The Narrow Road to the Deep North (34 page)

So how did one beating make one a war criminal? And what was a prisoner of war? Did not the Field Service Code specifically state that a captured officer was to kill himself? What was a prisoner of war? Nothing, that’s what. A man without shame, a man with no honour. A no man.

One beating?

He had been a good officer, and some of the other officers had chided him for dealing with most infringements of discipline just with face slapping.

You’re too warm-hearted, he recalled Colonel Kota telling him after Nakamura had slapped Corporal Tomokawa for some misdemeanour. Just slapping a man for that? I would have thrashed him so hard he never forgot.

And after that, Nakamura wanted to scream to the clear Kobe sky, what was a prisoner of war? What?

CHOI SANG-MIN
was sitting in the dark on a bamboo stool, a luxury he had been allowed as a condemned man. He had heard that some ex-POWs had simply tossed Kim Lee from the top floor of a brothel in Bangkok when they had found him there. That seemed to him reasonable and sensible. He hoped Kim Lee had spat on them as they threw him to his death. Kim Lee had been a guard like him, he had killed POWs, and when the war was ended they had killed him. It seemed perfectly understandable, unlike his own situation, which did not. He despised the Australians’ hypocrisy, dressing up their vengeance with rituals of justice. In his heart he knew they had always wanted to kill him too, so why all this pretence?

He had neither watch nor clock. Other than his intuition, he had no way of knowing how much longer the night might go on. But his intuition no longer seemed to work. The night was never-ending and yet it was already racing away from him. The Changi prison had been locked down for the evening, perhaps two hours earlier. If he had thought about it, he may have reasoned it was somewhere near midnight. But he did not think about it or anything, really. Choi Sang-min was lost in a place beyond thought. His mind beat time between two emotions. One was a panic that would come on him like a mad, nagging cough and have him once more frantically pacing his Changi prison cell trying to discover a way of escaping, only to discover there was no escape possible, either from the cell or from his imminent death.

And then his mind would pitch to anger, not at his fate or the impossibility of escaping, but at a fact he found tormenting. As he was imprisoned as a member of the Japanese military, he must surely still be owed his fifty yen monthly pay, none of which he had seen since before the war’s end, two years earlier. His anger arose not out of arithmetic or greed, but an idea of motivation that was also a sense of injustice. Fifty yen was the only reason he was there. Why, then, was he not receiving it?

And because in his heart he knew he would never receive any money ever again, that the fifty yen was an absurdity and yet he had somehow been robbed of it, his mind would abruptly swing back to panic, and he would once more begin pacing his cell, running his fingers over the walls, his hands over the cell window bars, the door, pushing, touching, searching for a way out, until he once again realised no escape was possible and his mind swung back to the anger he felt at being denied his fifty yen.

His trial had been held in an Australian military court and had lasted two days. Other than when he was being directly questioned, the proceedings were all in English and he understood almost none of it. At its end, the judge—a man with the face of a windswept candle and the voice of a gravedigger—for the first time looked directly at Choi Sang-min and spoke. An interpreter, his gaze fixed resolutely on the judge’s lips, whispered in Choi Sang-min’s ear broken branches of Japanese sentences.

Because of—of the contradictory nature, said the interpreter, evidence presented—form of written testimonies—the charge of having participated in the murder—Australian Imperial Force Sergeant Frank Gardiner—is dismissed. The translator switched to a more informal tone to add, This is very good news, very good.

And then he returned to his fragmented translation.

The charges—of having ordered the murder of Private Wat Cooney—these are upheld—as are several other lesser charges of—ill-treatment, including the withholding of food and medical supplies leading to avoidable suffering and death. Having—having been found guilty of being a Class B war criminal—you will—be—be executed by hanging.

The translator this time added no gloss of his own.

There were more words but Choi Sang-min was no longer hearing anything. When he had been questioned in court, Choi Sang-min had tried to explain how, as a Korean sergeant, he could never have ordered the death of a prisoner, but the Australian lawyers quoted from the interrogation of a Japanese officer called Colonel Kota saying he had. Kota’s evidence had already helped convict several Korean and Formosan guards and, Choi Sang-min had also heard, he had later been released without charge. Choi Sang-min had pointed out that Cooney was no longer in the camp when the order to execute him was supposedly given. But the camp records, confused and incomplete, offered no proof that this was so.

After his sentencing, his Australian defence counsel, a flabby man with wet, glistening eyes that reminded the condemned Korean of scalpel blades, pleaded with him to lodge a petition for clemency. Choi Sang-min was resolved to dying in a foreign land and could not see the point in drawing out the agony. It had not escaped the notice of Choi Sang-min, along with the other Koreans and Formosans held at Changi as Class B and Class C war criminals, that the Allied victors often seemed to free officers who had links to the Japanese nobility and let others more lowly, like themselves, be the scapegoats whom they hanged. Choi Sang-min thought of Major Nakamura, who had never been arrested and no doubt never would be; of Colonel Kota, who was once more free. Both were probably working for the Americans somewhere.

All the same, said Choi Sang-min.

What? asked his counsel, wet eyes cutting back and forth.

All the same, said Choi Sang-min, a comment he made to demonstrate his fatalistic acceptance of life, but which his counsel understood as an assent to his attempt to prevent his execution and have the sentence commuted. The lawyer submitted the petition, and Choi Sang-min’s life and torment were extended by another four months.

Choi Sang-min noticed how every man at Changi conceived of his destiny differently and invented his past accordingly. Some men had point-blank denied the charges, but they were hanged or were imprisoned for lengthy periods anyway. Some had accepted responsibility but refused to recognise the authority of the Australian trials. They too were hanged or were jailed for greater or lesser periods. Others denied responsibility, pointing out the impossibility of a lowly guard or soldier refusing to recognise the authority of the Japanese military system, far less refusing to do the Emperor’s will. In private they asked a simple question. If they and all their actions were simply expressions of the Emperor’s will, why then was the Emperor still free? Why did the Americans support the Emperor but hang them, who had only ever been the Emperor’s tools?

But in their hearts they all knew that the Emperor would never hang and that they would. Just as surely as they had beaten and tortured and killed for the Emperor, the men who didn’t accept responsibility were now to hang for the Emperor. They hanged as well and as badly as the men who accepted responsibility or the men who said they never did any of it, for as they jiggled about beneath the trapdoor one after another, their legs jerked all the same and their arses shat all the same and their suddenly swollen penises spurted piss and semen all the same.

During his trial, Choi Sang-min became aware of many things—the Geneva convention, chains of command, Japanese military structure and so on—about which he had hitherto only the vaguest idea. He discovered that the Australians he had feared and hated had, in a strange way, respected him as one who was different: a monster they called the Goanna. And Choi Sang-min wasn’t displeased to learn that he loomed so large in their hate.

For he sensed in the Australians the same contempt for him that he had known in the Japanese. He understood that he was once more nothing, as he had been in Korea as a child, standing at the back of his class after being caught whispering in Korean instead of speaking in Japanese; as he had been when working for the Japanese family, where his position was worse than that of the family pet; as he was in the Japanese army, a guard, lower than the lowliest Japanese soldier. Better Kim Lee’s fate than his now. And yet some men who he knew had done far worse things than him or Kim Lee had their lives spared. How? Why? None of it made any sense.

Beating the Australian prisoners, on the other hand, had made a lot of sense. However briefly, he felt he was somebody while he was beating the Australian soldiers who were so much larger than him, knowing he could slap them as much as he wanted, that he could hit them with his fists, with canes and pick handles and steel bars. That had made him something and someone, if only for as long as the Australians crumpled and moaned. He was vaguely aware that some had died because of his beatings. They probably would have died anyway. It was that sort of place and that sort of time, and no amount of thinking made any more or less sense of what had happened. Now his only regret was that he had not killed many more. And he wished he had taken more pleasure in the killing, and in the living that was so much part of the killing.

As the Australians talked to each other during the trial, it dawned on Choi Sang-min that this was something beyond hate. It was a certainty about life that he had never had but that the Japanese above him had always had. And when he had been given power over the life and death of the Australians, he had at first beaten them only because it was the Japanese way that he had been brought up with, and he saw nothing remarkable about thrashing a man who you felt was too slow or shirking work.

At Pusan he had undergone the same strict military training as that for Imperial Japanese Army privates. Only they were not Japanese, they were all Koreans and were never to be soldiers: their job was to be guarding enemy soldiers who had surrendered because they were too cowardly to kill themselves. As well as marching and shooting and bayoneting, he had been taught
binta
, the face slapping that the Japanese insisted on for even the most minor error. Even if only one person made a mistake, everyone had to be slapped. Every day they had all the trainee Korean guards line up in two rows facing each other, and each trainee had to slap the trainee opposite him, right hand on left cheek, left hand on right cheek, taking it in turns and only stopping when the face of the one being hit was badly swollen. All orders had to be obeyed.
Binta
and obeying orders, that was now Choi Sang-min’s life—right hand on left cheek, left hand on right cheek. He longed to run away and go home, but he knew there would be trouble for his family with the Japanese authorities if he did. And besides, he would shortly be earning fifty yen a month.

He remembered how he had whispered to the trainee opposite him that he would go easy on him if he returned the favour. Their ruse was quickly spotted by their Japanese officer. He was a fine-looking man whom the recruits admired. Choi Sang-min even imitated his way of walking and his slow, precise way of turning when spoken to. Now the officer was shouting in Choi Sang-min’s ear.

Want to pretend? he yelled. Pretend this doesn’t hurt.

And with a short steel rod he hit Choi Sang-min in the kidneys on both sides so hard that he pissed blood for several days afterwards. The next morning, when the recruits were once more lined up in rows to slap each other, Choi Sang-min beat his counterpart with a desperate rage that never quite left him, right hand on left cheek, left hand on right cheek.

And, at first, when he—a small, skinny Korean kid of sixteen—had been sent to the jungle in a distant land, he had been frightened of the larger, taller and older Australian men, orang-utangs with their wide-set backs, thick arms and hairy thighs. They were always whistling and singing. In his experience, Koreans and Japanese didn’t do much of either in public, and he hated this strange cheerfulness. And so he went further than he strictly needed to with his punishments—to impress upon them that he was more man than they were, to make clear that their cheerfulness should end. And after a time the men began to shrink and shrivel, their arms withering and legs wasting; they whistled less and only sang sometimes.

And in truth the prisoners deserved what they got. They tried to avoid work, and when they couldn’t avoid it they did it badly and lazily. Though they did it much less, they would still sometimes whistle or sing when he was about. They stole anything and everything—food, tools and money. If they could do a job badly they saw it as a triumph. They were skin and bones, and they’d just give up while they were working and die there on the railway. They’d die walking to work and they’d die walking back from work. They’d die sleeping, they’d die waiting for food. Sometimes they died when you beat them.

It made Choi Sang-min angry with the world and with them when they died. It made him angry because it wasn’t his fault that there was no food or medicine. It wasn’t his fault that there was malaria and cholera. It wasn’t his fault that they were slaves. There was fate, and it was their fate and his fate to be there, it was their fate to die there and his fate to die here. He just had to provide whatever number of men the Japanese engineers needed each day, make sure they got to work and kept at the work the Japanese engineers wanted done. And he did his job. There was no food and no medicine and the line had to be built and the job had to be done and things ended up as they were always going to end up for them and for him. But he did these things, he did his job and their section of line got built. And Choi Sang-min was proud of that achievement, the only achievement he had ever known in his short life. He did these things, and these things felt good.

The moments when he completely lost his temper were the most euphoric to him. In his world of darkness and ignorance, he felt free—and more, he felt alive for the first time in his life. All his hate and his fear, his anger and his pride, his triumph and his glory, came together when he hurt others, or so it seemed to him now, and his life had for that short time meant something. And at such moments he escaped his hate.