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By Harumi Ozawa
, Agence France-Presse
OSAKA, Japan: More than 60 years
had passed, but Akira Makino still suffered nightmares about
Filipino hostages and the injections that rendered them unconscious.
Then there was the one about the surgical knife gouging a human
liver.
Every time he woke up to the
flashbacks of horrific killing scenes, he shut his eyes tight and
tried to turn his mind away from something he no longer wanted to
think about.
But Makino, 84, also felt he had
to speak out about his wartime experiences to as many people as
possible during the final years of his life.
“These were nothing but
living-body experiments,” Makino said as he sat on a bench wearing
just his pajamas at a hospital in the western Japanese city of
Osaka, making some of his last comments before he died earlier this
year.
“My captain combat-surgeon
often showed us human intestines, and said this was the liver and
that was that and so on,” he said. “He did that to train us. The
captain said if he died, we would have to take up a scalpel to
conduct the operations instead of him.”
Makino, a low-ranked medic
deployed to a Philippine island during the final years of World War
II, began making his striking statements on Japanese war atrocities
in public just last year.
He was regarded as the first
former Japanese soldier to have been stationed in the Philippines to
speak of vivisections on hostages and his remarks caused some
controversy as historical memory remains a point of simmering
friction between Japan and the countries it invaded.
Nationalist Internet sites
launched a campaign branding Makino a liar.
Makino said what he experienced
was not systematic atrocity, but rather a glimpse of soldiers’
desperation during the disorganized, last-ditch struggle of a nation
on the verge of defeat.
On a deserted frontline
It was one year before Japan’s
surrender when Makino landed on the southern Philippine island of
Mindanao in August 1944.
He was assigned as a medic in the
33rd coast guard squad of about 20 soldiers who were in charge of
detecting enemy airplanes.
His squad joined a landing force
of some 1,500 troops on the fabled Yamato, once the world’s
largest battleship which US bombers sank later in the war.
“The Yamato was such a huge
ship that it could not easily find a suitable port,” he said.
“So the ship anchored in the middle of Manila Bay and we dispersed
to a variety of destinations in the Philippines.”
Soon after arriving at the
Japanese military base at Zamboanga on the western tip of
Mindanao, Makino found himself and his unit cut off from
headquarters, with the situation growing worse by the day.
They received no military
supplies or orders, let alone medical packages.
The main enemy facing the small
Japanese squad were the guerrilla bands formed by local Muslim Moros,
who constantly threatened their station, he said.
“We were told the Moros were
such cruel people that they attacked enemies with spears, and we
actually rescued some people assaulted by them,” Makino said. “I
was told many times I should not walk in the palm tree jungle after
dark.”
Naturally, he said, almost all
the hostages they captured were Moros. “We were supposed to keep
them alive in captivity, but it was no problem if we ‘disposed’
of them, in the beheadings the Japanese have become infamous for.”
He remembered at least 50
hostages being killed, “including those who got this,” he said,
moving his hand to imitate a sword cutting off a head.
The frail old man recalled that
many others were kept alive as human guinea pigs for his superior
combat doctor, who wanted to show young medics like himself how to
conduct surgical operations.
“We first anesthetized
them—we usually used injections or oxygen gas,” he said. “Then
they passed out in a few seconds.”
The combat doctor would tell him
to watch as he sliced open a hostage’s stomach, a scene that
Makino says made him so ill he couldn’t eat or drink for days
afterwards.
“When cooking chicken, the
doctor would get amused and say, ‘Oh, this is just like human
intestines,’” he said.
But Makino said he eventually
became accustomed to what he had to do.
“I was desperate,” he said.
“I didn’t want to do anything like that if possible. But I had
to follow the orders of my superior as a military man, otherwise
I’d have been beaten up.”
He could not put a definitive
number on how many of the 50 people the unit killed were vivisected
or how many of the operations he took part in.
He did say he could never forget
those days on the tropical island and even six decades later he
could barely talk about his experiences without breaking down.
As he talked about his
experiences and memories with AFP, he lowered his eyes and said he
felt the most profound guilt over the way the bodies were handled
afterwards.
The Japanese made Moros dig holes
in the ground, he said, and then they hurled in the bodies with the
stomachs still open. “The mud got in all over the human stomach.
My captain said there was no need to close the wounds because that
would just be a waste of suture thread.”
His voice suggesting the troops
had some mercy, Makino added: “But we didn’t leave any of the
bodies out on the ground.”
Driven to desperation as war’s
end neared
Makino’s confession revives
memories of Imperial Japan’s “mad scientist” Lieutenant
General Shiro Ishii, who led the infamous Unit 731 in northeastern
China, where the Japanese made their colonial base of Manchukuo and
conducted germ warfare tests on prisoners.
Ishii is believed to have
attempted the mass production of biological weapons by testing
deadly germs such as anthrax, dysentery and cholera on prisoners of
war, mainly Chinese, and dropping plague-carrying fleas and rats on
their villages.
Makino said his unit in the
Philippines did not have any organized plan and that it did not test
plague germs.
“It was a one-off thing,”
Makino said. “We didn’t take data or anything.”
Another veteran, one of only a
handful surviving from the Philippine battlefield, said the final
days of the war were so desperate they did whatever they thought
necessary just to survive.
Yoshihiko Terashima, 86, a former
naval chief commander, said he did not commit any living-body
experiments himself but added: “That could have easily
happened.”
“It must have been natural for
military doctors to come up with the idea of using whatever they had
for tryouts in such destitute situations,” he told AFP in a
separate interview.
“They had no medicine and no
supplies, so then of course they would have had to come up with ways
with whatever they had. And they must have done the same thing to
injured Japanese soldiers as well,” he said.
He contrasted the situation in
the Philippines with that in northeastern China, then known as
Manchuria. “There [in Manchuria] Japan was winning the war. During
the time of Makino [in the Philippines] we were losing it.”
The Americans landed on the
Philippines’ main Luzon island in January 1945 and within six
months declared victory. An estimated 218,000 Japanese soldiers were
killed in the battles on Luzon island alone.
Like many Japanese soldiers,
Makino and Terashima each fled into the jungles.
At his home in a Tokyo suburb,
with cabinets full of war documents and a rolled-up map of the world
lying on the floor, Terashima recalled the destitute conditions that
he face while fleeing from US attacks.
“When you holed up in a cave at
night, you see huge rats crawling up on the faces of dead bodies,
eating the eyeballs,” Terashima said in a firm voice.
“So we took an iron helmet to
catch them and ate them.
“Those dying just lay on the
ground, living a few days by eating the maggots that were infesting
their own faces.”
In later years, both Makino and
Terashima repeatedly returned separately to their former
battlefields to collect the remains of Japanese soldiers.
Makino traveled back and forth
between Japan and the Philippines more than 10 times, taking
everyday supplies like rice, pencils and clothes to needy residents
of Mindanao.
“I’ve done it out of a quest
for redemption,” Makino said.
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