Grassroots Fascism by Yoshimi Yoshiaki

Author:Yoshimi Yoshiaki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS021000, History/Asia/Japan, POL054000, Political Science/World/Asian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

FROM NITTSŪ TRANSPORT AGENCY CLERK TO RETSU CORPS COMMUNICATIONS UNIT

FROM CENTRAL CHINA TO BURMA

On March 21, 1941, Sakimoto Takashi joined the 13th Telegraph Regiment of the Central China Expeditionary Army, then in Hiroshima, as an active-duty soldier.145

Sakimoto was born in Komenotsu in Kagoshima Prefecture in 1920. Upon graduating from the Kumamoto Technical College Training Department, he was supposed to be employed at Japan Nitrogen (Nippon chisso) in Korea, but because of illness he was unable to join the company and worked instead in his family’s affiliate of Japan Transport, Komenotsu Transport. In his 1940 conscription examination, Sakimoto qualified as First (A) Class. He never forgot his father calling out to him as he set off to join his unit, “Takashi, can’t you get a little larger-sized uniform?”146 Sakimoto went to the front as a private second class; by the time of his repatriation he was a corporal.

Assigned to his regiment’s Fourth Company, Sakimoto underwent training at Pugi in central China in April 1941. In February 1943, he was reassigned to the 26th Brigade and sent to Ipoh in Malaya. In May of that year the brigade was rechristened the 31st Infantry Group (Miyazaki Detachment) Communication Unit and headed for Burma, but Sakimoto was delayed after catching malaria along the way and reached Kawlin only in July. According to his impression at the time, the Burmese people were “sociable and kind.”147

Accompanying a mid-August inspection tour by the infantry commander as a member of the wireless squad in preparation for the Imphal Campaign, Sakimoto enjoyed friendly treatment from the local population everywhere he went. He “believed wholeheartedly” in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere “as precisely the national policy” and believed the Japanese army was assisting Aung San in “finishing off the British” in order to “make Burma independent.”148

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