Background

My interest in Japanese soldiers was sparked over forty years ago as an undergraduate student of Japanese language and history. My father had been in the Australian Airforce (RAAF) during the Pacific War, and many of my childhood neighbours and schoolfriends had fathers who had fought in New Guinea. Like most returned servicemen, they rarely talked about their experiences, yet there was an all-pervasive undercurrent of disdain for the behaviour of the Imperial Japanese soldiers, ‘those dirty yellow bastards’ during the Pacific War. The commonly held view of Japanese soldiers was bleak and brutish indeed. Such descriptions as those provided by Samuel Hynes in his book about war abound. Hynes quotes George MacDonald Fraser, who wrote Quartered Safe Out Here, a recollection of his time spent in Burma:

No one underestimated Jap [sic]: he might be a subhuman creature who tortured and starved prisoners of war to death, raped women captives, and used civilians for bayonet practice, but there was no braver soldier in the whole history of war, and if he fought to a finish […] there is no question that he was viewed in an entirely different light from our European enemies. Would the atomic bomb have been dropped on Berlin, Rome, or Vienna? No doubt newspaper reports and broadcasts have encouraged us, civilians and military, to regard him as an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone-Age; the experience of Allied prisoners of war demonstrated that the reports had not lied and reinforced the view that the only good Jap was a dead one. And we were right, then.

The disdain, and indeed hatred, held for the soldiers of Japan was, though perhaps warranted, in direct juxtaposition to the way we remember the contribution of our servicemen in military conflicts. The fascination with and memorialization of war in Australia (as with many other ‘victor’ countries) has seen the elevation to hero status of the service personnel who fought in campaigns such as Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele in the First World War, followed by those who fought on the Kokoda Track in New Guinea and the ‘Rats of Tobruk’ of the Second World War, the prisoners of war who struggled to build the infamous Thai-Burma Railway or suffered terribly in the death camps of Changi and Sandakan Death March (to name but a few), and more recently, though a bit more fraught, those who fought in the Battle of Long Tan in Vietnam.