Tears in the Darkness (57 page)

After army college, he met a beautiful woman, Toshiko, from a prominent Tokyo family and asked her to marry him. In two years they had two sons, Michio and Masahiko, and not long thereafter, in 1917, Homma was posted to Britain as an attaché and military observer. Either by choice or common practice, Toshiko stayed behind in Tokyo. The years of separation, however, turned out to be too much for her. She
seemed to lose interest in her family and sent her children to Sado Island to live with Machi-san, Homma's widowed mother. Masaharu returned to Japan to try to settle things, but by then Toshiko was living with another man, and Homma filed for divorce.

Although the scandal stung his pride, it did not hurt his career. By 1925 he was back working at army headquarters, an urbane man well traveled, now rubbing shoulders with some of the capital's political and business elite, among them the director of the Ooji Paper Manufacturing Company, Naokitsu Takada, and his lovely twenty-one-year-old daughter, Fujiko.

At their first meeting, Fujiko, wearing a silk kimono of fine gauze with a Chinese sash, served Masaharu tea. She was a bit bewildered by this big man with large eyes, a dark tan, and a white linen suit. He sat there with his hands folded in his lap, so nervous and tongue-tied all he could think to say was, “This is the first time I've worn my lieutenant colonel's badge.” They were married November 8, 1926, in the Ueno section of Tokyo. He was thirty-eight, she was twenty-three. She raised his sons as hers and later had two children of her own, Hisako and Seisako.

Meanwhile, Homma the soldier steadily gained rank and held important field and staff commands, especially in 1937 as head of the army's powerful Propaganda Corps. In the years that followed he served in China, then, on November 2, 1941, five weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, General Gen Sugiyama, Imperial Army chief of staff, gave Homma command of the 14th Army. His mission was to take the Philippines in fifty days. Homma won his victory, forced MacArthur to flee, but instead of fifty days, his 14th Army took five months to secure the islands, and a displeased Sugiyama, spurred no doubt by another of Homma's antagonists, Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo, relieved the general of command, put him on reserve status, and shipped him home in the summer of 1942, in effect cashiering him.

His army career was over, and he spent the war years at home with Fujiko and their two young children. (Michio, the oldest boy from his first marriage, died of a childhood illness; his second son, Masahiko, joined the army and was stationed in Manchuria, a second lieutenant.) In August 1945, after Japan surrendered, Homma learned from friends in government that his name was on an American list of war criminals, and
he slipped out of Tokyo for a few days and headed north to Sado Island to say good-bye to Machi-san, then he surrendered himself to Japanese gendarmes and American intelligence officers.

[
Homma, Prison Diary, September 19
] The guards change every day, so the way things are run changes as well . . .

I can tell that I am the one most hated by the Americans after reading the article in the
Mainichi
Newspaper that has my name in the headlines. This cannot be helped.

 

His world was now a twenty-by-twenty-foot cell in a dank three-story city jail. He had no direct contact with Fujiko or his children, but he could pass word to them through the good offices of a former prime minister, Kantarō Suzuki, who was allowed to visit the prisoners and act as their go-between. Homma had not yet formally been charged or arraigned and had only the vaguest notion of why he'd been arrested. The newspapers were saying that he “ordered the Americans to take the infamous death march of Bataan,” but he'd done no such thing, and he couldn't understand where the papers were getting that. Some days it seemed they were blaming him for the whole war, and playing the scapegoat didn't sit well with the general.
⁷

“The loss of the war is the responsibility of everyone,” he wrote in his diary on September 24. “We are merely the unfortunate ones who are representatively responsible and sacrificed . . . I did not personally do anything wrong . . . I do not have a guilty conscience. This is what I would like my children to understand.”

 

EVERY DAY
he thought about his fate. He'd read that the accused war criminals in Germany were going to face a court of judges from many nations. Would he too “be subject to an international trial,” he wondered, or would he have to account for himself in front of an American tribunal, judged by men he had once defeated?

The more he thought about the future, the more disquieted he became. “The cold fall wind touches my skin. My dreams at dawn do not bring tranquillity.”

On October 3 MacArthur's headquarters announced it was ready to bring to trial General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japanese
forces in the Philippines at the end of the war. The
Nippon Times
said Yamashita would be brought before a United States Military Commission in Manila. The article also included the government's main charge. Yamashita, it said, had “unlawfully disregarded and failed to discharge his duty as commander to control the operations of the members of his command, permitting them to commit brutal atrocities and other high crimes.”
⁸

Reading this, Homma was sure he was looking at the basic elements of the government's case against him as well.

[
Homma, Prison Diary, October 3, 1945
] The outcome of Yamashita's trial will give us an idea of what will happen to us.

In fact, the charges against the two men, and the tribunals that passed as trials, were not only similar, they were unprecedented and would make political and legal history.

 

YAMASHITA
had been sent to the Philippines in the fall of 1944 to lead the 275,000 Japanese troops there in a delaying action. The Japanese knew they could not hold the islands—the Americans had more men, ships, planes—but the longer they could keep the enemy fighting, the better their chances at the peace table or, if it came to it, the more time they'd have to prepare for an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. During the battle Yamashita lost contact with his field commanders, at least one of whom took it upon himself to wage a
gyokusai suru,
a fight to the death, in Manila. Thus disposed, Japanese troops and their officers there set about slaughtering thousands of civilians in the city and its surrounding provinces. Yamashita, at first on the run from the American Army, then holed up with a third of his command in the mountains 155 miles north of Manila and, cut off from his commanders, apparently knew nothing of the arson, rape, murder, and torture being conducted by the drunken, frenzied
hohei
holding Manila. In the weeks that followed, the rest of Yamashita's force spent their time on the run, falling back before the Americans—sick and starving Japanese troops eating grass and hiding in the mountains to stay alive. Finally at 4:00 p.m. on September 1, Yamashita walked down a path from his mountain headquarters and, under a prior arrangement, turned his command and himself over to the American Army.
He was immediately arrested and told he would be tried as a war criminal.
⁹

YAMASHITA, ON TRIAL,
PLEADS “NOT GUILTY”

[
Nippon Times
] MANILA, October 11.—General Tomoyuki Yamashita, so-called “Tiger of Malaya” and last Japanese commander in the Philippines, pleaded innocent today to charges of violating the laws of war in failing to stop the atrocities committed by his troops . . .

Yamashita was not charged with committing the crimes personally. His trial, scheduled to begin October 29, [will hinge] on the question of responsibility held by the Imperial general for acts of troops under his command [and] will determine the precedent for other future war criminal prosecutions.

 

[
Homma, Prison Diary
] [Yamashita's] sentencing will be my sentencing as well. I wonder what will happen.

He wanted to live—on that point he was clear—but if his jail cell diary was a transcript of his psyche, his thoughts turned daily on death.

October 9: “There are many people here (myself included), who feel that the death penalty is better than being imprisoned here for ten years.”

October 13: “I would rather be sentenced to death than receive a long prison sentence.”

October 19: “I no longer regard my life as precious.”

He was clearly preparing himself, doing what every right-thinking Japanese would do in his place. The way a Japanese met death was taken by his countrymen as an emblem of the way he had lived his life. Hope for the best, embrace the worst. Life is precious—let it go, like it was nothing at all.
¹⁰

He must have been a little afraid, though, afraid of losing what he had found in Fujiko. He wrote of her often, “ached” for her and his children. First at the Yokohama jail, then, later when he was transferred to Omori Prison in Tokyo, Fujiko would stand outside the gate and politely ask to see her husband. Each time, she was turned away. Guards would deliver her presents of food and toiletries and bed linen, but the rules did not permit visits, the Americans told her.

[
Homma, Prison Diary, October 24
] I am truly grateful for the white rice, seaweed, chestnuts, and other gifts . . . My only regret is that I cannot even see . . . the faces I long to see.

He read the newspapers daily, and the stories about all the social and political shifts taking place outside the prison walls left him alienated and estranged—stories about wage-and-price controls, Japanese women demanding suffrage, Americans planting their flag on Mount Fuji, the emperor calling on MacArthur, instead of the other way around.
Shikata ga nai
, Japan was changing and there was nothing to do but watch.

Every day he tried to prepare himself for his upcoming trial, even though no charges had been filed yet. He didn't expect much from his former enemies. He guessed they'd give him an “unfair” hearing in which he would be “pushed around by a large number of justices,” then taken outside and hanged or shot. And the accounts of Yamashita's trial, which was just beginning in Manila, only confirmed these suspicions. “There is no room for optimism,” he wrote.

 

WHEN SCORES OF NATIONS
met in convention at The Hague (1907) and Geneva (1929) to discuss the consequences of armed conflict, they agreed to a set of rules that, among other things, called for the protection of civilian populations and the fair treatment of prisoners of war—limits on armed conflict that came to be called the “law of war.” Implicit in the rules was the belief that those who violated them should be punished. The question was, how and by whom.
¹¹

President Roosevelt had stated publicly that America intended a legal punishment, full-fledged trials, but as more stories of Nazi and Nipponese villainy reached the War Department, some of the president's cabinet officers, and some of America's allies, began to talk about political rather than legal punishment. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wanted to bring “Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their arch accomplices . . . before a drumhead court-martial” and shoot them “at sunrise.” Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his cabinet ministers that war criminals should be summarily “executed” as “outlaws” and wondered whether the Americans would send him an electric chair on “lend-lease.”
¹²

By the beginning of 1945, the War Department and America's allies had settled on a basic plan. There would be two international tribunals
with civilian judges, one at Nuremberg, Germany, and the other in Tokyo, to try the war's archcriminals, the heads of state and their political henchmen who had committed omnibus crimes against humanity and peace—in other words, the men who had started and prosecuted a world war and caused the deaths of some fifty million people. Meanwhile, military men, the major field or area commanders, charged with specific war crimes (overt acts, as the law calls atrocities) would be given national trials by military commissions (boards of officers) sitting in those venues where the crimes were said to have taken place.

And so it was in the fall of 1945 that Tomoyuki Yamashita and Masaharu Homma found themselves preparing to stand trial before two military commissions in the Philippines, commissions whose procedures—particularly the all-important rules of evidence—were so “bare bones” that the trials took on the appearance of kangaroo courts. In a military commission, for example, none of the documents, reports, statements, letters, affidavits, or depositions submitted as evidence had to be verified or supported by direct testimony, which gave that evidence the quality of hearsay, accusations that were impossible for the defense to challenge or disprove.
¹³

The Allies also wanted to rush this justice along. The trials were to be the epilogue of a long war, and President Harry Truman, Churchill, and the other victorious leaders knew that a war-weary world wanted the sad, painful story to end. “Proceed, without avoidable delay,” Truman ordered MacArthur, who, in turn, through a surrogate, told his legal section, “speed is of the essence.”
¹⁴

[Nippon Times,
Wednesday, October 31
] In the Philippines General Tomoyuki Yamashita . . . is being tried by five American generals who will write a new chapter in international law if they hold him responsible for the reign of terror which his troops spread throughout the Philippines.
¹⁵

 

MORALLY RESPONSIBLE
, politically responsible, but heretofore not legally responsible. Commanders have always had to account for the behavior of their men, but that responsibility has always been fiduciary rather than criminal. If his men went astray for want of oversight, the custom was to revoke a commander's trusteeship and retire or cashier him. Only if his actions had been wanton—if, say, he'd explicitly ordered his men to sack a city or slaughter innocents, clear violations of the traditional conventions of war—was a general hauled before a tribunal.