 p.m. for the late), the men gathered at the mine head and boarded a small cable-car train that carried them into the heart of the mountain. The main tunnels and most of the side laterals had electric lights, but not the coal drifts. There men wielded picks and shovels in a gloom, the beams from their hat lamps flipping this way and that like miniature searchlights.

The prisoners worked in seven-man crews. Ben Steele was assigned to
roku shotai muen
, coal crew number six. Each day his crew descended into the mountain and disembarked in one of the main tunnels, then walked a half mile to the coal drift (the side lateral) they were working. Two men with picks loosened the coal, then two others with shovels threw it onto a V-shaped metal trough that ran back down the drift to a connecting lateral and a conveyor belt that emptied into a large hopper, which, in turn, filled coal cars bound for the surface.

It was eerie down there in the stygian caverns and drifts, their headlamps throwing shadows on the cave walls. After an hour digging and shoveling, the men were covered in black dust. The dust filled their lungs, of course—the makeshift masks they fashioned from rags were poor filters—and they always finished a shift coughing and hacking and blowing their noses.

Sometimes they also came out shaken, for mine work was dangerous. The weight of the mountain was always pushing down on the timber braces that supported the ceilings, and these braces frequently collapsed, burying part of the drift and sending thick black clouds billowing out into the main tunnels. None of the Americans were killed in these cave-ins—Japanese miners had long since mapped escape routes for just such emergencies—but each collapse left everyone, including the Japanese supervisors, on edge.

 

WHEN THEIR SHIFT WAS DONE
, the men headed for the
sentō,
the communal bath, for their group soak. The etiquette of the communal hot tub called for a dirty bather to soap up and rinse off at a faucet before slipping into the water. The Americans, naturally, just piled in. The rock crews, timber crews, and men working topside quickly learned to get to
the tubs ahead of the coal crews, whose grimy members always left the water the color and consistency of ink.

On their one day off in ten, the men washed and repaired clothing, cleaned the latrines and dumped the honey pots, picked lice off one another, reread the shredded stack of letters they carried from camp to camp. Most of the time they sat around gabbing, and the talk always turned to food. Sizzling steaks and chops, plump chickens, mounds of mashed potatoes and butter, bowls of applesauce and ice cream.

When they weren't talking about food, they were trying to scrounge or steal it. They stole from the gardens of the locals and from the guards' cabbage patch but rarely from one another. In a society of hungry captives, taking another man's grub was considered a capital crime, the lowest and most craven form of behavior. In November and December 1944, every American in camp received an eleven-pound Red Cross package. And just in time. Working in the cold had left them even hungrier, if that was possible, and the packages helped the men survive into the new year. In February 1945 a much smaller shipment of Red Cross boxes arrived, one package shared among six. Ben Steele collected the cans allotted him, scratched his initials on the tops with a rock, and stowed them in his room. A few nights later returning to his barracks, he discovered his stash gone. Checking through the barracks, he met another man who'd been robbed, Sergeant Ralph Keenan of Denver. The two nosed around the compound, and it wasn't long before they had a line on the thief.

What should they do? they asked each other. No point reporting the theft to the Japanese—they wouldn't give a damn. And the two hungry prisoners were also certain that their own officers, a couple of captains who had never exerted their authority, would just shrug the matter off. If they wanted their supplies back, they concluded, they'd have to go after the stuff themselves.

They found the pilferer hiding in his room. Turned out he'd eaten almost every damn can he'd filched. They stood there for a few seconds thinking about their empty stomachs, then they took off their belts, wrapped the rough strands of hemp around their knuckles, and began to beat the robber bloody.

“Stop!” he begged them. “Please, stop.”

But his assailants kept flailing away.

“We ought to kill you,” Ben Steele yelled, kicking and punching the man. “Kill you, you lousy son of a bitch.”

 

THE JAPANESE HAD CAPTURED
192,600 Allied military prisoners of war—Americans, Britons, Australians, Indians, Dutchmen. They penned their captives in 367 prisons and work camps located along what has come to be called the Pacific Rim—Japan, Manchuria, Formosa, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Burma, Siam, French Indochina, Malaya, and the islands of the Dutch East Indies. One hundred and sixty-five of these work camps were in Japan and Manchuria. Together they served as a source of slave labor for vital Japanese industries: tanneries, textile factories, steel and lumber mills, coal and iron and copper mines, chemical plants, dry docks, wharfs, rail yards and terminals, construction and irrigation projects, processing plants, and refineries.
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The Americans chafed under their chains, and in every factory and work site, they plotted rebellion, a state of mind as natural to them as conformity was to the Japanese. There was still a good bit of fight in them too, patriotism in some men, simple revenge in others. And they exercised these impulses in a thousand small acts of sabotage—breaking tools, jamming machines, botching jobs.

At Omine-machi, coal cars were always going off the tracks, slowing production, and electric blowers in the ventilation system frequently had to be shut down so Japanese repairmen could remove the rocks and debris jamming the motors. The Japanese also noticed something strange about the mine's daily yields. The Americans appeared to be working hard enough—each time a Japanese supervisor poked his nose into a drift, he'd find the crew of prisoners working away, but despite all the work, the American coal crews never seemed to meet the production quotas mine officials set for them.

The Americans were goldbricking, of course, faking it. Using lookouts and a system of signals and whistles, the prisoners alerted one another at the approach of a Japanese, and men who had been sitting around, snoozing and lollygagging, would jump up and make a great show of work.

If the Japanese caught on, they never said so. They wouldn't. To charge anyone in Japan, even a lowly prisoner of war, with nonfeasance and not have proof would make the complainant look silly, lose face. So the Japanese
administered “private punishment” instead, which is to say they punched, slapped, kicked, and cudgeled the prisoners for any infraction.

The bullies meting out this punishment acquired nicknames, descriptive epithets. “Fat Boy” and “the Frog” liked to use clubs, while “the Weasel” and “the Bull” preferred to hammer men with their fists. (“When the Bull hits you,” one of the men said, “you stayed hit.”) Nobuyasu Sugiyama, “Junior” now, was much younger than the other supervisors and was always trying to prove himself their equal.
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Here was a prisoner who wasn't shoveling fast enough. Slap! And here was a man too slow pushing a coal car down a lateral. Slap, again. Sugiyama slapped Sergeant Robert E. Kay from Electra, Texas, so hard and so often, the sergeant's ears were sore for months. Sometimes Junior would beat a man for thirty minutes or more—knock him down, pull him up, scream at him to stand at attention, then knock him down again. These lazy Americans, they weren't fooling him. If he thought a crew was sloughing off or putting on a show of work, he'd come up behind a man, pull off his cap, feel his forehead for sweat and, taking dry skin as evidence of sloth, slap the hell out of him.

In April 1945 Sugiyama was hospitalized for appendicitis, and when he returned to work, he was assigned to supervise several construction and cleanup crews topside. He wasn't happy with this new assignment; the Americans were “ignoring” him, he felt, and he detected a very strong “anti-Japanese feeling” in the American straw boss, likely a sergeant, who was their ramrod.

Things came to a head one late summer day, a small problem with some string. A work crew of nineteen men had been mixing cement. With almost everything in Japan in short supply, Sugiyama had left standing orders for the topside crews to take care with the cement bags, and when he went to inspect them later in the day and found the bottoms ripped out, he told the guards to line up the men.

Indeed, the prisoners had been monkeying with the sacks, but their purpose was salvage not sabotage; they were after the short lengths of string that held the bags together bottom and top, string they needed to mend their clothing and gear, tie their shoes (if they had them), secure their
bentō
boxes.

Sugiyama was very angry. He wanted to know which of them had taken the string and damaged the sacks. In other words, who had deliberately ignored his instructions?

When no one owned up, he made the prisoners form two lines, one facing the other, then he ordered them to start slapping one another.

To the Japanese, “line slapping” was a familiar form of corporal punishment, used in schools and military training camps. To the Americans, it was just more of the malignant mauling they had endured since the day they surrendered.

Supervisors wielding clubs joined the proceedings to make sure the prisoners weren't pulling their punches. Standing at the end of the line, Private Paul A. Dobyns of Mount Vernon, Missouri, had no slapping partner, so Sugiyama stepped into the gap.

Poor Dobyns, his comrades knew he was in for it. Junior slapped Dobyns so hard so often he knocked him to the ground. Then the real punishment began. Sugiyama drew his leg back and kicked Dobyns, kicked him in the head, the face, the ribs, the back. Kicked, kicked.

The line slapping, meanwhile, continued. One of the men guessed that they had slapped and swatted one another for almost thirty minutes. Toward the end of the time, the prisoners were so exhausted they could hardly raise their hands to deliver another blow.

Dobyns was in terrible shape. Sugiyama had turned his face into chopped meat and left him half deaf. Private Dick Bilyeu, a fellow Missourian, helped carry Dobyns to the bath and put him to bed. His face was inflated, his left eye swollen shut. Sugiyama seemed to have crushed the man's spirit as well. Dobyns refused to eat, and Bilyeu and others had to force-feed him to keep him alive.
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THE ALLIES
were closing in fast, taking back territory as they moved closer to the enemy homeland. On January 9, 1945, American forces at last returned to the big island of Luzon, coming ashore at Lingayen Gulf not far from where the Japanese had landed three years before. American forces soon reoccupied Clark Field. A special column of troops, meanwhile, drove south through Japanese lines and entered Manila on February 4, liberating the civilian internment camp at the University of Santo Tomas and the POW compound at Bilibid Prison. By early March the last pockets of resistance in the capital had been eliminated. Half the city was in rubble, but Manila at last had been liberated.
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