Japan's War Memories by George Hicks

Author:George Hicks [Hicks, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, Japan
ISBN: 9780429814044
Google: NgSaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-23T01:35:29+00:00

The Thai-Burma Railway

During the mid-1980s, some public attention was also drawn to another notorious episode of the war—the Thai-Burma Railway. In 1979, the Yasukuni Shrine had been presented with a locomotive from that railway by survivors of its wartime construction unit, who had raised funds to buy it from the Thai government. To them this was merely a memento of their dedication in that most arduous project—the ‘death railway’ that had cost the lives of so many allied prisoners and many more Asian laborers. But other former members of the unit, organized by a former Kempeitai interpreter using the pseudonym Nagase, had a little earlier adopted a different mode of commemoration by way of arranging help for surviving laborers who had settled in areas along the line, having been unable to return home amid postwar disorder. Nagase also arranged a reunion with some former prisoners of war at a bridge on the River Kwai, already well known in Japan from a film of that name. A British former prisoner there gave him a book he had written, describing his wartime experiences under the title And the Dawn came up like Thunder. Nagase at his own expense published a translation of it in Japan in 1980 entitled Slaves on the Thai-Burma Railway. It made little initial impact because of limited distribution but in 1983 inspired a party of teachers belonging to the Geography Teachers Research Association to visit wartime sites in Southeast Asia to expand awareness of the area. In 1984 they arranged for a reissue of the book with added material by a regular publisher mainly for use as general reading by students, with considerable success. In 1986 also a leading publisher brought out Fiction and Fact in ‘Bridge on the River KwaV based on immediate postwar investigations on the railway in conjunction with the British army. One fictional point was that the bridge was not actually destroyed as in the film. In the same year, a Buddhist Peace Temple was dedicated beside another bridge on the railway by joint local and Japanese initiative, with coverage in Japan.

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