es347fan
02-26-2007, 08:11 AM
"...It was sex education..." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1438491.ece)
Dissect them alive: order not to be disobeyed
For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War?
He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan - after number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines, she called me ’war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frailold man who lives alone in Hirakata near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.” Only in the twilight of his life, has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret which he had carried.
(...)
“New soldiers started arriving, and they were younger and younger, 15 or 16 years old,” he remembers. “We said, ’Where are you guns?’, and they replied, ’We have no guns - but we have bamboo spears.’ It was then I knew that we had already lost the war.” It was in such an atmosphere that he found himself in Zamboanga, a Muslim town in the far south-west of the Philippines.
(...)
Our psychological state was very strange by then. In those conditions, we could do anything, absolutely anything.” It began with a practice which has been described by a number of former Japanese soldiers - the “testing” of traditional Japanese swords on live prisoners. “There were university graduates who had no idea how to fight, but who were officers because of their education,” Mr Makino says. “They carried swords, but never used them. They’d say, ’Bring the POWs - we will see how sharp these swords are!’ So they tied up the prisoners and chopped their heads off. But the swords were so rusty, they couldn’t do it cleanly.”
(...)
One day towards the end of 1944, Mr Makino was summoned by his commanding officer, a navy doctor whom, even now, he declines to name. “I was his number two, and he told me that if anything happened to him, I had to take over from him. He told me to come and see a vivisection.
“The first time it was one prisoner, a middle aged man. He’d already given up - there was no struggle. He was tied to the bed and anaesthetised with ether, so that he was completely unconscious. The Lieutenant showed me what to do. He cut him open, and pointed out, ’Here’s the liver, here’s the kidneys, here’s the heart.’ The heart was still beating, then he cut the heart open and showed me the inside. That was when he died.” “I didn’t want to do it, but it was an order, you see. At that time, if a commander gave you an order it was understood that it was the order of the Emperor, and the Emperor was a god. I had no choice - if I had disobeyed, I would have been killed.” The “operation” took about an hour; when it was over the body was sewn up and thrown into a hole in the earth. Eight more vivisections followed, Mr Makino said, up to three hours long. “Over the course of time, I got used to it,” he said. “We removed some of the organs, and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were women, young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it, but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education.
****
:hitout:
Dissect them alive: order not to be disobeyed
For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War?
He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan - after number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines, she called me ’war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frailold man who lives alone in Hirakata near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.” Only in the twilight of his life, has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret which he had carried.
(...)
“New soldiers started arriving, and they were younger and younger, 15 or 16 years old,” he remembers. “We said, ’Where are you guns?’, and they replied, ’We have no guns - but we have bamboo spears.’ It was then I knew that we had already lost the war.” It was in such an atmosphere that he found himself in Zamboanga, a Muslim town in the far south-west of the Philippines.
(...)
Our psychological state was very strange by then. In those conditions, we could do anything, absolutely anything.” It began with a practice which has been described by a number of former Japanese soldiers - the “testing” of traditional Japanese swords on live prisoners. “There were university graduates who had no idea how to fight, but who were officers because of their education,” Mr Makino says. “They carried swords, but never used them. They’d say, ’Bring the POWs - we will see how sharp these swords are!’ So they tied up the prisoners and chopped their heads off. But the swords were so rusty, they couldn’t do it cleanly.”
(...)
One day towards the end of 1944, Mr Makino was summoned by his commanding officer, a navy doctor whom, even now, he declines to name. “I was his number two, and he told me that if anything happened to him, I had to take over from him. He told me to come and see a vivisection.
“The first time it was one prisoner, a middle aged man. He’d already given up - there was no struggle. He was tied to the bed and anaesthetised with ether, so that he was completely unconscious. The Lieutenant showed me what to do. He cut him open, and pointed out, ’Here’s the liver, here’s the kidneys, here’s the heart.’ The heart was still beating, then he cut the heart open and showed me the inside. That was when he died.” “I didn’t want to do it, but it was an order, you see. At that time, if a commander gave you an order it was understood that it was the order of the Emperor, and the Emperor was a god. I had no choice - if I had disobeyed, I would have been killed.” The “operation” took about an hour; when it was over the body was sewn up and thrown into a hole in the earth. Eight more vivisections followed, Mr Makino said, up to three hours long. “Over the course of time, I got used to it,” he said. “We removed some of the organs, and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were women, young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it, but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education.
****
:hitout: