The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (31 page)

Nagase and I talked a lot about the railway. The utter ftitility of it still astonished both of us. The P5Tamids, that other great engineering disaster, are at least a monument to our love of beauty, as well as to slave labour; the railway is a dead end in the jungle. Most of the track in the border area was torn up after the war, the sleepers used for firewood or for building houses. The line had some strategic military value at the time, but only in the service of a doomed campaign that cost millions of lives. The line has become literally pointless. It now runs for about 60 miles and then stops. The rest of it is as abandoned as the little line which I found on Unst in the Shetland Islands in 1933.

As we walked and talked, I felt that my strange companion was a person who I would have been able to get on with long ago had we met under other circumstances. We had a lot in common: books, teaching, an interest in history, though he still found one of my 'manias' puzzling; and I warmed to him more and more as the time in Kanburi went by. We were due to fly to Japan together at the end of the week.

I still needed to consider the matter of forgiveness, since it so concerned him. Assuming that our meeting, in itself, constituted forgiveness, or that the passage of time had made it irrelevant, seemed too easy; once someone raises forgiveness to such a pitch of importance you become judicial. I felt I had to respond to Nagase's sense of the binding or loosening force of my decision.

A kind Thai woman who we met that week tried to explain the importance of forgiveness in Buddhism to me; I understood that whatever you do you get back in this life and if what you have done is tainted with evil and you have not made atonement for it, evil is returned to you in the next life with interest. Nagase dreaded hell, and it seemed that our first meeting had made parts of both our lives hellish already. Even if I could not grasp the theology fully, I could no longer see the point of punishing Nagase by a refusal to reach out and forgive him. What mattered was our relations in the here and now, his obvious regret for what he had done and our mutual need to give our encounter some meaning beyond that of the emptiness of cruelty. It was surely worth salvaging as much as we could firom the damage to both our lives. The question was now one of choosing the right moment to say the words to him with the formality that the situation seemed to demand.

We flew to Osaka, surrounded by Japanese businessmen. I was separated firom Patti until a very sophisticated gendeman, speaking excellent English, heard from her what we were about and gave up his seat so that we could be together. Mrs Nagase and some of her pupils, young professional women of great charm and courtesy, met us at the airport and within a couple of hours we were on the extraordinary bullet train from Osaka to Okayama; it was like riding a missile adhering to the rails. We sat on the top deck as we swept past the continuous spread of small houses and other buildings along the coast of the inland sea.

Kurashiki, where we went next, is a jewel, an Oxford or a Bath among Japan's devastated and rebuilt cities, almost untouched by the war and its old city later spared by developers. I loved the wide, clean canal running through it, the swans and the little bridges. Yoshiko took us to *the old house', her family's pre-war residence which is maintained as a traditional Japanese dwelling. She comes from an old and substantial Kurashiki family, and she is proud of her city. The house is beautifril, with internal paper walls and graceful plain rooms furnished sparsely with low tables and hangings. We sat on cushions for the tea ceremony, though I was unable fully to concentrate on the intricate and graceful ritual because it was some time since I had attempted to sit cross-legged. I was struck, though, by the low doors of the tea-house in the yard, built small so that a man wearing a sword could not pass through them. This seemed a civilized precaution.

In the 'new house', where the Nagases live, I saw the same chaos of books and papers with which I am surrounded at home. One day I sat unwittingly in his study in the same chair, in almost the same position, in which Nagase had sat for his photograph for the Japan Times and in which I had rediscovered him.

Nagase was determined to show me the cherry blossoms at their finest, and it became a running joke. He would announce each morning that the cherry blossoms were 'open today 30 per cent', or 45 per cent, and that soon we would be able to see them as they were meant to be seen. He once took us to a park in Okayama, and was disappointed to find that in that particular garden the blossoms could only be judged to be 40 per cent open.

It was astonishing to be walking around this handsome town: a few years before I could not have imagined meeting a Japanese person voluntarily and now I was strolling in streets full of them, a tourist in my seventies, an honoured guest of two good people. Everyone we met was extremely courteous, and it was wonderful to me to see these crowds of smiling, well-dressed young people who are heirs to an economic superpower that leads the world in electronics, when I remembered my patient explanations of how a radio transmitter works in that wooden room in Siam in 1943!

Their command of engineering skill was displayed most beautifully in the bridges over the inland sea, connecting Honshu and Shikoku. I asked specially to see them, since the marvel of the Forth Bridge was one of my childhood wonders. They form the greatest span of bridges in the world, nine miles long, a sequence of bridges leaping off and disappearing gracefully over the horizon.

So we did what tourists are expected to do in Japan, and it was most enjoyable, but this is not a travel book and all the time I was aware of an unresolved question between Nagase and me. I found it hard to choose the right moment; there were always others around, and Nagase had a tendency to wish to make our encounter public, a symbol of reconciliation, and this gave some of our outings the character of official visits, with Japanese pressmen dogging our footsteps.

Meanwhile, we attended to things that were important to both of us, in different ways. We went to Hiroshima, and Patti and I laid a bunch of mixed flowers on the memorial. A director of the Peace Memorial Museum, himself deformed by radiation, showed us around. Terrible photographs of burnt children, of people with radiation sickness, of obliterated streets; we saw a man pointing out, with the stump of his hand, the image of a human figure preserved as if it had been photographed by the flash of the atomic blast.

The whole atmosphere of Hiroshima is like that of a shrine. Nagase and I were guilty of violating its respectful busy gravity rather disgracefully. We were walking around the museum together, Patti and Yoshiko in firont of us with some of Nagase's firiends. In the background there was a hubbub of chattering and commentary. Suddenly, as Patti later told me, she heard an outburst of unseemly hilarity behind her. There we were, two old gentlemen laughing our heads off in this sanctum of peace.

We had been talking about the last days of the war. Nagase asked me when I had heard about the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. 'On 8th August,' I told him. He was astonished: this was at least two days before he and his unit were told about it. He wanted to know how we could possibly have known, locked up as we were in Changi and deprived of contact with the outside world. Ah, I told him, but of course we had a radio. And for some reason that set us off, even in a place of such awfiil seriousness.

One day, to the surprise of our hosts, I asked to see a memorial of a very different kind, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the centre of Japanese imperial tradition and the chief cult centre of what was once Japan's state religion, Shinto Buddhism.

Nagase and I had talked about historical truth and he was concerned - almost to the point of obsession - with ensuring that the Japanese should be aware of what their army did in the name of the Emperor before 1945. He believes that there must be a break with all vestiges of the cult of obedience to authority; he is a militant spiritual humanist. He often talked about how there was so little in the way of good history to put into Japanese schoolchildren's hands; so little encouragement to face up to the past and come to terms with it. Nagase's crusading spirit, which is courageous and laudable, can become a little wearing, as when he wished to publicize our outings; but the more he talked the more I could understand his zeal. His obsession had become atonement and reconciliation, which need publicity - whereas mine had been with private remembering and revenge. The positions he takes up arouse fierce hostility in Japan. He once said that he would not be surprised 'to wake up and find myself dead'.

A clearer picture of what he is fighting against cannot be seen than at Yasukuni, to which we were taken by Professor Nakahara, who we had the good fortune to meet again. The shrine is at one level a moving war memorial, dedicated to the worship of those who died for the Emperor, but at another it is an unashamed celebration of militarism. Cherry blossom trees are bedecked with little white ribbons with personal messages and requests. In the grounds you can find a monument to the Kempeitai - it is like seeing a memorial to the Gestapo in a German cathedral. In firont of a museum building next to the shrine, and very much part of it, is parked a field gun, for all the world like the Imperial War Museum in London - except that this is a place of religious worship. And alongside the artillery-piece, there is an immaculate C56 steam locomotive, described by the shrine authorities as the first engine to pass along the Burma Railway. It stands proud, its smoke-deflectors polished and its great wheels pressing down into the gravel, its beauty a monument to barbarism.

Nagase told me how he had protested vigorously when the C56 was installed at Yasukuni in 1979. He wrote to the officials of the shrine, and reminded anyone who would listen that Tojo is reputed to have visited Siam when the construction of the railway was about to start, and said that it must be completed even though one prisoner should die for every sleeper on the line; and Nagase had pointed out that this particular engine demanded a sleeper for every metre of track. Both Tojo, as a soldier of the Emperor, and the machine are worshipped at Yasukuni.

In all the time I spent in Japan I never felt a flash of the anger I had harboured against Nagase all those years, no backwash of that surge of murderous intent I had felt on finding out that one of them was still alive. Indeed Nagase gave me the impression of having been prepared for a much more irritated and difficult encounter than ours turned out to be.

Perhaps that is why he seemed afraid, suddenly, when I asked to see him alone in his hotel room in Tokyo, where we were staying prior to our return to Britain. Days before, I had worked out what to do. I had decided to give him a piece of paper which I thought would meet both our needs, and had planned to give it to him in Kyoto; he had wanted very much to show me the great temples of the ancient former capital of Japan.

It rained heavily on the morning of our planned visit to Kyoto, and Nagase felt unwell, so we went with Yoshiko to that extraordinary place. In the rain, the glitter of the Golden Pavilion was softened, its image in the lake blurred. We walked around the stark, simple gardens and looked at everything we could, but I was worried about Nagase's brush with his old cardiac trouble and anxious now to make our final peace.

Looking out the window of our room in the nondescript, modem Tokyo hotel, I could see through a gap created by a building site the coming and going of trains in the huge Tokyo railway station. I sat waiting for Patti and Yoshiko to go out. My request to see Nagase on his own must have carried a charge of electricity, for it disturbed Yoshiko and she said to Patti, with a worried look on her face, 'Heart', and glanced pleadingly at me. I said that it would be all right, but she could not hide her distress.

After they had gone I went next door. There in that quiet room, with the faint noise of trains and the city streets rising up to us, I gave Mr Nagase the forgiveness he desired.

I read my short letter out to him, stopping and checking that he understood each paragraph. I felt he deserved this careful formality. In the letter I said that the war had been over for almost fifty years; that I had suffered much; and that I knew that although he too had suffered throughout this time, he had been most courageous and brave in arguing against militarism and working for reconciliation. I told him that while I could not forget what happened in Kanburi in 1943, I assured him of my total forgiveness.

He was overcome with emotion again, and we spent some time in his room talking quietly and without haste.

The next morning we saw Nagase and Yoshiko to their train back to Kurashiki. He phoned us from there that evening to make sure that we were all right. I thought that I had seen him for the last time, perhaps for the last time in our lives. The following day we ourselves made our way to the train for Osaka, from where we would fly to Britain. When after a journey of three hours, the train drew to a halt in Osaka, we stepped on to the platform. At the exact spot where our carriage door opened there was my friend Nagase standing with Yoshiko, smiling and bowing. They knew exactly which coach we were in, and they were hke excited children, so pleased to have tricked us; it was good to see them.

They took us to the airport and we left Japan. As the plane tilted us over the bay of Osaka, I held my wife's hand. I felt that I had accomplished more than I could ever have dreamed of. Meeting Nagase has turned him from a hated enemy, with whom friendship would have been unthinkable, into a blood-brother. If I'd never been able to put a name to the face of one of the men who had harmed me, and never discovered that behind that face there was also a damaged life, the nightmares would always have come from a past without meaning. And I had proved for myself that remembering is not enough, if it simply hardens hate.

Back in Thailand, at the Chungkai War Cemetery, when Patti and I walked off on our own, she had had a moment of doubt as she looked at the rows and rows of graves, and wondered whether we were doing the right thing after all. It was only a moment, for we both knew we should be there. I said then: 'Sometime the hating has to stop.'