"You Oriental Devil !"
This cry of bitterness and hatred dug deeply into my heart's core.
It was only three or four hours ago. We were marching under a blazing sun along a single footpath surrounded by water filled rice fields. A young Chinese man of slight build had come walking toward us without showing any sign of fear.
He was immaculately dressed in an all white Chinese style two piece cotton suit. In the rustic setting he cut a singularly conspicuous figure. Furthermore, his rich black mustache, so rare for a Chinese, added a shade of fearlessness to his well shaped features. He smiled as he was about to pass by. Just then I accosted him.
"Wait, wait a moment. Were there any Chinese soldiers from where you came from?"
"No, no Chinese soldier, not even one villager."
"Then will you mind helping us carry some of our luggage for several hours?"
Saying so, we transferred to his shoulders a portion of the luggage our aged baggage bearer was struggling with. The young man obediently did what he was asked. And our bunch of seven, two Chinese and five Japanese, moved forward in the direction the young man had just come from.
The July sun glared down upon the red earth of Hunan Province as if to want to scorch it. The night before we had stayed at a large, abandoned villa belonging to a Professor Lei (Thunder) at a town named Huachiao (Flower Bridge). Before going to sleep we had doused ourselves with perfume of various scents found in Mrs. Lei's dressing room.
Early next morning when we started out on our liaison mission, the mixture of perfume fragrance had changed into a stifling odor as it got mixed with the oily sweat from our bodies. Becoming unbearable, I decided to let my men sit down and take a short rest under the eaves of a small farming village. Without sitting down, I pulled out the 6x power binoculars awarded me at the time of graduation from Officer's Candidate School and casually looked through the lens to see what was ahead of us along the road.
What I saw was startling. There, about 500 meters in the direction we were to continue advancing, were about 100 or so armed peasants or guerillas spread out over the countryside. They were hiding in the grass and under the trees, waiting for us to walk into their trap, we were totally outnumbered.
"Damn it !" I cursed to myself.
What crossed my mind then was that there was a low ridge about two kilometers behind us, and if we were able to make it to the top of the ridge we might have a fighting chance to defend ourselves. When I looked back toward my men it seemed they had reached the same conclusion from the tone of my curse, as they had already taken off 50 meters or so ahead of me ! Each was running hell-bent toward the ridge along the numerous narrow paths between the water filled rice paddies. I followed, very unlikely for a soldier of the Emperor, show my back to the enemy and having reversed the direction of advance.
Looking back I could see the enemy coming at us in hot pursuit, spreading their flanks out widely in an encircling operation and chanting in a chorus "Sa-ni, Sa-ni", which means "Kill you, Kill you".
It was a race between us and the enemy. Would we get to the top of the ridge first or would they close their net? Made it we did to the foot of the ridge. "Now make it over the top" I thought. Just then bullets began to whiz close above our heads and lodge into the earth of the ridge just before our eyes. From the sound of the gunfire likened to a crack of a whip, I judged the enemy was within 100 meters behind us. At such close range we would soon be finished.
Just then the top of the ridge became alive with the sound of rifle and machine gun fire. "The games up, the enemy has beaten us to the top of the ridge !" I thought. For a few seconds we laid still. A moment later a bugle sounded off its quaint Chinese notes. The guerillas vanished as if they had melted into the surrounding scenery. It just happened that a company of our infantry was passing by at the top of the ridge and saw us below, surrounded. And they had fired at the guerillas with little time to spare. Thanks to them we narrowly escaped from the clutches of sure death.
After about an hour had passed, one member of our party, his excitement of nearly getting killed still unabated, shouted out "Where is that guy in the white clothes? He must have led us into that trap!"
"That's right. Ever since we met him he looked suspicious!" said another voice. Soon everyone agreed.
I had been lying down with a recurring malaria attack but got up with the commotion around me. We searched around for the man in white. Soon we found him. He too, like us, had been shot at and barely escaped death. He had cuddled up in a corner of a barn and fallen fast asleep, exhausted. We woke him and began questioning him.
"No, I'm no guerilla!" he denied strongly. He showed us his ID card. It had his photo on it and said he was a teacher at some high school. From his inner pocket he took out a photograph. It showed him with his wife and two small children.
He then knelt down under our eyes. With his arms held high above his head, his hands pressed together like in a prayer, he began to rub his forehead into the ground many, many times. In this fashion he pleaded for his life. So intensely excited were we all that we had no ears to hear his earnest plea. We were bloodthirsty. And the Devil inside us kept saying "Kill him, Kill him".
As we dragged this young man behind a hill, he realized he was going to get killed. He put up a violent struggle to free himself. It took three of our men to pin him down face upward.
Just then a veteran superior private jumped up and sat astride the young man. He pulled up the young man's white shirt, baring his chest. His left hand fumbled for the location of the young man's heart. He then placed his middle and index fingers over and in parallel to the two rib bones covering the heart. There, between the two fingers, he placed the tip of his bayonet sideways. In a flash, with the palm of his right hand he tapped the hand of the bayonet lightly downward. It was a fast, smooth job of an experienced executioner.
The young man let out a piercing scream with his last breath, "You Oriental Devil !". It was a cry filled with burning animosity and fury. At the same moment the body of the young man arched sharply upward. This reflex threw the three soldiers, who had been pinning him down, off of him. Immediately, bright red blood spurted out from his twisted mouth with a gurgling noise. Gradually the blood flow eased and the blood started to turn black. Then it began to form a circle of froth around the mouth, letting out a bubbling sound.
The young man's mustache, which had been neatly and proudly attended to, was rumpled up mercilessly by globs of slimy blood.
His body next began to twist and shake, at first in large spasms and gradually in small ones. Finally the convulsions ceased. All of this took only a few minutes.
As officer in charge, I failed to put a stop to this violence. I could only watch stupified over this gory scene where priceless human life was being taken away at the hands of human beings who had become possessed by the Devil, myself included. As the young man's life began to ebb away I could sense the soul within me start to fade out from my body. I soon crumbled to the ground and sat there, my mind emptied and hollow.
The young man's expression of wrath still showing on his face was indescribably ghastly. His enmity filled glare focused squarely on us and failed to let go.
Soon the dense foliage of the killing site gradually began to cover and wrap the now still body of the young man, his pure white clothing crumpled and stained with his blood. And soon the surroundings returned to their former quiet and stillness.
The Oriental Devils walked away from the scene of the killing without uttering a word. When they reached the village what they saw was the haughty figure of the superior private washing the blood off his bayonet in the pond as is nothing had happened. And they next saw him cut a new notch in the handle of his bayonet, the 12th one, for the young man he had dispatched just those few minutes ago.
Why had this young man come walking toward us that day? Coming along that single path in the countryside where only the day before a fierce battle had raged and when only three weeks or so later victory would have come to free him and his countrymen from the millions of Oriental Devils? Why was he dressed up is such conspicuous pure white attire? Only he then knew.
We now know only one thing for sure. Contrary to our suspicions, he was not a member of that band of guerillas just as he had asserted.
This fact surfaced a few years after the war had ended. I had then been employed at General MacArthur's occupation headquarters in Tokyo when an Education Mission from China was visiting. As a member of that Mission there was a young Army captain named Chien Ming Nien (which means "Money Next Year"). We got around to talking about the War and our involvement, and by coincidence it came to light that he was the leader of the band of guerillas, who, on that unforgettable day, attempted to surround and destroy us.
"That day there were about 100 of us non-uniformed soldiers, but there was not one dressed in white clothes nor was there anyone sent out to lure you into a trap. That man of yours in white, under bright sunlight, made for an excellent chasing target" the Captain said.
The discipline instilled in me by my strict parents; the moral education received in grade and high school; the ethics and philosophy leared in college; the Bushido (Way Of Samurai) hammered into me in the Army; and the conscience which had been nurtured and taken root within me over the twenty years or so of my life; all of these elements making up the basic fabric of my own self were torn out of me by a single sharp cry of this young man's dying words, "You Oriental Devil !".
More than fifty years have elapsed since that damnable day.
But even now the young man occasionally visits my bedside dressed up in the same white clothes and torments me mercilessly with his repeated cry of "You Oriental Devil !". Suddenly I wake up to find my body covered with heavy sweat and my heart racing and out of beat.
For the Oriental Devil there is no statute of limitation, nor any room even for an iota of mercy, let alone extenuating circumstances.
At this rather late date I search my heart and keenly feel that War itself is a Devil and it turns humans into Devils; and that no matter how just a cause for War one may have, War in the end runs contrary to the human code of conduct.
And, without any doubt, I shall continue to bear the ceasless sin of the Oriental Devil until my last breath.
Minoru Kawamoto December 12, 1993 At Katase Enoshima