By David Shimozawa
This is about my quest to discover the nature of the man who was my uncle and why he died. Takaharu Shimozawa was my father’s youngest brother. I never met Takaharu and my limited knowledge of him came from what my mother and father told me. He was born in 1919, fourteen years after my father Kohei. Takaharu‘s brother Masashi, was blind from infancy and three years older. Takaharu was devoted to his brother. He was Masashi’s eyes and inseparable companion as they grew up together in the village of Nishioi, near Odawara. He shared a dormitory for a time with his blind brother at the Methodist College of Kwansai Gakuin University in Osaka to assist him, then completed his own studies in Economics at the Baptist College of Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama. He was charismatic, with a remarkable ability to draw people to him, gain their friendship and earn their respect. Like his brother Masashi, he became a devout Christian. His life was filled with promise. Then, immediately after his graduation, he was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army and sent to a military academy for officer training. In 1944, at 24 years of age, he was sent to Borneo and never came back.
One day, in the early 1980s, perhaps 1984, my mother said to me, “David, there is something that I want to tell you about your father’s younger brother Takaharu, who died in the war.” She went on to say that Takaharu was put in charge of a prison camp in Borneo, where some prisoners were beaten and died. Takaharu was held responsible. He was tried by a British Military Court, sentenced to death as a war criminal and executed by hanging in 1947.
In October, 2008, I travelled to Japan with my son Derek. It was on our last night in Tokyo, at my older sister Atsuko’s home, that the subject of Takaharu’s death came up. I wondered aloud if the military training that Takaharu underwent in the Japanese Army could have changed him. I could tell that Atsuko was very disappointed that such a thought could ever enter my mind. She was dismayed when she learned that our parents had not told us about the circumstances of Takaharu’s death. She said to me “I don’t understand how our parents could be ashamed of Takaharu. He lived an exemplary, honorable life and I am proud to be his relative. He did nothing wrong. He was unfairly judged and put to death. In any case, it was the fault of the Japanese military. They took young men and sent them off to die in a useless war. He was a casualty of war.” Atsuko was 12 years younger than Takaharu, so she would have been 12 or 13 years old when he went off to war. I am sure that she revered him.
Shortly after we returned to Canada, I received a very moving letter in roma-ji from Masashi’s widow Yukiko-san. Yukiko-san told me that she and Masashi had made several pilgrimages to Borneo to visit the places where Takaharu had lived and died. They met several Japanese veterans who had served near Takaharu. They told her of the extraordinary compassion and generosity that he showed to the prisoners under his care, who thought highly of him and with great affection.
I wrote back to Yukiko-san to tell her that my mother and father never expressed any sense of shame about Takaharu. They only spoke of him with love and respect and like my sister Atsuko, they truly felt that his death was a tragedy. While we were growing up in Winnipeg, there was an underlying resentment against those of Japanese ancestry for the atrocities committed by the Japanese army against soldiers from Winnipeg who were sent to defend Hong Kong. In 1979, my family moved to the Lower Mainland, a community that is 30% comprised of immigrants from China, Korea and their descendants. Many still have very strong views about what the Japanese Army did to the citizens of Nanking and the plight of Korean comfort women. I tried to explain, that this is the reality of living in a ethnically diverse country like Canada and that our parents, with their silence, chose not to burden their children in Canada with the need to explain or take a position about the circumstances surrounding the death of their uncle.
I now felt compelled to discover what really happened in Borneo, so I obtained a photocopy of the trial record from the National Archives of the United Kingdom. After reading through this material a clearer picture of the events emerged.
Takaharu Shimozawa’s rank was Rikugan Shoi (2nd Lieutenant). On May 1, 1944 he was assigned to supervise a work group of 210 Indian soldiers at Lutong, Borneo. This group had been recruited by the Japanese to join the Indian National Army (INA). The INA was fighting against British rule in India and collaborating with the Japanese in Southeast Asia. The 210 Indians had signed oaths of allegiance to the Emperor and were assigned to work alongside the Japanese to repair the oil tanks at the Lutong refinery.
One of the Indians, Lachman Singh, escaped three times. His last attempt was in late November or early December and he was caught on Dec 8, 1944. That day, on Lieutenant Shimozawa’s orders, Lachman was put on parade, where he was beaten by the Indians, then by three Japanese soldiers under Shimozawa’s command. They were Jotohei (Superior Private) Kanji Saito, Heicho (Lance Corporal) Makino and Jotohei Hirai. He was then taken to the guard house, and tied to a pole. Lieutenant Shimozawa was called away to attend to an oil tank fire. When he returned two hours later, Lachman had died.
The trial was held at Labuan, Borneo on May 10,11,13 and 14, 1946. The Prosecution argued that Lachman, on Shimozawa’s orders, was savagely beaten in a deliberate act of murder and tabled two affidavits as corroboration. Also, Lieutenant Minoru Hatashita, an army doctor, testified that he conspired with Shimozawa to issue a false death certificate that stated the cause of death as Malaria. This, they said, was irrefutable proof that Lieutenant Shimozawa was attempting to cover up an intentional murder.
In his defence, Lieutenant Shimozawa testified that after each escape, he took Lachman Singh back and did not report him to the Kempei Tai (the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo) or send him back to the Indian POW camp because he feared for Lachman’s safety. Lachman was beaten only on the buttocks and legs and not severely. He was told by his superiors that Lachman was an ally, not a POW and that he believed that he was disciplining Lachman as a Japanese soldier, with a view to correcting his poor behavior of stealing supplies, then running off. His intention was to get the punishment over quickly, then take Lachman back into the unit. Lieutenant Shimozawa added that Makino and Hirai, against his orders, beat Lachman again, while he was away attending to the fire and that he thought that this was the cause of Lachman’s death. He admitted that the cause of death stated as Malaria in the death certificate was false. Tatsuo Takahashi, a civilian who worked at the refinery, gave numerous examples of Lieutenant Shimozawa’s leadership qualities, moral courage, kindness and generosity to his men, who in turn respected and liked him.
A verdict of guilty was delivered at 10:00 hrs May 14, 1946. Takaharu Shimozawa was hanged at Jesselton Prison on Jan 11, 1947 at 06:02 hrs. His subordinate, Superior Private Kanji Saito was shot at Changi Prison, on Sept 27, 1946 at 06:30 hrs. At the time of the trial, Makino and Hirai were known to be, or reasonably believed to be dead.
Was the death sentence fair?
The Court ruled that Lachman Singh was a POW and British soldier, not a Japanese soldier. He was beaten, which was an illegal act, so the Prosecution had little difficulty making their case that a war crime had been committed. The burden on the Defence was to present a strong case to support mitigation of the sentences, but they were at a great disadvantage. The Court accepted as unassailable fact, the affidavits of two witnesses who were alive but who were not produced at trial for cross examination. The Defence could not present rebuttal witnesses from among the 210 Indian eye witnesses. They had been repatriated to India. Not surprisingly, the defendants’ statements were used against them. These were written in English, a language that they could not read and prepared by officers whose impartiality and competence to translate the nuances of the Japanese language appear, from the transcript, to be suspect. The accused never saw or signed a statement written in Japanese. Takaharu was allegedly beaten during his first interrogation. He was a POW at the time and had he died, it is unlikely that the officers who beat him would have been hanged.
Takaharu was not without blame. Lachman Singh died and never returned to his family in India, as a result of decisions that Takaharu made. Lachman had been in the jungle for at least four days. The decision to administer punishment that day, because he looked fit enough, was unwise. Takaharu should have been aware of any malevolence held by Makino and Hirai toward Lachman and taken stronger measures to prevent their beating him again. For these decisions, he had responsibility.
The Prosecution’s assertion, that the cover up was absolute proof of an intentional murder, is puzzling. A more plausible explanation is that Takaharu was worried about reprimand by his superiors for his misjudgments that caused the death of a Japanese allied soldier.
I believe that imprisonment and not death, would have been an appropriate sentence.
After reading the transcript, it is my personal view that Takaharu was the same exemplary man in Borneo that he was when he left his family in Odawara to go to war and that he was the generous, compassionate officer that Tatsuo Takahashi described in his testimony. I do not believe that he had transformed into a man who had Lachman Singh beaten to death in a murderous, sadistic rage for escaping three times, as suggested by the Prosecution and so readily accepted by the Court. If he wanted Lachman dead he could have simply called up the Kempei Tai to take him away, or he could have sent Lachman back to the Indian POW camp. Either action would have been an effective warning to the other Indians not to run away, if that had been Takaharu’s purpose.
Why did Takaharu die?
Labuan, in 1946 was the trial venue for all war crimes committed in Borneo. The three officers of the Court, all military men, would have been exposed, both in and out of the courtroom, to an unending stream of horrific accounts of atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in Borneo and throughout Southeast Asia against their comrades. The Sandakan Death Marches in Borneo were the most notable of these atrocities. I believe that this hardened the hearts of the officers of the Labuan Court. They were in no mood to mitigate a death sentence. Unlike the arrangements at other trial venues, Colonel Yoshimori Yamada, the Defence Counsel, was not provided with an able Allied Counsel to assist him and he was unable to sway them.
My quest to find Takaharu—who he was and why he never came back, is over. When I reflect on what I have discovered, my final thought is that my wise older sister Atsuko was right: Takaharu was a casualty of war.
